He had built an entire identity as a self-made man on a set of foundations he had simply never been forced to examine, because as long as they held, there was no reason to look, and I made very sure, for eleven years, that they held.

That is the quiet tragedy of the enabler, which is what I was: you hold everything up so seamlessly that the person you are holding up comes to believe he is standing on his own.

My invisibility was so complete that even I half-believed his story, half-believed I was living on his generosity rather than the reverse.

It was only when I stopped holding it up, when I finally set down the weight I had been carrying so long I no longer felt it, that the truth became visible to everyone, including him: that there had never been anything underneath but me.

The house of cards did not fall because I attacked it.