Two days later we met again in the hipstery east of London. He was ecstatic, drank too much, and kept trying to engage in conversation, but the only thing he was really interested in engaging was getting the paperwork moving.

I worried he wouldn’t make it home in that state, so I told him to come to mine — just a quick bus ride. I’d been to his place enough times, so it felt safe. Two nights later, same move, except he stayed sober. Sleeping with him was nice, and I wanted more.

The next morning — a Saturday — I found him in the kitchen socialising with my housemates. Bizarre. This man who struggled with intimacy suddenly buzzing like a bee, questions flying: one about them, one about me, back to them, back to me. Strange. But also interesting. I’d never been close to a western PhD-holder before, so I told myself maybe that’s how it’s supposed to be. Hell knew.

He spent another night and then asked if I wanted to move in with him. I said yes. No overthinking, nothing to lose. There was nothing not to like about him.
Apart from all the weird things.

He was overjoyed, and two days later came the next offer: a holiday in the south of France. Damn. Was this really happening?
“Yes, absolutely.”

We flew out, rented a car and a small house in Provence. It felt too good to be true. Smart, educated, good-looking, kind, effortless. Natural, even. Except… no. That was me bullshitting myself. He wasn’t natural.

He loved talking about his work — some project about monitoring people’s communication and extracting data. Was it ethical? “It’s going to be useful for organisations.” Right. Meanwhile I took an interest in the minibar, and got a quick slap-down: “Those drinks are expensive.”
Made me laugh.

Was I turning into a cold bitch? My friends sometimes said I had “bitchy elements.” But I’d just offered this guy a marriage, and he was worried about the minibar? No. Not bitch. The words were generous and naïve. But I only figured that out much later.

Then came the adrenaline side of him. In contrast to his bookish, academic mask, he drove like a lunatic, attacking curves, braking at the last possible second, hungry for risk.

One night, on the way back from Aix, he stopped in a forest. Midnight. The moon was weak, the place pitch black. “Let’s enjoy the silence. Let’s walk.”
I refused. “You’re not going to kill me in a car rented on your passport, I guess. But out there, in the forest, at midnight? I don’t know you that well.”

On the drive back, he pushed me to explain. I told him fear doesn’t need logic — it’s a feeling. Valid, even if you can’t map it out on a flowchart. He was furious. Said I wasn’t cooperating. All I could see was a man either pretending not to understand, or genuinely incapable of grasping basic human fear. A fracture in the brain. I finally said: “You know what, we’ve been way too rigorous for two hours. Let’s just have a look at that minibar, maybe.”

But overall, the feeling was familiar — childhood weekends dragged to my mother’s aunt. Dust, moths, naftaline, boredom stretching like an eternity. Holidaying with this man was like holidaying with that aunt.

He was obsessed with how important his work was, convinced that friends, colleagues, relatives were just jealous imbeciles. He climbed ruins in Provence like a reckless teenager, slipping and yelling “OMG!” while I stood below, already rehearsing the phone call to the ambulance. He dragged us into sketchy streets in Marseille and, when I said we should turn back, grinned: “You don’t know that.” No — but I didn’t want to find out.

This man wasn’t stupid. But his risk assessment was stuck at age twelve. He didn’t just like adrenaline — he needed it more than survival. And maybe, just maybe, he couldn’t feel much else.

A couple of days later, we met again at his place. Swift change in his behaviour – as if suddenly aware that never asking for my input in any of the activities we did together seemed inconsiderate at best, he made me a part of his…monologue.

He would ask me many, many questions about my life and about the feelings various situations elicited in me. This was a very interesting and welcome shift in our dynamics.

Most people talked about themselves and, if they remembered, they’d ask me briefly one or two questions about me, just to get back to talking about themselves without stopping. This guy was adamantly learning about me and about how I was feeling. How wonderful! It’s just that he didn’t seem to clock that changing his behaviour so abruptly was weird, neither was he aware that interrogating me non-stop for 3 hours in a space so much his own, not at all familiar to me, felt again – weird. Cuz this was not a conversation. And there something chilling about his way of recording how I was experiencing feelings. It reminded me of how programmers speak to computers about colours – they are codes, letters and numbers, nothing else. I felt like I was just data here.

Later, he mentioned again in detail how much he believed that his social research was going to help the humanity and then mentioned again how anxiety-inducing it felt not knowing if he would be allowed to continue his work, or he would have to leave the country. We also drank wine, and, on this occasion, I found it in me to be more accommodating with his sexual advances. And… he then proceeded to masturbate using my body. He was alone in this - manoeuvring his body so that he got enough friction between his flesh and my clothes to get him somewhere - and very focussed on the walls around. Didn’t say a word throughout the process, nor did he look at me, and I could see that this behaviour felt normal for him. He climaxed without visibly noticing that I had my clothes on and wasn’t aroused at all, wiped and went out to have a cigarette.

A 45-minute-long skype conversation with his mother ensued, during which he’d go through a range of angers, joys, excitements, completely unbothered that I was still present, in fact completely oblivious. His mother had all of him effortlessly. Single mothers and their 45 year old sons – you don’t wanna go there! Couldn’t help feeling that sexing me, or whatever that was, was just the foreplay for his session with his #Mami. Theirs was loud, they’d display range, fuel one another, build momentum, scream, pat each other on the back. Didn’t have to understand their language to sense the obvious – this was a match. But it wasn’t clear who was giving it to whom - they both seemed to have mastered the art of pleasing their favourite object, switching roles with a fluency most couples would envy.

Upon his return into the room, he spoke of his was exhaustion at not knowing how to get a visa to continue living in the country.

My instinct was telling me that our interaction was bizarre, but I silenced it before it started playing with my mind. How many times had I been in situations where I’d tell people that I had bad experiences for just being me, and people denied my reality? Why was I keen on telling myself that this guy’s despair was performative, that overall his behaviour was alien? I was feeling like I was having an opportunity to help and all I could think about was how to find flaws in this person. When had I turned into such a sour person?

We kept drinking and he looked very blue. By now I’d thought that I knew him well. So stupid of me.

