When I connect with a wallet to the bitcoin network, how is the balance actually retrieved? One node? Or more? I understand it is a sum of all transactions. But when I load my wallet I assume I connect to certain node. How do I know that that particular (malicious) node has the most recent or valid blockchain? In other words: can it be possible for a node to cheat by adjusting the blockchain which I could connect to with a wallet and get a faulty balance?

I read some articles about this and they state that this will be rejected by the network. But I have no idea how this works. Can somebody help?