Every quality that email counted on was a virtue.

My trust, my good faith, my grief, my unwillingness to think the worst of the man I had loved — he had inventoried all of it, coldly, and built his timeline around it, confident that my better nature would keep me from looking until it was too late.

That is a specific and chilling kind of cruelty, to turn a person’s goodness into the instrument of their ruin.

It is also, I have come to think, the signature of the truly dangerous ones.