We study how the matter dispersed when a supermassive black hole tidally disrupts a star joins an accretion flow .
Combining a relativistic hydrodynamic simulation of the stellar disruption with a relativistic hydrodynamics simulation of the tidal debris motion , we track such a system until \simeq 80 \% of the stellar mass bound to the black hole has settled into an accretion flow .
Shocks near the stellar pericenter and also near the apocenter of the most tightly-bound debris dissipate orbital energy , but only enough to make the characteristic radius comparable to the semi-major axis of the most-bound material , not the tidal radius as previously thought .
The outer shocks are caused by post-Newtonian effects , both on the stellar orbit during its disruption and on the tidal forces .
Accumulation of mass into the accretion flow is non-monotonic and slow , requiring \simeq 3 - 10 \times the orbital period of the most tightly-bound tidal streams , while the inflow time for most of the mass may be comparable to or longer than the mass accumulation time .
Deflection by shocks does , however , remove enough angular momentum and energy from some mass for it to move inward even before most of the mass is accumulated into the accretion flow .
Although the accretion rate rises sharply and then decays roughly as a power-law , its maximum is \simeq 0.1 \times the previous expectation , and the duration of the peak is \simeq 5 \times longer than previously predicted .
The geometric mean of the black hole mass and stellar mass inferred from a measured event timescale is therefore \simeq 0.2 \times the value given by classical theory .