So, out of nowhere, the words come out of my mouth “Look, if it helps you, I’m more than happy to marry you, so you can stay in this country.”

The instinct – my loyal saviour and fierce enemy – works in unknown ways. In that moment, just as I was uttering the words, I knew that I was going to regret this decision. But, of course, I told myself “Nonsese, wake up – this man needs help”.

His face changed instantly “What do you mean? Would you do this for me? Oh, my God, I don’t deserve this. You’re a heaven sent!”

Which I was, indeed, but I reiterated that it literally didn’t cost me anything to help him and, understanding how important this was for him, I knew that “I had to do it”.

It looked like I had won him over. Until then, I had never thought about making efforts to win him over – I somehow thought that he was too interesting to want to stay with me long term – but as soon as it appeared like I had convinced him that I was worth having a relationship with, I felt more valid.

Suddenly, he was a different person. More relaxed, more assured, and he started looking at me. Beautiful eyes. I wasn’t sure if they were light brown, dark yellow or green – just couldn’t tell – but they were beautiful. Or was it just me feeling seen.

Almost forgot that…as a child, I had a thing for frogs. They were squishy and had big eyes that didn’t convey emotion. They looked frozen, staring intensely with an absentminded gaze, then they leaped and froze again. They looked as if their nervous system was not a whole – they were just flesh with primal reflexes. I found it fascinating how frogs, whether you sang Mozart or shouted profanity at them, kept the same poker face.

Once my guy started looking into my eyes, he reminded me of the feeling of looking into a frog’s eyes – a wet nothing. But that was just a detail, which I was determined to ignore, as he was very articulate.

By now I was very much into him and understood that he was trying. Nobody is perfect, neither was he, but was willing to try.

While I wasn’t in any way in a privileged position, I was thinking that I kinda ended up dating a frog.

Photo by Khamkéo on Unsplash

I had moved to London two years prior to this moment and, naively thought that I was going to be spoilt for choice in terms of dating. So wrong! Men in London came across as underdeveloped emotionally, impatient, slightly sociopathic, and generally unable to understand relationships the way I did. Everyone was compulsive about finding and having sex and then moving on quickly. I had a hard time understanding what exactly they found appealing about this way of playing: was it having sex with as many partners as possible or playing the seduction game often? I think they also had a hard time figuring out what the game was about.

The world was approaching that moment when dating became synonymous with using dating apps and my guess was that londoners treated real life as an app – swiping people, not meeting them.

I was working a lot, so I hardly ever had time to go to parties or…I don’t know…how does one meet people in a city where people are averse to people?

I created a profile on one of the “efficient” apps and was ready to go. Real faces I hadn’t seen many. There was an abundance of very processed photographs, everyone looked healthy, rested, well dressed and clean - the London you never get to see in real life. But I was willing to give it a try and kept telling myself to stop finding reasons to avoid using the app. I also learned within the first 2 days of being on the app that grammar was a thing of the past. I read many confusing profiles - there were no commas, no semicolons, no full stops. Words were still in use at that time…

I met an IT guy. For the second date he met me at his place. We talked for a couple of hours. He was soft spoken and gentle. I was feeling safe and pleased that the first person I met appeared to be sane. He eventually leaned in to kiss me, I responded, and almost instantly felt his hand trying to choke me. Confused, a bit scared, I yelled firmly “No, not this!”. He then asked if he could urinate on me, just to learn that I wasn’t into golden showers either, and then offered two other…procedures that I found equally unexpected and a bit more invasive than what I was ready to subject myself to. I gathered that I was failing in this negotiation and decided to leave. He told me that, had I left, he’d go on the app. “Ok, noted. Was there anything else?”

I left grateful that I managed to get out of his house dry. A text came in shortly “this could’ve been big”. Right.

I laughed it off the next day with a friend of mine.

A couple of weeks later, I decided to go on a date with a guy who seemed to be a bit of a brainiac. I found that interesting, as I had never dated dorks before. We met in a bar, he looked friendly and masculine, but without projecting macho vibes. Felt safe and he was no dork at all. I liked him before he even opened his mouth to say hello. And his voice, oh my! The most accurate description of it would be ‘sounding like peanut butter carrot cake’. Don’t laugh!

We talked about politics, ethics, rugs, yellow cats, Mongolia and then some more. A gentleman. Time flew by, it was getting late, I had to go home, but we both felt like we wanted to enjoy each other’s company a little bit more. We started walking and out of the blue he suggests that I went to his place and we had sex. I said “it’s late, but let’s keep this conversation open” thinking that I dodged the bullet elegantly. But he was just not having it, started yelling ‘what’s wrong with late’, I tried to say that I had to go to work the next day, but suddenly this man wasn’t hearing anything I was trying to say. And no later than 20 seconds later he was having a full-fledged meltdown triggered by my refusal to have sex with him. I asked him to stop so we could say goodbye in a civilised manner, but he already looked like he was about to become violent, and I decided that I should hop on a bus that was approaching. Which I did and, once I got home, I stared in the mirror for a good fifteen minutes, hoping to understand what exactly about me was so irresistible that made this man almost have a heart attack in the middle of the street.

The third guy looked like a fun-sized model. Meridional, curly hair, beautiful eyes, iconic jawbone handsome as a devil. We meet and decide to meet again next week. He was texting me daily – great humour as well. At the weekend, we met by chance at a party. He was with somebody, caught in what appeared to be a torrid affair, and pretended to not know me for 2 hours. The next day, the texts continued, to my surprise, as if nothing weird had happened at the party, and he let me know that yes, he’s dating multiple people. Cool. Bye.

Still, I knew that it would be foolish to think that ‘that was it’ living in a city of 9 million, but I was a getting a bit tired of dating app people and decided to have a break.

I’d check the app every now and then but had no intention of interacting with people unless they were amazing.

In hindsight: normal is always safer than amazing

One evening, I was doing my usual post-work routine: social media, news, calendar for the rest of the week, dating app and I was happy that I bought two unusual pairs of socks: neon pink and neon yellow. I thought that wearing them in a city that dressed in black might cause social unrest.

