Several major corporate clients, without explanation, let their contracts lapse.

And Eleanor — Eleanor, who had moved into my house and my guest rooms and my silk robes because Julian was a wealthy, prominent, ascending man — watched his wealth and his prestige begin to hemorrhage, and did the arithmetic, and moved out of the estate four months later to pursue, I have no doubt, some other wealthy and prominent target.

She left him alone in the enormous, echoing house, with the pink curtains still hanging in the playroom of the son who no longer lived there.

I did not gloat about any of it.

But I did note, from a great distance, that a man who builds his whole life on appearances is uniquely defenseless against a video, and that Julian had spent seven years teaching me the value of a careful record without ever once imagining that a record might someday be kept of him.

There is a lesson in Julian’s collapse that I have turned over many times, and it is not the satisfying one about the villain getting his due, though he did.