“You have to know,” Sam’s message read, “I’m really worried about Dylan. Something’s off. ”
I stared at my phone. Sam and I hadn’t spoken in years, but we’d both known Dylan since we were kids.
He was my best friend of twenty years. And for the last few weeks, I’d been feeling the same worry she was describing. He’d been erratic, forgetful, confused. I’d planned to reach out to her, but she beat me to it.
We started comparing notes. At first, it was just small inconsistencies. A story he’d told me didn’t match the version he’d told her. But the deeper we dug, the worse it got.
The lies stretched back at least a decade, and they weren’t small at all. He’d told me he and his partner had eloped in Vegas. He told Sam nothing about it, even though he’d told me we’d both be bridesmaids. He told me he lived in a different country, had a high-powered job, and had been diagnosed with terminal cancer eighteen months ago.
He described surgeries, treatments, remission, and the cancer coming back. I’d spent so many nights grieving, convinced my best friend was dying. It was all a lie. The husband he’d introduced me to over the phone?
He was a real person, but he had never heard of Dylan in his life. I found him on Instagram and messaged him. That was the first time I ever thought to check. It had never seemed weird before.
Why would someone invent a whole marriage, a whole terminal illness, a whole life? He told me he was being abused by this man. He knew I’d survived an abusive relationship myself. He told Sam and me different versions of everything.
We reached out to old friends who’d drifted away from him. Turns out, they’d all distanced themselves when they realized they were getting different stories. None of them knew the depth of it. We wanted to believe it was a medical issue.
Head trauma from the abuse, or the cancer spreading to his brain. But the breadth and the depth of it, plus knowing the cancer was a lie, made that harder and harder to believe. Sam and I decided to reach out to his family. We wanted to come from a place of concern and get him help.
But the messages went into their request folders, unread. We didn’t have any other way to contact them. I’d spent the day avoiding him after he had some kind of medical emergency but refused to let me speak to anyone else there. I just needed space to figure out what the hell to do.
When his family finally got back to us, it was through a family member named Charlie. They told us the family had known about his lies his whole life, but they had no idea how deep it went. They were devastated. And Charlie confirmed the only real thing in his entire story that we could verify: the death of an infant he’d told us about.
That was real. Almost nothing else was. Twenty years. None of it was real.
I wanted to confront him. I wanted to scream. But Sam and I agreed that a confrontation would only make things worse. We weren’t the ones who could fix him.
His family could. So we decided to slow-fade our friendships, let his family take over, and step back. It didn’t work. Within a week of us pulling back, he felt the shift.
He started messaging us more intensively, trying to get a reaction. I’d reply once a day to safe, innocuous things. Then, one morning, I woke up to twenty deleted messages. That was the one thing I’d never tolerated from him.
It sent my anxiety spiraling. When he came back, he apologized and explained that a third party had told him his mom was having a heart issue. He said he freaked out for two hours, then discovered it was a lie. He said he wanted to murder the person who told him, and that he hated people.
That broke me. I’d seen the first ten messages in my notification bar. They were about jewelry he liked. And here he was, two years after telling me he had terminal cancer, lying to me about his own mother’s health.
I sent him a long message. I told him I knew everything. I said I wouldn’t tell him how I found out, but that I knew the truth. I said I hoped he could get help, but I couldn’t be around while he did.
He read it immediately. I blocked him before he could reply. For a week and a half, I felt a strange mix of sadness and relief. The weight lifted.
I told Sam what I’d done. She realized she’d accidentally archived his messages, and he’d been messaging her all week. She told him to go fuck himself and to never speak to her again. I thought he knew he’d been found out.
I was wrong. I forgot about regular text messages. He got through. He told me he knew Sam had poisoned me against him.
He said he was done with her and didn’t care about her. He called me scum for dropping him. And then he doubled down on every single lie. He said Sam was lying.
He said everything he’d ever told me was true, and he had never lied to me. I ignored him. But I’d been keeping in touch with his family and Sam. They all saw the messages.
His sister-in-law told me his brother had finally spoken to him and told him we were all in contact. Everyone knew everything. Apparently, the conversation didn’t go well. We can only hope it’s the first step toward him getting help.
I’m in therapy. I went back to my twelve-step group. I’m getting support, and I don’t feel any urge to reply to him. It feels like grieving a person who never actually existed.
—
When I came home from work last week, I was exhausted. I’m a nurse, and one of my patients had assaulted me that afternoon. My eye was swollen shut, and the pain was a constant, throbbing presence. My fiancé had been with me, taking care of me, until he got a call.
His best friend had been in a car accident. A van had backed into her car in a parking lot. She wasn’t even inside the car when it happened. She wasn’t hurt at all.
But my fiancé lost it. He told me he thought she was hurt, and it made him realize he couldn’t lose her. He told me he realized he was in love with her. He left our flat to be with her.
He told me he confessed his love, and she felt the same. He told me all of this while I sat there with a black eye and a broken heart. Everyone had told me not to worry about their friendship. They grew up together.
Their families were close. They were like brother and sister. I was stupid enough to believe it. He’d always been there for me.
He was the love of my life. And now, a week later, he’s moved into her flat. She broke up with her boyfriend. They aren’t hiding it.
Everyone knows. Our friends, their families—they’re all over the moon about them being together. No one thinks about me or her ex-boyfriend, whose lives were torn apart so they could be together. I had to cancel our wedding.
I signed a new lease alone. I blocked him and everyone who told me it was fate, that they were meant to be. I thought I’d be marrying the love of my life tomorrow. Instead, he’s proposing to her.
I saw her ex-boyfriend once after it all happened. I just hope he’s doing okay. I hope he’s found some peace. I’m trying to move on, but I don’t know how.
The worst part is, I still love him. I know it’s stupid. But I miss him so much, and it hasn’t even been a month. I had to turn off my chats.
I received messages telling me my assault was deserved. That my attacker was right. I got tired of seeing those notifications. I’m not in a bad place.
I have no plans to go down that road. I just feel lost.