Same faces on the app, same news, same….

I was beginning to understand that Londoners rarely used the word ‘boring’; they’d prefer ‘amazing’ instead.

A message pops on the app “hey, nice profile”.

“Thanks, you’re kind”.

“You sound interesting”

“I know.”…and I almost pressed ‘send’.

Oops, no! “You can’t be bitchy yet, it’s way too early.” I rephrased: Thanks, you’re not too bad yourself.

Bla-bla-bla, I wasn’t hearing anything new and started giving him a rationale why I wasn’t really interested. But we ended up chatting for an hour and it was ‘Wow!’. He said what I needed to hear. Polite, consistent. We set a date.

Toward the end of the conversation, we decided to meet the next day somewhere in central London. He texted me the next morning to reconfirm. He had already won me by being polite and able to have a conversation.

Covent Garden, near the station. I arrived and watched him from across the street for 2 minutes. He was relatively decent, looked like an autistic Louis Theroux. No facial expression though. He was staring at the air. Empty? Suicidal? Banker? Clothes: unremarkable.

I cross the street, greet him, he jumps as if being greeted was unusual to him.

He pushed for a restaurant, got snippy when I refused. “Maybe you don’t understand fine things.” Men and their egos…

I tell him to fuck off shortly and that walking is perfect for me.

The conversation was nice, but I realised quickly that he was having a monologue. I was in the presence of a well-read man, who was able to build complex phrases and interesting links between ideas.

He was walking alone though - reciting, paraphrasing things obviously important to him, crossing the street, changing direction, not asking for my opinion on what was next.

But yeah, some say that many men lack emotional intelligence and I was walking with a data point which firmly supported that theory.

An hour later, in Shoreditch, I suggest we have a drink on a bench. We keep talking. Thirty minutes later, having to powder my nose, I spot a pub, head there, do the thing and return. He randomly tells me that dates on benches, as well as peeing in random pubs are things he never did, as “he was too civilised for such practices”. ‘Good for you!’ I say, thinking “alternatively, you could just go f. yourself” and ask him why he looked increasingly uncomfortable. He had to pee but, being ‘too civilised’, he couldn’t. He eventually decides to look for a pub and exactly 27 minutes later he’s back. Men and their egos…

I wanted to be sure of what I thought I saw, and, at that point, I was – this man was virtually unable to look into my eyes and, while fully able-bodied, he was using his limbs in a way which looked as if they’d recently been attached to the rest of his body. Looked as if he was in the process of learning how to operate them. And although words came easily and described interesting ideas, his face lacked expression. Most people, intelligent or less, educated or not, feel like whole units. With him, I couldn’t find the words to express it in my internal dialogue process, but I felt strongly that there was nobody home.

On my way to north London, I convinced myself that “of course he seemed unusual, most intelligent people are unusual”.

I received several texts the next day telling me how incredible the date had been and how lucky he felt to have met me and….

Oh, so he did notice I was there.

The second, third and fourth time we met, the monolo…..conversation was equally interesting, he was a variation of charming, and I was curious to get to know him better. Unlike other men, he wasn’t rushing me to bed. That felt unusual. Safe, even.

The dynamic with him was a bit unusual, but well....there are pros and cons to dating men.

By then, I’d adjusted to his fragmented presence. Our minds adapt to any reality. Mine had adapted. Now I was dating someone who didn’t feel like a person. Piece of cake.

At some point within that first month, he invited me to his place. He was somewhat troubled about his UK visa, which was ending in the following year. He kept mentioning his visa situation every time we had met until that point, but he’d also talked a lot about his career.

He also educated me on causes dear to him, generational trauma, feeling stateless, despite having multiple passports.

There was a mix of anxiety, fear, powerlessness, frustration, and hope. I started to care about him, in part as I felt we had so much in common. Or maybe I was groomed into feeling compassion for him?!

On that first evening at his flat, there was an attempt to engage me in a sexual interaction, I obliged, but I wasn’t feeling anything for him in that respect. I was accustomed to discussing with this person that didn’t display facial expressions, but attempting to have affectionate sex with him felt like expecting to be comforted by a door.

The story starts with episode 35. You can read everything here here .

This is not a triumph story. It’s about how dangerous things can become before you understand you’re inside.

Once I was out of it, I made a decision not to turn on myself. Not to perform the ritual of I should have known, I should have seen it, I should have left sooner. People who operate the way he did are so far outside the range of what most of us are built to recognise that you genuinely cannot see it coming until you’re already in it. That’s not naivety. That’s just the distance between normal and whatever he was.

I spent a long time trying to understand what I had witnessed. The closest comparison I could find was an odd one: passion. Most people never get tired of the things they truly love doing. They don’t need reminders, motivation or discipline, they just return to them again and again.

Looking back, I sometimes wondered if causing confusion, fear and instability worked in a similar way for him. Not as a strategy. Not even as a goal. More like a compulsion he kept returning to because he couldn’t imagine doing otherwise - harming people wasn’t something he did when provoked, or when he lost control, or when circumstances pushed him there. It looked more like a passion.

I started writing this because it helped me recover. I kept going because I think it should exist. Not because my story is unique, but because it isn’t.

Most victims end up gradually isolated from the people who could help them — coerced into dependence, told that staying inside is in their best interest, or else. There are always signs. If something doesn’t feel right — in your life or someone else’s — pay attention. You don’t have to be heroic. You just have to not look away.

To the handful of people who stayed: you know who you are. Thank you.

50 days later, I was in Paris for a very long weekend. Getting my life back in check, recouping all I felt I had been deprived during my time with Oliver of. On a strict diet – pain au chocolat, pavlovas and a sip of rosé in the evenings.

I had just delivered fabulously for the last 2 uni exams, what were they….statistics and neuropharmacology...and now I was here, in the city of lights, celebrating my way out of the dark.

One afternoon, I just felt like walking – Concorde, Vendôme, Garnier, Pigalle - until long after sunset. They all looked friendly and very close to me, as I had realised that by then I had managed to rewrite the reflex of being afraid to be outside. Then, it must have been 7 PM, I climbed to Montmartre to watch the city from above.

