WHAT I THOUGHT
WAS REAL.

NO MATTER WHERE I WENT

No matter where I went to make myself a home, I was only greeted with more incidents.

More questions.

More things I couldn’t explain.

It was mentally draining.

I had moved.

Changed devices.

Changed my number.

Tried ignoring things.

Tried moving on.

Nothing had worked.

And somewhere in the middle of all of that, he was still around.

Mostly through text.

He would message me about how unhappy he was with his girlfriend.

Problems they were having.

Things I honestly didn’t care very much about.

My responses reflected that.

Sometimes I’d take hours to answer.

Sometimes I barely engaged at all.

Mostly, I remember thinking:

Why are you telling me this?

I had considerably bigger things to worry about.

I was trying to understand why nothing around me felt normal anymore.

Eventually, I started going through the people in my life.

Except there weren’t very many.

My circle was tiny.

I wasn’t talking to a bunch of new people.

I didn’t have some dramatic ex lurking around.

There wasn’t an obvious person I could point to.

And my attention kept coming back to the newest person in my orbit.

Him.

I started believing that whatever was happening might somehow be connected to him.

Around the same time, I was still running my increasingly desperate technology experiments.

New devices.

No Wi-Fi.

Different connections.

A temporary new phone number.

Part of the point was simple:

Does anything change?

It didn’t.

But changing my number meant he couldn’t reach me anymore.

Eventually, between the stress and pure intrigue, I reached a point of:

What the fuck. Let’s see what this guy says.

So I texted him from the new number.

Nothing dramatic.

As I remember it, essentially just a greeting.

And his response caught me completely off guard.

He responded with something along the lines of:

“Yeah, that’s my people.”

The problem was...

I hadn’t asked him about any people.

I hadn’t explained what had been happening.

I hadn’t accused him of anything.

I had essentially just appeared from a new number.

And my brain went:

Wait. What?

Then he followed it with a picture of an excavator.

Which, I assume, was supposed to provide some kind of context.

Construction.

Work.

His people.

Whatever.

I don’t remember seeing any actual people in the photo.

Maybe that’s exactly what he meant.

One strange response didn’t prove anything.

But given everything I was already trying to understand, it certainly didn’t make me less suspicious.

And apparently my exhausted brain came up with the simplest explanation it could handle:

Maybe this guy is just extremely obsessive.

Great.

Mystery solved.

ALL THE ORIGINAL QUESTIONS PLUS HIM

Looking back, there was an obvious sensible response to suspecting him.

Stay away from him.

I did not choose that response.

By that point, I was exhausted.

Nothing I’d tried had made things feel normal again.

I needed to do something.

More than anything, I was intrigued.

I wanted to know what was really going on.

So instead of staying away, my response became:

Okay. Let’s see what this is about.

Would I recommend this strategy?

Knowing what I know now? No.

At the time, I’d reduced everything to an explanation I could understand.

Maybe he was just obsessive.

And in my already exhausted state, getting closer somehow felt like a way to finally understand what he wanted.

Maybe then it would stop.

It didn’t.

We communicated more.

The incidents continued.

And suddenly my simple explanation didn’t work anymore.

If this was just him...

why hadn’t anything changed?

Apparently we were already at the part where we were obsessed now.

Fine.

Now what?

I thought getting closer might answer the question.

Instead, I somehow had all the original questions plus him.

And one of the most exhausting parts was the pretending.

Everyone acting normal.

Me trying to act normal.

Him sometimes acting like he had no idea what I was talking about.

It was tiring.

Sometimes I’d make comments like:

“Don’t you already know?”

And leave it there.

I wasn’t about to explain every conclusion I had reached.

Every once in a while, he would say something that felt strangely specific to me.

Other times, I’d point something out and he’d suggest I was imagining things.

Which didn’t reassure me.

It irritated me.

Whether every explanation I had developed was correct was one thing.

Pretending I hadn’t noticed anything at all was another.

THAT’S ALL I’VE GOT

By that point, my question wasn’t how much information I believed had been gathered about me.

From my perspective, it was substantial.

My question was much simpler:

What were they looking for?

Because seriously.

What did I have?

Sometimes I would give him little glimpses of my past just to see how he’d react.

Not everything.

Just enough.

His response was essentially that none of that mattered to him.

I remember thinking:

Okay... then what else is there?

Seriously.

That was it.

That was the material.

A few years of my private life.

I wasn’t hiding state secrets.

I wasn’t sitting on classified information.

I’m not Agent Kim from the North.

If somebody expected to uncover some fascinating hidden identity, I’m sorry.

You got me.

A mom.

A few failed businesses.

A complicated past.

And apparently a willingness to study cybersecurity out of pure irritation.

That’s the package.

So if my past wasn’t what mattered, I was genuinely confused about what anybody could possibly still be looking for.

Maybe somebody thought I was much more interesting than I actually was.

Maybe they thought I knew something.

Maybe they thought I had something.

Maybe the goal was something else entirely.

I still don’t know.

What I do know is that while I was still trying to understand all of this...

the relationship was already becoming serious.

VERY QUICKLY

There wasn’t a clean moment where the questions stopped and the relationship began.

They overlapped.

While I was still trying to figure out what was happening around me, somehow this man had already moved us into conversations about something serious.

There was a lot of talking.

Long messages.

Big declarations.

Family.

Marriage.

A home.

A future.

Very quickly.

Looking back, the speed matters more to me now than it did then.

He wasn’t slowly getting to know me and eventually discovering what mattered to me.

The future arrived almost immediately.

My son was included in it.

Family was included in it.

Stability was included in it.

He wasn’t only telling me that he wanted me.

He was describing a life I would want.

I told him it was too fast.

Because it was.

He was certain.

He knew what he wanted.

Meanwhile, I was still over here thinking:

Wait. Are you the problem?

There had been enough talk about marriage that at one point I decided to test exactly how serious all of this seriousness actually was.

Basically:

Okay then. Where’s the ring?

The ring never happened.

Looking back, perhaps the giant declarations were easier than the small piece of jewellery.

But at the time, I was still doing something I’ve done throughout my life.

Giving people the benefit of the doubt.

Finding another explanation.

Forgiving quickly.

Wanting to believe that when somebody tells you who they are and what they want, maybe they actually mean it.

I didn’t have language for any of this then.

I wasn’t sitting there thinking:

This looks like a romance scam.

I thought I was dealing with an unusually intense person during an unusually confusing period of my life.

Looking back, I see the beginning differently.

The speed.

The certainty.

The future planning.

The immediate inclusion of my son.

The promises of family.

And eventually, the money.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Somewhere between all the questions I still had and all the certainty he seemed to have...

I went along with it.

I moved in.

My son came with me.

And for a brief period of time, I got to see the version of family he’d been promising me.

At least, that’s what it looked like.