I know because Harrison sent me a photograph two years ago and because I looked, once, in a weak week last autumn, and found the same thing — a man in a battered sedan, sixteen hours a day, in Atlanta, liquidating a retirement account to stay ahead of a restitution order he will be paying until he dies.

I felt nothing when Harrison sent the photo. I have written that down before and it was true.

I do not feel nothing now.

What I feel is something narrower and harder to sit with, which is that the man is running a machine. He is not a monster who blew up a life and left.

He is a person who, over a period of at least eighteen months, told a dying-wife story to a mistress, to a company, to a manager who circulated a collection sheet, to a woman named Priya who offered to call her sister’s oncologist — and who, eleven weeks before that, sat at his parents’ kitchen table in Preble County with a quitclaim deed and a printed statement he had made himself.

That is not a man who lost his head over a girl. That is a project. It ran for two years and it took money from his wife, his parents, his employer, his colleagues, and — I have come to believe — from Emma McDowell, who paid in a currency that does not show up in Gavin’s ledger.