The attorney, a man named Elias who smelled faintly of old paper and peppermint, didn’t look up from the folder for at least 63 seconds. I sat there, tracing the scar on my thumb where a galley knife slipped during a heavy swell near the Aleutians, and waited for him to acknowledge the stack of printed emails I’d spent 13 nights organizing. I had just finished peeling an orange in a single, unbroken spiral-a habit from the submarine galley where waste is a sin and precision is the only thing that keeps you sane. I laid the peel on his mahogany desk, a bright citrus serpent against the dark wood.

‘They are lying to me, Elias,’ I said, my voice sounding too loud in the quiet room. ‘They’re acting in bad faith. I can feel it in the way they pause on the phone. It’s been 43 days since the last inspection, and they just sent another request for the same plumbing records I’ve sent three times.’

Elias finally looked up, his eyes weary. He didn’t look at the orange peel. He looked at the folder. ‘Nova, feeling is for the galley. In this office, and certainly in a courtroom, good faith isn’t a vibration. It’s a very specific, very narrow legal hurdle. You feel like they’re being cruel. But legally? They’re just being thorough. Or they’re being incompetent. Neither of those is a crime.’

The Implied Covenant: A Haunting Presence

I realized then that my frustration, as thick and heavy as the 503 tons of seawater pressing against a hull, meant absolutely nothing to the law. I had spent months thinking that because the insurer was being ‘mean,’ they were breaking the law. I was wrong. The gap between a moral injury and a legal wrongdoing is a canyon wide enough to sink a fleet.

In the world of insurance, ‘Good Faith’ is an implied covenant, a ghost that haunts every contract. It suggests that neither party will do anything that injures the right of the other to receive the benefits of the agreement. But the definition of ‘injure’ is where the insurance companies build their fortresses. They don’t have to be your friend. They don’t even have to be polite. They just have to avoid being ‘unreasonable’ in a way that can be proven in front of a judge who has seen 1003 cases just like yours this year.

We often mistake bureaucracy for malice. When a claims adjuster forgets to return a call for 13 days, we see a calculated move to break our spirit. In reality, that adjuster might just be a person with 163 files on their desk and a failing marriage. However, the insurer’s playbook often thrives in this ambiguity. They know that if they stay just inside the lines-if they ask for one more document, or schedule one more ‘final’ inspection-they can delay payment without ever triggering a bad faith statute. It is a slow-motion war of attrition.

The Ambiguity of Due Diligence

To prove bad faith, you usually have to demonstrate that the insurer denied a claim or delayed payment without a ‘reasonable basis.’ But what is reasonable? If there is even a 3% chance that a portion of your claim is questionable, they can claim they are merely performing their due diligence. They aren’t acting in bad faith; they are ‘investigating.’ This investigation can last for 83 days, or 123 days, or until you simply give up and accept a settlement that covers only half of what you actually lost.

I remember a specific mistake I made back in my early days in the galley. I misread a line on a supply manifest-something about the shelf life of powdered eggs. I assumed ‘good faith’ meant the supplier would tell me if the batch was turning. They didn’t. They sent the eggs, I served them, and 23 sailors ended up sick. The supplier hadn’t lied; they just hadn’t volunteered the truth. They followed the letter of the contract. The moral failing was mine for trusting the ‘vibe’ instead of the data.

This is why the technical documentation of a claim is the only weapon that actually fires. You cannot walk into a room and say, ‘They made me wait and it felt bad.’ You have to be able to say, ‘On October 3rd, I provided the requested documents. On October 13th, I followed up. On October 23rd, they requested the same documents again, citing a loss of digital files.’ This creates a pattern. A pattern is a character. A character can be judged.

The Map in the Minefield

In many ways, this is where the expertise of a professional becomes the difference between a sinking ship and a successful voyage. When you are drowning in the technicalities, having someone who knows the exact pressure points of the industry is vital. I’ve seen how meticulous documentation can force an insurer’s hand, turning their ‘reasonable delay’ into an undeniable breach. This level of detail is exactly what National Public Adjusting provides, acting as a buffer between the policyholder’s raw emotion and the insurer’s cold calculations. They don’t care about the ‘feelings’ of the case; they care about the undeniable facts that make a bad faith argument stick.

The Silence of Inaction

I think about my time in the deep water often. Down there, you don’t survive because you’re a good person or because you have ‘good vibes.’ You survive because the seals hold, the oxygen scrubbers work, and everyone follows the checklist to the letter. The law is a submarine. It doesn’t care if you’re cold. It only cares if you’re right.

Most people don’t realize that an insurance company is a machine designed to retain capital. It is not a safety net made of cotton; it is a ledger made of steel. If they can justify keeping $50,003 in their accounts for an extra month by claiming they need a ‘specialist’s’ opinion, they will do it. That month of interest, multiplied by 10,003 claims, is a significant part of their business model. It isn’t personal. It’s just math. And you cannot sue math for being mean to you.

Injustice is often just the byproduct of a very efficient system.

The Map of Evidence

Elias finally pushed my folder back toward me. ‘You have 33 examples of them being slow,’ he said. ‘But you only have 3 examples of them being potentially illegal. We need to focus on those three. Forget the 30 times they were rude. Focus on the three times they violated the state’s prompt payment act.’

Building the Wall of Evidence

I felt a strange sense of relief. It wasn’t the relief of being understood-it was the relief of having a map. I had been trying to navigate a minefield using my heart as a compass, and all I was doing was getting exhausted. By separating my ‘feelings’ of bad faith from the ‘legal reality’ of it, I could actually start to fight back.

We spent the next 53 minutes circling dates on a calendar. We looked at the $13,003 estimate they’d given me vs. the $43,003 estimate from an independent contractor. We looked at the 13-day gap between their promise to send a check and the actual postmark on the envelope. These were the bricks we would use to build our wall.

Be the Cook Who Peels the Orange

If you find yourself in that gray space, where you know you’re being treated unfairly but you can’t quite prove why, stop looking for empathy. Start looking for the clock. Start looking for the repetitions. The insurer is counting on your exhaustion. They are counting on the fact that most people will scream ‘Bad faith!’ and then crumble when asked for the evidence. Don’t be most people. Be the cook who peels the orange in one piece. Be the person who documents the 3rd, the 13th, and the 23rd of every month until the machine has no choice but to pay what it owes.

As I left Elias’s office, I took the orange peel with me. It had started to curl at the edges, losing its scent. The truth, much like that peel, is only useful while it’s fresh and intact. By the time I reached the street, I had already decided. I wasn’t going to be ‘excited’ for a resolution. I was going to be prepared for a process. In the end, the only thing that proves bad faith is a mountain of good evidence, stacked 83 inches high, until the weight of it becomes impossible for even the largest insurer to ignore.