By the time you finally understand what’s been happening, you’re already standing on ground that doesn’t belong to you anymore.” That was it exactly.

That was the whole machine, described by a man who’d been ground up in it before me.

We talked for nearly an hour, Thomas and I, two men on a phone line who had never met and never would, bound together by a woman who had done the same thing to us both a decade apart.

And what struck me, more than the sameness of the scheme, was the sameness of the shame.

Thomas had never pursued the criminal case, he told me, not because he lacked the evidence but because he could not stand up in a room and admit, on the record, how thoroughly he had been fooled — a grown, successful man, taken apart by soup and patience.