I eventually sat on the stone stairs for what must have been like 2 minutes and I decided to listen to some music, whatever…

Ear buds in, tap Spotify and play absentmindedly and BOOM! – Celine Dion in full detonation mode:

“I’M THE ONE

WHO WAAAANTS TO

LOVE YOU MOOOOOOOORE.”

I burst into laughter splashing saliva and bits of chocolat on my puffer as an avalanche of crude snapshots crash into my mind: grey haired 50 yo Oliver on his back, eyes closed, belting opera, while #Mami is changing his nappy aggressively...his ex wife and ex boyfriend fight by the side ferally over a kebab, Regina the dog barges into the room and bites into his glasses out of spite…his #Mami belly dances for him to whatever he’s belting...

I’m laughing, I can’t stop and I think I’m gonna wet myself. I’m sweating and my laughter starts to feel like convulsions, painful... I’m probably gonna vomit...

Then, I stop abruptly, blank faced, trying to make sense of my whereabouts.

It’s Paris, from above - golden, still and cold.

-----

Thank you for reading.

Should you feel really generous, you’re welcome to restack parts of this series.

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Stick around – I’ll soon start publishing a new series.

You can start from the beginning here .

The next morning, he was packing clothes, stuff, his breathing machine….all of it, with a lot of consideration – in about 2 hours, he was gonna leave, heading for his yoga retreat.

I was scrolling mindlessly when Youtube suggested out of the blue ‘Black Widow’ by Rita Ora & Iggy Azalea – not my cup of tea, but 1000% where I was then. It was fun and I decided to play it loud on my computer.

“I’m gonna love you until you hate me / and I’m gonna show you what’s really crazy / You should have known better…..”

Two leather clad amazons, manoeuvred swords like knifes through butter through guys who wronged them. Kitsch, grotesque, hilarious - energy I recognised well.

He reacted instantly:

“What’s that? It’s so...violent.”

“Awww, come on…it’s a love song.”

...but I couldn’t shake the thought that had visited me repeatedly over the previous weeks: One day, the neighbours would force the door open because of the corpse smell and find him exactly where they left him: in front of a laptop, decomposing while still typing...

Ten minutes later, I got a massive hug, and later updates from the journey, and some generic noise about the retreat….

I started organising logistics - 30 minutes to make a clean exit looked doable.

For the New Year’s, I went to a party in Blackheath, but my mind was elsewhere.

By 1 AM, I was already bored. I jumped on my bike and rode through parks south of the river. Greenwich was open and deserted and I stopped to look at the skyscrapers and the first meridian green laser beam – a perfect, clean line between 2 different things. A hint.

Further down, by the river, next to the Cutty Sark, the foxes were feasting on food left by people who watched the fireworks earlier and were occasionally chasing rats away. Or eating them.

There was something very familiar about the rats – opportunistic, entitled, thieves…hell, even the hair colour... And then, I could see it clearly. Oliver. Rat vibes.

I wizzed through the Greenwich tunnel yelling from the top of my lungs something by Metallica. On the Isle of Dogs, more foxes. Playing, barking, not really bothered by the firecrackers. It all smelled like freedom.

On the 1^st of January, I arranged with Rich to move to his place for a few days.

By 3 PM, Oliver texted me “to reassure me of” whatever…

I started putting things in boxes, sealed gift phone included, and 15 minutes later Rich was in front of the building with a van.

I then texted Oliver “moving out by the 3^rd ”

We threw everything in the van, I left the key on the kitchen table and closed the door behind me. Half an hour after the text left my phone, I was out.

Noise started pouring as text messages: threats, regrets, promises. Then silence. Later, he texted to say that he had arrived back home. His home - not my business anymore.

By the 3^rd of January, I let him know that the elegant way to part ways was for him to financially support me reorganise my life.

He asked if 400 GBP would be enough and my response was that it was in his best interest that we did this cleanly. Rebuilding a life in London was expensive and I suggested an amount that would buy me time and a lot of distance. His response came in abruptly “You’re crazy. I don’t have this money.”

But he knew that he couldn’t afford not to make the investment I suggested and for the first time I fully trusted that he’d make the right decision. The next day, we met in a public space to say goodbye and I reminded him what the amount was. He looked at me and said ‘You wouldn’t dare.’ I smiled.vDuring our year together, we ended up knowing each other so well that we both knew what that exchange meant.

He made the transfer. I watched the amount appear in the app, powered the phone off, “bent” it in half against the kerb, placed it beside him - “Thank you. Bye.” - and walked away.

A part of me was sorry for overwhelming him with so many surprises within the space of just 3 days.

That night, I couldn’t sleep well - too many things had changed too quickly - and I was under the feeling that it hadn’t ended yet. I was in the process of getting legal counsel to end it, but that was not it. Something I couldn’t put my finger on was still bothering me.

And then it hit me. The shared account. The bloody account I never had access to. I jumped to the laptop, learned quickly that both of us had full rights over that account and...yeah, no reason to keep it.

By 9 AM I was at the bank, fresh and coldblooded.

I asked to close the account, we did security, verification – good to go. The lady typed away at a computer and let me know that there’s money in the account.

I kinda missed the point and I told her that I didn’t mind it, all I wanted was to close the account, but she insisted that she couldn’t just evaporate the money in it, somebody had to take it.

...In an instant, I saw him telling me that I didn’t need money, me chained to a bedroom heater, a car crashing, a naked idiot punching me, my head hitting a steel boulder...

“I’ll take the money, of course. Could you also print the statements for the last six months, please? Thank you.”

She types something, the printer starts printing, she disappears to a room at the back, then returns, moves notes from a container into the counting machine, a batch is done, more notes, she waits, she smiles, looking as if she was counting the air molecules… and she keeps doing this silent dance of tapping, typing, moving notes, smiling obliquely, while further registering more air molecules...

It didn’t make much sense, I was getting a little annoyed and eventually asked her if she could finish helping me before continuing whatever she decided to do while helping me. (Dammit!)

“Oh, this is your money I’m counting. Here are your statements.”

