Everyone who knew him could tell you exactly when things went wrong.
None of those moments were ever his fault.
He had a gift for that. A rare, practised talent for standing at the centre of every storm and emerging untouched by blame. If a friendship ended, he had been betrayed. If a job was lost, he had been undermined. If a family member stopped calling, they were jealous, or difficult, or simply unable to handle someone who told the truth.
He told the truth, he would say. That was his great burden.
People believed him at first. He was charming in the way certain people are, not warmly, but convincingly. He spoke well, listened selectively, and remembered details that made others feel seen. In the beginning, that felt like care. Later, they would understand it differently.
He borrowed things and forgot to return them. Favours, money, time, loyalty, all taken easily, repaid rarely, and if questioned, met with a look of wounded disbelief. Did you really keep count? I thought we were friends.
He moved through relationships the way a slow fire moves through a room. Not burning everything at once, but leaving nothing quite intact. A word that planted doubt. A silence that communicated disappointment. A story told slightly wrong to the wrong person. None of it deliberate enough to name. All of it deliberate enough to feel.
When people began to pull away, he had an explanation ready. They had never truly understood him. They were ungrateful. They could not tolerate a real person, only a performance.
He surrounded himself with new ones. There were always new ones. And he repeated what he knew. The charm, the confidence, the quiet accumulation of small hurts dressed as misunderstandings.
Years passed.
The circle shrank. Not dramatically. There was no single confrontation, no great unmasking. Just a slow and persistent withdrawal, the way people leave a room they have stopped feeling welcome in. Old friends stopped including him. Family gatherings became shorter, then infrequent, then something he was no longer informed about.
He noticed. Of course he noticed.
But the story he told himself remained unchanged. The world had failed him. He had given everything and been left with nothing, because people are selfish and loyalty is rare and he had simply been unlucky enough to discover this earlier than most.
He sat with that story the way a man sits with a portrait he has painted of himself, adjusting the light, touching up the details, making sure it showed him exactly as he wished to be seen.
Outside, life continued without him.
He did not ask why.
He already knew the answer he would give.