Nathan had been methodical about it.

He had thinned my friendships one by one, not with prohibitions but with a thousand small frictions, making every outside connection slightly more trouble than it was worth until I let them lapse on my own and blamed my own busyness.

It is the loneliest kind of theft, the theft of your own witnesses, and by the third year he had nearly completed it.

But he never got Natalie, and the reason is instructive.