Without even looking, she grabs some papers from her left, hands them to me and I…get it - Oliver had been paid his salaries there for a long time and that account was the financial centre of his life.

Oh, boy!

By now, the entire contents of the account had been counted and was siting there yelling ‘marriage refund’.

“Sure you wanted cash? We can wire it.”

“Cash is fine. Thank you.”

I close the account, sign the papers, get a copy, thank and leave. Cake time!

The cafeteria where 8 months prior he had bought a slice of cake for me and then ate it himself in front of me was literally 200 yards from the bank, so before heading off, I made a quick stop and bought a whole cake in an elegant box.

I then headed to the nearby square and I fed it to pigeons. A couple of rats also showed up to feast – so many rats in London!

Less than a minute and the cake is gone.

Now we’re done.

Clean.

If this story resonates with you, subscribe or RESTACK it— I publish two instalments per week.

You can start from the beginning here .

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The story starts with episode 35. You can read everything here .

3 weeks left

By then, the relationship had become theatre. Dark theatre, but theatre nonetheless.

The roles were fixed. He was the trembling intellectual under siege, misunderstood, fragile, persecuted by cruel people who refused to see his brilliance. I was the difficult partner who kept disappointing him, frightening him, destabilising him, yet whom he loved with heroic determination. And orbiting around him somewhere in the background, endlessly rotating like a worried moon, there was Mami, ready to descend from the heavens whenever emotional reinforcement was required.

Everything had become performance.

He would give me tasks to keep me busy. I’d do some, ignore others. He’d throw a miniature tantrum, insult me, become cold for fifteen minutes, then dramatically wounded, then loving again. The transitions were so fast they no longer registered emotionally. I had stopped trying to make psychological sense of him. My only real thought by then was simple:

Two months left and I’m out. That thought had become my internal clock.

*

Things were changing in the house though. My storms were subsiding. His were intensifying. Earlier in the relationship, he had always seemed composed while I was emotionally reacting to things. Now, I was becoming increasingly detached, while he had become nervous, brittle, permanently overstimulated. He talked constantly about his work, his mother, incompetent people, betrayal, exhaustion, danger. It all blended into background noise.

One random Thursday, he was baking. I was on a chair in the kitchen, looking something up on my phone, half-present. He was rummaging in a cupboard.

Then I felt something on my shoulder.

My first thought was that he was being affectionate - unusual enough to register. But the weight was wrong. The texture was wrong. I didn’t even need to turn my head.

“What the...”

“I thought we should have sex.”

“With...that?”

“Don’t start.”

“I’m not starting anything.”

“You destroyed my erections. This is your fault.”

“I’ve seen that maybe four times in total. Not enough contact to cause lasting damage. And please don’t ever put it on my shoulder again - it’s disgusting”

“Ok, can we have sex? Let’s have sex.”

“You were baking a cake. Maybe…back to the cake.”

One morning, he made breakfast.

He called me into the kitchen to show me — the presentation was careful, considered. I praised it and made my own tea and ate biscuits from a packet I had opened myself and took with me when I left.

As I was gathering my things to leave the house, he asked me, softly:

“So what do you feel about me now? Have I managed to convince you? I feel we’re in a very good place now, we’re a really good match. I love you so much.”

At that point, his emotional speeches were reaching me the same way airport announcements did - audio filler.

“I’m glad you feel like that” I said “But why do you feel like that?”

He looked genuinely surprised by the question.

“What do you mean? We’re in such a good place now. We made efforts. We’ve grown. Don’t you think so?”

“I’m learning as we go.”

“You’ll see once we’re in America that…”

By then, America had stopped sounding like a country. The idea of it had turned into a recurring eczema he kept scratching no matter how irritated the skin became.

And I went off. I felt in my stomach the nausea of too much accumulated bullshit and I heard myself say, calmly:

“Look….you smell of death. One day the neighbours will break into your flat because of the corpse stench, just find you decomposing, typing away at your laptop.”

He looked devastated.

“OMG, that’s so unfair. After everything I’ve done for you. And you said you loved me.”

“Oh, don’t be so emotional.”

An hour later the messages started arriving.

“Your selfishness has no bounds.”
”You’re dangerous.”
”You have no empathy.”

Noise.

His emotions lasted on average 5 minutes – by the time I would have finished typing whatever response I had, he’d probably have moved on to how much he’ll love me in America, so I didn’t bother.

That evening he announced he was going to rent an Airbnb. ‘He didn’t feel safe with me anymore’.

I immediately became cheerful, went full asshole mode and said:

“You can always rent from me. You’ll feel at home.”

He stared at me.

“WHAT???”

“What...? Didn’t you say you loved me and would do anything for me?”

I didn’t care whether I escalated things or not. Mostly, I was relieved. His Airbnb booking started the following evening.

The next day, I came home from uni around three in the afternoon and found him sitting in front of his laptop holding one of my jackets. Tweed, structured, one I liked. It was in pieces. Not worn-through pieces. Destroyed pieces. He was holding it in both hands like someone who has finished doing something and hasn’t yet decided what to do next.

“What happened to my jacket?”

He looked up, registered my presence, and produced an expression of surprise.

“I didn’t realise…”

“You didn’t realise that you ripped a tweed jacket?!”

“I swear. I remember taking it out of the wardrobe and then I got emotional reading something online and... I don’t know. You know I’m not always fully aware of what I’m doing when I’m distressed.”

I looked at him. I looked at the jacket. I thought about the breakfast, the texts, the Airbnb announcement - small calculation.

“Right,” I said. “Ok.”

He no longer irritated me and, naturally, a part of me still defaulted to humour - because, if he was truly this unaware of his actions, it was remarkable that in 46 years of life he had never accidentally stabbed himself to death while reorganising cutlery.

I had called him a corpse the previous morning and now my jacket had mysteriously disintegrated in his hands. LOL

He left that evening. I collected my burner from where I kept it and went to New Cross to see Richie.

We hugged at the door and I understood how long it had been since I had been in the company of someone who meant me no harm. We sat down and I told him where things were and he listened and told me that the invitation to stay at his place remained open, whenever I needed it. I told him I had forty days left, roughly, and that I intended to use them.

