Story Of A Mimic

Looking back now, after the anger and adrenaline burned off, I can admit something uncomfortable:

The level of commitment he brought to lying was almost impressive.

Not morally impressive. Spiritually? Psychologically? Deeply disturbing.

But the stamina required to maintain that many distortions, to hold eye contact while lying, to double down when confronted, to continue performing sincerity while actively betraying someone in real time…

That takes effort.

After I learned about A, and subsequently realized my entire reality had been manipulated for someone else’s pleasure, I existed inside a fog for about three weeks.

I could not make sense of anything.

I was angry. I was devastated. But underneath all of that was something even harder to explain: part of me was still trying to fix something I hadn’t broken.

The relationship had felt so healthy while I was inside of it that my brain could not reconcile the duality.

I could not emotionally process that someone would intentionally do something this cruel while simultaneously building intimacy, trust, future plans, family integration, safety, tenderness, ritual, routine, and emotional dependency.

So instead, my mind tried to create a softer explanation.

Maybe he was broken.

Maybe he was self-sabotaging.

Maybe he hated himself.

Maybe he was compartmentalizing.

Maybe he spiraled.

Maybe he accidentally got in too deep.

Anything felt easier to believe than the truth:

That he was fully aware of what he was doing.

That he enjoyed the secrecy.

That he liked the access.

That he derived emotional gratification from maintaining multiple realities at the same time.

I first spoke to A on May 23, 2025.

By the time we hung up the phone, I was physically shaking.

Adrenaline was surging through my body.

“What do you mean you’ve been together for five years?”

“What do you mean you still talk every day?”

“What do you mean he still sleeps with you?”

“What do you mean he FaceTimes your children?”

“What do you mean he tutors them in math?”

“I BOUGHT A HOUSE NEXT DOOR TO HIM.”

She had no idea I existed.

At one point during the conversation, she casually mentioned that gladiolas were their flower.

I immediately thought about how many times that fucker had brought me gladiolas.

Not even original.

That part almost made me laugh.

She started sending me screenshots because I still couldn’t fully believe what I was hearing.

The day he met my parents for the first time, he left the barbecue, kissed me goodbye, told my children goodnight, and said he’d see us later.

I drove my kids home and tucked them into bed.

He told me he was going to have beers with Lou.

Instead, he drove directly to A’s house.

The night he took my kids and me to the small local theater to watch the electric violinist, he had spent the previous evening at A’s house.

After he dropped me, my children, and our nanny off at the airport so I could visit my sister for the holidays, he got back into my car and drove to celebrate A’s birthday.

Naked.

Every intimate moment between the two of us was bookmarked by another woman.

Coming from her house.

Going to her house.

Texting her.

Calling her.

Lying to one of us while standing physically beside the other.

I marched over to his house to confront him.

I had no plan.

I just knew I needed to look him in the eyes.

His adult son answered the door.

I told him:

“Go get your fucking dad.”

When he came outside, he looked sloppy and disheveled.

Oddly enough, it amused me.

I remember thinking:

You couldn’t even pull yourself together for this moment?

I asked him point blank:

“Who the fuck is A?”

And he looked directly into my eyes and said:

“Someone I used to date.”

I stared at him.

“Someone you used to date? Or someone you were sleeping with the entire time you were with me?”

Silence.

He just stood there staring at me.

I called him a pussy.

I told him he was dead to me.

Then I turned around and walked away.

The following morning — May 24, 2025 — I had to leave early for a training at church.

As I pulled out of my driveway around 7:30 AM, I noticed his car was gone.

Admittedly, I had no business texting him.

We were not together anymore.

We had technically been broken up since February.

I had also just discovered what a profoundly dishonest little human being he was.

But I was furious.

So I texted him:

“Where the fuck are you? Couldn’t sleep alone in your bed? You out being a whore?”

It was not my best work.

He responded by telling me he was driving to his parents’ lake house.

