He told me I looked beautiful.

He played the part flawlessly, because he thought the part was almost over and the payoff almost in hand.

Watching him that day was one of the strangest experiences of my life, and it taught me something about people like him that I did not know before and will never forget.

I had assumed, in my few private moments of trying to make sense of it, that a man carrying out a con of that scale must be constantly straining — that the effort of pretending to love a woman and three children he actually despised must show somewhere, in a tightness around the eyes, a flatness in the voice, some crack in the mask you could see if you knew to look.

But there was no strain.