It was not just grief for the time we’d lost.

It was the vertigo of discovering that a whole chapter of my own history was a forgery — that the falling-out I’d mourned, replayed, blamed myself for, had never occurred.

I had spent three years believing I’d said something unforgivable, or simply let the friendship starve through my own neglect, because that was the story Devon had handed me and I had learned not to check the stories Devon handed me.

And all that time she had been on the other side of a wall he’d built, wondering the same thing about me.

Two women, each told the other had left, each quietly deciding the fault was her own.

That was his real genius, I would come to understand — not the theft, not even the tracker, but the way he made every casualty of his control feel like a self-inflicted wound.