He had planned the timing and the paperwork and the pressure and the story; he had rehearsed his warmth until it was seamless; he had accounted for my every likely reaction and prepared for all of them.

And none of it mattered, in the end, because on an ordinary afternoon two days before the wedding, distracted by his mother’s call, he had simply forgotten to hang up.

That is how the meticulous fall.

Not to some greater cunning, but to their own smallest human carelessness — the one loose thread they were too confident to check.

He had spent three years being careful about the enormous things and had lost everything to a two-second thing he did not even notice doing.

I did not gloat, standing at that microphone.