He asked me about the phone — the one Oliver offered me and used to monitor my movements — and I asked him to remove whatever needed removing. He did something technical and brief and said: done. Then said, in full confidence that Oliver would give me a new phone soon. I told him Oliver didn’t have another old phone to give.

“He’ll buy you a new one. You’ll see.”

We both laughed. Then I went home.

Oliver spent much of December in various Airbnbs, a yoga retreat in Suffolk, then something in Wales. He’d come home for a night occasionally, moving through the flat with the performance of someone fragile — slightly unsteady, apparently burdened, talking about danger and uncertainty in the particular way people do when they want to be asked about it. I didn’t ask. I made tea. I counted days.

He would speak softly about how frightened he was of me. By then, it barely registered emotionally.

According to the solicitor, whatever narratives he had built around me carried no more evidentiary weight than gossip repeated often enough. That knowledge had changed everything internally. The fear hadn’t vanished, but cracks had appeared in it.

Christmas approached.

“So have you thought about what gift you’re buying me?”

“No. Honestly, no. But give me your card and I’ll buy you something expensive.”

Predictably, this led to a noisy speech abou… All I could hear was noise.

Then he suggested we go shopping together. He bought himself a coat and then insisted we enter the Apple Store.

“We deserve new phones,” he announced.

“My phone works perfectly well.”

“No, please.”

He spent twenty minutes comparing models and colours before finally buying one phone. ‘Because I didn’t want one’.

I immediately remembered Rich’s prediction and I started laughing. I said that I had just seen a person tripping, or something…. Once home, Oliver handed me the bag.

“No, it’s actually for you. I’ll set it up tonight.”

“That is so…..umm…..sweeeeeet. I want the pleasure of unboxing it on the first of January, as a new year’s present to myself. Let’s not open it until then.”

Damn. Rich had been completely right.

On his last evening before going to Wales for his New Year’s Yoga whatever, he wanted to see the Christmas lights in the West End. We went. Covent Garden, the decorated streets, the particular atmosphere of the city performing festivity for itself. We walked through Seven Dials, that small roundabout with its metal bollards at the pavement’s edge. A car was moving very slowly on the far side and then

I felt a sudden force against my back - sharp and decisive. I went forward, the ground arrived to my chin faster than I could process, my head passing close to the nearest bollard before I landed. I waited for what must have been 5 seconds, to make sense of what was going on, then I flipped onto my back.

He was standing above me staring down. Not in panic. Not in horror. More like... blank calculation interrupted halfway through.

Then, almost instantly, his face changed and he yelled:

“OH, MY GOD! I GOT SO SCARED!”

I sat up slowly.

“Yeah?”

“The car. I thought the car was going to hit you.”

The street - empty.

“Why did you push me?”

“No!…..I was trying to protect you….. I thought you didn’t see the car.”

My body was flooded with adrenaline so intense it made my hands shake. I noticed that I had a few cuts on my palms and some blood.

“You didn’t move…”

“Don’t be silly, I’d rather hurt myself. You know how much I love you.”

I let him help me up. I said something. We walked home and he talked about how much he loved me and how he’d always protect me and how much…

Noise.

I heard the words from a place that was completely detached from their content.

What I was aware of was that I was running out of reasons to believe that the next few weeks were going to pass without incident. He didn’t wanna let me go, but it started looking like he didn’t like me alive either and he was losing his patience.

I needed to leave. Not in February.

NOW!

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The story starts with episode 35. You can read everything here .

Photo by Djim Loic on Unsplash

The story starts with episode 35. You can read everything here .

4 weeks left

Right! Find a law firm.

The first firm couldn’t see me, neither could the second. The third asked if I had an appointment...

I was standing on a pavement in Farringdon eating the residual evidence of my fourth ice cream, holding my phone with the hand that wasn’t sticky, googling divorce lawyer central London with desperation. Today was the day and I was not gonna go home without having achieved what I’d come to central London to achieve.

I found a firm. Glass door, small plaque, entrance designed to suggest that the people inside were serious, not frightening. I went in and told the woman at the reception desk that I had an appointment but couldn’t remember which of her colleagues I was there to see and… She looked at me, I looked at her.

“OK, I don’t actually have an appointment,” I said. “But I think I’m in danger and I need to speak to someone today.”

She asked if I could pay - I could - and told me to sit down for a couple of minutes, while she was going to find someone available.

The lawyer - a woman in her forties - had a stillness that I have since come to associate with people who spend their days listening to the worst things that have happened to other people and have learned to do so without flinching. She brought me into a small conference room, set a glass of water in front of me and asked me what was going on.

I talked for twenty minutes without stopping.

...not entirely sure what I said or in what order. I know I covered the beginning — the app, the visa, the marriage — and somewhere in there I covered the tracking and the therapy and the list he had presented me with ten days earlier, the way he had described what he had built around me and what would happen if I stepped outside it, the paper trail he claimed to have, the GP, the therapists – 4 of them - the police calls I hadn’t known about, Marcel, the airBnb guests... the entire scaffolding.

At some point I became aware that I was kind of crying, but not really...I was distressed, anxious, terrified...

She waited until I was done and then asked me further questions. Targeted ones, the kind that arrive already knowing roughly where they’re going. She asked about the timeline, about specific incidents, red flags, about whether there were witnesses to particular things. She asked about documentation — what I had, what he had, what existed in writing.

I kept feeling that she already knew the story. That she had heard it before, or something so close to it that the details barely mattered. At some point I said that it felt like she knew the answers before I gave them and she said, with something that wasn’t quite a smile, that these situations had a pattern and that the pattern was remarkably consistent across cases. That the people who did this were doing the same thing and things. That it was almost shocking how similar they were.

Hmmm...ok. So he was not a singular phenomenon, not a unique catastrophe I had uniquely failed to anticipate, but a type, a recognisable, documented type.

I had been living inside what felt like an unprecedented disaster. She was telling me it had a name and a folder and probably several precedents in her filing cabinet.

This was comforting.

