And because federal regulators take a keen interest when a public company’s controlling debt changes hands overnight amid allegations of fraud, Flynn’s personal accounts, his cars, and his glass penthouse were locked under a federal asset freeze, pending a forensic accounting of how much of his fortune had ever really been his.

None of it was revenge, whatever Flynn would later scream at me.

Revenge is a thing you reach out and do to someone.

This was closer to gravity — a structure he had built on borrowed ground, held up the whole time by a single decency he did not possess, collapsing the instant he proved he did not possess it.

I did not push Flynn off any ledge.

I simply stopped being the thing that had been holding him up, and let him discover what he was actually standing on.