For Eight Months I Thought I’d Found Love After My Divorce — Then a Woman I’d Never Met Recognized His Photo and Said “When I Knew Him, He Went by a Different Name,” and I Understood Every Breakfast Had Been Reconnaissance

Someone will notice.

Someone will ask the inconvenient question.

Someone will say, that contract doesn’t sound right, let me look at it.

So the very first work of a man like Gregory, long before any paperwork, is to thin the herd around his target — to become, gently and by degrees, the person whose judgment she trusts most, and then to use that trust to turn her, one careful conversation at a time, against everyone else whose judgment might contradict his.

He did not attack Christopher directly.