She walked me through what he had described — the therapists, the GP, the police calls, the guests — and translated it out of the register of threat and into something more functional - legalese. What he had, she explained, was a collection of statements he had made to various people over time. His words, delivered to audiences he had selected. But no corroborating evidence, no documentation that didn’t originate with him. A paper trail that, on examination, was made entirely of paper he had produced himself.

‘He was bluffing. I had a clean record.’

She asked if there was anything else I could tell her about him, things he might have done, people he might have harmed. And I stopped - it hit me like a truck. I had been so consumed by the previous ten days, so contracted by fear, that I had forgotten the rest of it. The thing online, the investigation, the suspension, the people on the forums and the Facebook groups, the colleague at his former job, the ex he had kept, I now remembered, in a situation he had not freely chosen – the blackmail. I ended up summarising:

“Damn! He has a clear pattern, he tries to blackmail people into obedience”.

She typed his name into her computer.

A pause.

She looked at the screen for a moment, then pressed her lips together, made a sound…almost a laugh, the kind that escapes before you can stop it, and said something like well this definitely changes things, then turned back to me and said, in language I didn’t entirely follow but understood in the way you understand things that matter, that a man with that much publicly documented history of a certain kind of behaviour, combined with what I had described, combined with other things I had mentioned, basically a man with a public trail of shit going 10 years back — provided certain people were willing to speak — was not a man in a strong position. Was not, frankly, a man in any position.

He had nothing on me, she said. What he had done was a recognisable tactic — the pre-emptive construction of a counter-narrative, built in advance against the possibility that someone might one day describe his behaviour accurately. It was, she said, extremely common in these situations. It was also, without corroborating evidence, extremely limited.

Big words, long words, legalese..

I asked her to summarise what she said, to make sure I understood.

‘He had nothing on me. I could just leave tomorrow and I’d never hear from him again.?’

She also printed a short list of firms. Gave me some phone numbers and told me that options existed and that I should use them.

Then she said:

“You are free. He is not and that is unlikely to change.”

I left the building. It was cold and getting dark. I stood in the middle of a square and felt something like relief, but relief implies the danger has passed and the danger had not passed, but something adjacent to it. A small, solid thing. The knowledge that I was not insane. That what I had perceived was real. That I had not, in the process of surviving the previous year, lost my grip on what was actually happening. And I knew that his threats were BS.

I had two more months before the rental market made moving feasible. I knew that. I had a plan, approximate but real, and I had a list of firms in my pocket and a phone that he didn’t know about, and I was going home to a flat I would be leaving in February.

I could survive two months. I had survived twelve.

I had not anticipated the physical dimension.

It had started around the time everything else changed — the week after he made his announcement, when the flat reorganised itself around his requirements and I began navigating my own home like a guest who had overstayed. Nausea, intermittently. Headaches. A fever that arrived and receded without explanation. A digestive misery I had no prior history of and no obvious reason for. By the time I got back from the lawyer I had been acutely unwell four times in two weeks.

I told him I needed to see a doctor. He told me, pleasantly, that this wasn’t necessary. That he would take care of me. That he would make tea.

I thanked him and found reasons, each time, not to drink it. I told myself I was being paranoid. I told myself that stress did strange things to the body and that I had been under considerable stress and that there was no reason to interpret symptoms as anything other than the physical cost of an extremely difficult year.

I told myself this and I continued, quietly, to find reasons. One thing was clear though - I’d only feel extremely sick after I’d drink teas that he made for me.

Later that week, he came home looking as if he was about to deliver excellent news. By now, I was no longer afraid, I was just stunned by how out of touch he was.

“Listen. Spain. Malaga. You, me, my mother. She’s always wanted to go. We could visit castles, eat well, she’ll take care of us…”

“WOW!”

“Right? I knew you’d like it. She’ll take care of us. It’s gonna be great, you’ll see. And she’ll bring….”

“No. NO! You’re deranged. I’m trapped with you, but you insist that we’re happy and we should do a holiday in Spain with your fucking mother. You’re sick!”

“Why are you saying that? You’re very cruel.”

“Look: take your ex-wife...no, take all your exes and your mother and holiday with all of them in Spain.”

I rarely still tried to make sense of his psyche, as it was clear that he was living inside his own phantasy, but one day I found myself thinking that I should just leave, ignoring everything, and he would probably not notice and would still talk to me like I was there and repeat that we were happy and that, once we’ll have moved to America….

One afternoon, he went like:

“Can you at least answer her emails? She’ll feel less alone.”

“Alone?! I don’t care if she fucking...”

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The story starts with episode 35. You can read everything here .

Photo by Tingey Injury Law Firm on Unsplash

The story starts with episode 35. You can read everything here .

5 weeks left

The days that followed had a specific quality I hadn’t encountered before.

He was pleasant. That was the texture of it — pleasant, warm, frequently loving. He told me, more than once a day, that all he had ever wanted was someone who understood him, and that he had found that in me, and that once we were in America everything would finally be as it should be. He was saying these as if describing a plan that had already been agreed upon.

When I mentioned, carefully, that America wasn’t something I wanted, the reminded me, in the same even tone, of what he had told me, what he knew, what had been documented, what would happen if I made choices that weren’t aligned with what we had agreed. Then the warmth came back.

I remembered ‘Misery’ — the nurse and the writer, how she broke his legs to ensure he could’t leave her. I had watched it as a teenager and found it almost unwatchable. The horror of being kept by someone who genuinely believed they were acting out of love. I hadn’t thought about it in years. Until now.

I was free to move, technically. I went to university. I went to shops. I could meet him in the city and he always said that he was ‘delighterd to meet me out!’. He was careful to frame this as generosity — it’s your life, I want you to be free — while making equally clear that the parameters of that freedom were his to define, and that anything outside them carried consequences he had spent a year quietly preparing for.

The fear was constant, but was not the sharp fear of an immediate threat, but slower and more total - water rising in a room with no windows. I was afraid to go to the police because I was certain, in a way that felt completely rational at the time, that he had already spoken to them, already established the narrative, already made sure that any account I offered would arrive pre-discredited. I was afraid to tell friends because I thought that the version of me he had constructed and distributed was the version they would recognise. I was afraid to leave the country because some part of me had become convinced that there were systems in place, borders alerted, my name attached to something I couldn’t see or refute.

