But I listened, because her account, given to my attorney and later sworn, was one more beam of light on a man who had built his whole life in the dark.

What she told me, once she started, poured out of her in a way that made clear she’d been holding it a long time.

She had thought, at first, that she was the exception — the one real thing in a life he’d otherwise faked.

That is the oldest architecture of these affairs, and she’d lived inside it the way I’d lived inside my marriage, each of us believing we had the genuine article while the same man performed a different genuine article for each of us.

It was only near the end, she said, that she’d caught the edges of the larger scheme — a comment he made about my father’s estate that didn’t fit, a flash of something cold when he thought she wasn’t watching, the growing sense that she was not his passion but his alibi, a warm and consuming distraction to keep two families looking at a bedroom while he emptied a vault.

When she’d tried to pull back, he’d turned on her with a speed that frightened her, and that fear was what finally drove her to the truth.