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## The Scale of the Ordinary
It is tempting, writing about a case as unusual as the Darwin fraud, to reach for language that makes it seem exceptional in ways that separate it from ordinary life. The hidden passageway, the faked death, the years of concealment, the photograph found by a Google search—these elements have the texture of fiction, of the kinds of schemes that appear in crime novels or television thrillers.
And yet the components of the scheme were, individually, quite ordinary. A couple in debt who bought a property they couldn’t afford. A life insurance policy. A decision made in desperation. A woman who didn’t tell her children something they needed to know. A photograph taken as a matter of routine in a property agent’s office.
The remarkable thing is not that the elements were extraordinary but that they were combined and sustained in a particular way. The decision to not tell the sons is, for instance, not in itself an extraordinary act. People conceal things from their children for many reasons. What made it extraordinary in this case was the duration—five and a half years—and the specific thing being concealed—that the father they were mourning was alive—and the active performance of grief that the concealment required.
Similarly, the hidden passageway. The modification of a shared wall between adjacent properties is not, in itself, remarkable. People modify their houses. What made this modification remarkable was its purpose: to allow a dead man to visit his wife.