He had never pursued it criminally; by the end he was too exhausted and too ashamed, which is a sentence I understood in my bones.

When Thomas finally spoke to me on the phone — two men on either end of a line who had loved the same dangerous woman — he said something I have not been able to put down since.

“She never asks for everything at once,” he told me.

“First it’s a password.

Then a copy of something, just to be helpful.

Then a signature, just a formality.

And in between, every time you question her, she makes you feel like the guilty one, the paranoid one, the one who’s ruining the good thing.