He was also careful about what he did not claim to remember.

A trafficking victim with traumatic amnesia could plausibly have gaps in their memory.

Claiming not to remember things was less risky than claiming to remember things incorrectly.

He went to school.

He met Nicholas’s old friends — people who had known the real Nicholas and who would have had more specific and potentially more skeptical expectations than the immediate family.

Some of these encounters are described in accounts of the case as moments when Bourdin’s ability to manage the deception was genuinely tested.

Nicholas’s friends would have expected specific things — specific speech patterns, specific jokes, specific shared memories — that Bourdin could not authentically reproduce.