There is a specific thing that happens to a con man in the moment his con collapses in public, and I watched it happen to Nathan in real time, and I will not pretend I found it anything other than deeply, thoroughly satisfying.

The performance had been his whole power.

For three years, and for that entire day, his strength had been that everyone believed the version of him he projected — the warmth, the devotion, the good-guy ease.

It was a power that existed only in other people’s belief, borrowed entirely from the audience, and the instant the audience stopped believing, it was simply gone, all of it, at once, leaving nothing behind.

Without the crowd’s faith in him, Nathan was not a charming man.