That this was a reckoning for him.

That he was embarrassed and ashamed.

That he wanted to change his ways.

That he needed solitude, meditation, prayer, and reflection.

That he would be home Wednesday and we could talk then.

Take that one in slowly.

I genuinely believed he was alone at his parents’ lake house.

I believed this man was having some kind of spiritual reckoning.

A rock-bottom moment.

For four days, while I was unraveling emotionally and trying to process the destruction of my reality, I believed he was alone praying, meditating, reflecting, and confronting the consequences of his behavior.

Meanwhile, he was on vacation in Washington, D.C. with another woman.

Over those four days, anytime grief hit me or I remembered something tender between us, I would suddenly remember that everything now felt contaminated.

And I would rage-text him.

Honestly, I can’t believe he didn’t block me.

But every few messages, he would respond gently.

Telling me how sorry he was.

Telling me meditation was helping him release years of pain and anger.

Telling me he had listened to the lyrics of “Amazing Grace” and truly heard them for the first time.

Meanwhile, the reality was that he was on vacation with the woman he had started sleeping with sometime around November or December of 2024.

She already knew about me by then.

I don’t know what version of the story he gave her.

Probably not the truth.

But on that particular trip, he told her I was angry because we were in a real estate dispute.

Not because I had just discovered that our entire relationship had been fraudulent.

Not because my consent had been manipulated through deception.

Not because I had been emotionally coerced into intimacy under false pretenses.

No.

According to him, I was just a bitter woman who refused to “get over him.”

He told her I was refusing to refinance my home because I wanted him back.

Which is actually hilarious in retrospect.

Because at that point, I still didn’t even know he was on the deed to my house.

When he cosigned for me originally, he explained it as though he was simply “loaning me his credit.”

He told me I would own the house.

He told me if we ever broke up, I would hold all the power and he would hold all the liability.

I trusted him completely.

The day we closed on the home honestly felt more like an Instagram moment than a legal transaction.

I never once looked over and said:

“Wait. What exactly are you signing?”

Because that’s what trust does.

It lowers your guard.

It assumes good faith.

The fight over that deed would consume the better part of the next year.

But that battle wouldn’t officially begin until he sued me in the fall with a partition action, attempting to force the sale of the home I had just moved my children into.

He returned from Washington on Wednesday.

He told me he was having dinner with his daughter and would come by around eight.

I’m guessing he probably rolled straight into town, dropped C off, and then came to my house.

I still knew nothing about them.

Nothing.

I was still struggling to process the realization that the man I loved was capable of this level of deception.

We sat and talked for hours that night.

He cried.

He appeared vulnerable.

He said every single thing I would have wanted him to say in that moment.

And before he left, we were intimate one final time.

I can’t fully explain why I wanted that.

But I did.

Very much.

I think part of me needed to know whether any of it had been real.

Whether the connection I experienced for eighteen months had actually existed.

Or whether I had fabricated the entire thing in my own mind.

Grief does strange things to people.

Especially betrayal grief.

Especially when your nervous system is trying to reconcile tenderness and violation simultaneously.

It would take me about two more weeks before I finally went fully no-contact with him.

We never spoke again.

Three days after that final night together, I became so physically uncomfortable that I went in for STI testing.

That was when I discovered he had given me an STI.

The same STI that had been causing recurring BV symptoms for the better part of a year and a half.

For over a year, I had blamed everything except him.

Laundry detergent.

Yoga pants.

Stress.

Hormones.

Diet.

Soap.

My body.

Meanwhile, the actual cause was simple:

He was sleeping with multiple women without protection and repeatedly bringing all of that biological disruption back into our bed.

That was the moment everything finally snapped into focus.

Not the lies.

Not the women.

Not even the lawsuit.

The infection.

Because the infection was physical proof that the deception had never been emotional alone.

It had entered my body.

I did not consent to any of this, but that’s what brought him joy.