“I’ve lost everything,” he said.

“No,” I told him.

“You didn’t lose it all in one afternoon.

You gave it away, bit by bit, over two years — you traded trust for a thrill, your family for your ego, respect for a stupid secret life.

The video didn’t take anything from you that you hadn’t already been handing away for a long time.”

I meant it as an accounting, not a cruelty, and I think somewhere in his ruin he heard the difference.

Because this is the thing people get wrong about a downfall like Gavin’s: they imagine a single catastrophic moment, a bolt from the sky, and they say he lost everything in one day. But no one loses everything in a day.