He was in a hotel somewhere with a woman he had married on Saturday afternoon, and he had noticed that his wife had not answered her telephone for thirty hours, and he was worried about her.

I want to be careful here, because this is where people want me to say that it was all performance and that he never cared about me, and that would be a tidier story.

I do not think it was performance.

I think Christian Dupont was, in some functional and entirely sincere sense, worried about me on that Sunday afternoon, and I think he would have got on a plane if I had said I needed him to, and I think he had partitioned his life so completely that both of those things were true at once and neither one interfered with the other.

That is a worse thing than a con man.

A con man is at least paying attention to you.