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

That is his crime, not yours.”

I did not believe her, at first.

That is the cruelest afterlife of being conned: the con does not end when the con man is caught.

It moves inside you and keeps running, in the form of a voice that says you should have known, that the signs were there, that a smarter or more careful or less needy woman would have seen through him.

I spent many nights with that voice, taking apart every month of the relationship, hunting for the moment I should have caught it, punishing myself for every kindness I had accepted at face value.