No — I did not let her go because I was fooled.

I let her go because being with her was hard and leaving her was easy, and I had been raised, with great care and enormous resources, into a man who always chose the easy thing and called it duty.

My father did not have to lie very well.

He only had to offer me a version of events in which abandoning the woman I loved was the mature, responsible, honorable choice — and I took it, gratefully, because it let me do the cowardly thing while feeling noble about it.

That is the particular corruption of a family like mine.

They do not teach you to be cruel.