I know how this sounds now. I knew, somewhere underneath, how it sounded then. But knowing something sounds irrational and being able to override the fear are not the same thing. I had spent a year having my perception of reality dismantled, and the result was that I no longer fully trusted my own mind. Which was, I understood much later, precisely the point.

One afternoon I found myself considering, with a calm that frightened me more than the thought itself, whether there was any exit from this that didn’t involve continuing to live in it.

And then something shifted - I had committed no crime, I was not the one with a documented history of moving through institutions and people and leaving damage behind, I was not the one whose name populated the first page of search results for the wrong reasons, I was not the one who had been suspended, investigated, threatened, abandoned by every colleague and contact who knew the full picture. He was trying to convince me that I was a malignant in order to prevent me from noticing that he was dangerous.

Why would I destroy myself on his behalf?

The nights were bad. I woke frequently from nighmares I couldn’t hold onto but whose feeling stayed for hours. I stopped eating consistently. I had unhinged contingency plans that I would construct in the dark and that looked, by morning, like the products of a mind running on too much fear and too little sleep.

I knew my mind was not entirely reliable. I also knew that knowing this was probably a good sign — the people who had truly lost their sanity didn’t usually sit in the dark cataloguing the evidence.

One morning, on my way to Uni, I got my burner from where I was keeping it and I called a therapist I trusted, someone from home, and talked for an hour. I asked him, several times, whether I was making sense or whether I should present myself somewhere for assessment. He told me I was not crazy. He told me I was on the edge of something, that the edge was understandable given everything, and that I needed to talk to the police.

I called Richie. He told me to come to his place with whatever I had on me.

Both of them were right and I knew it and I was not ready yet for either.

What I needed first was to understand, legally and precisely, where I actually stood, whether the scaffolding he had described was structurally sound or whether it was, as some part of me suspected, an elaborate construction built on the assumption that I would be too frightened to test it.

I got on a train into central London.

At Liverpool Street, I went into a shop, I bought four ice creams and ate them one after another, while people moved around me. I needed something immediate, physical and certain. Something that confirmed I was still inside my own body, still capable of wanting things, still present in a world that had begun to feel, over the previous ten days, like something...i was losing it.

The ice cream was very cold - I was still there.

I pulled up a map on my phone and started walking.

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The story starts with episode 35. You can read everything here .

Photo by Amaury Gutierrez on Unsplash

The story starts with episode 35. You can read everything here .

6 weeks left

“You are my sunshine, my only sunshine,
You make me happy when skies are gray,
You’ll never know, dear, how much I love you…”

I woke up to the sound of him singing this song. Not loudly, just present somewhere in the room, cheerful and calm. I opened my eyes slightly and looked at him. The morning light was still grey and he was standing near the bed smiling to himself, almost shyly. As soon as he noticed I was awake, he came closer, sat near me and touched my forehead.

“You’re very beautiful. I love you very much.”

There had been moments during that year when I was worried he’d explode, yell, throw another tantrum, create another scene. Now I was terrified. Whatever was happening to him no longer looked like manipulation or theatrics; it looked like something had disconnected somewhere inside him. I couldn’t tolerate it.

The email — the twelve numbered points of barely concealed contempt I had sent him the previous afternoon — had landed as a love letter. He had read devotion into every line and gone to sleep consoled and woken up singing and was now touching my forehead and telling me I was beautiful.

*

My relationship with the truth? I honestly wouldn’t know where it started. Maybe childhood, maybe fear, maybe exhaustion, but at some point, very early in life, I understood something practical: lying complicated reality. You had to remember things, maintain versions, anticipate consequences, look over your shoulder constantly. Truth was simpler, truth let you sleep. Sometimes honesty got me into trouble, but at least it was clean trouble.

Now I had a problem: I couldn’t tolerate him believing that email was sincere.

Part of me also wanted the tension gone. His happiness frightened me more than any of his outbursts ever had. A tantrum I understood. Rage was familiar territory. This soft optimism, this emotional warmth after months of psychological warfare — that felt wrong. And I also felt offended.

The man spent a year dismantling my sanity and when I finally insulted him properly, elegantly, with effort and precision, it didn’t even register?

So, later that day, while he was still floating around the flat, I said:

“The email was mockery.”

He looked at me blankly.

“What?”

“The email I sent yesterday. I was taking the piss.”

He laughed softly at first, genuinely assuming I was joking.

“But you said such beautiful things.”

“I said basically that I was happy to be your slave…..and you - my master. If that reads like beautiful to you, you’re more rotten than I thought. I’ll move out soon.”

The expression on his face changed slowly; he now looked like a child learning that somebody had deliberately destroyed a toy he loved. For the first time since I had known him, he looked emotionally abandoned.

For an hour he moved through the flat without purpose. Dishes. A glass of wine started and abandoned. Baking something, then not. He passed the doorway several times and said, to no one specifically, ‘but you said that I was your priority and I thought we were happy’ and then moved on again. I didn’t respond. I waited for it to resolve into something I recognised.

He came back into the room an hour later. He had changed. Not gradually. Between one moment and the next, something had been put away and something else had come out to replace it. He looked at me with eyes that were entirely calm and told me he was prepared to go to the police with all the evidence.

“Ok….ummm...What happened?”

He didn’t answer the question directly. Instead he began to talk, and as he talked I understood that this was not improvised.

‘Both his therapists had documented, over time, how volatile and unpredictable I was. Our couples therapist had witnessed it directly — the way I consistently rejected his account of things, the way I interrupted, the way I refused to engage. Classic presentation, he said, for someone in an abusive dynamic. His GP had a record of multiple requests for increased medication, each one linked to the distress of living with someone he didn’t feel safe around. He had made sure of that. Marcel knew. He had told Marcel, early on and consistently, about my unpredictability — in case something happened to him, he said, as though this had been a reasonable precaution all along. He had contacted the police on two occasions to document that he felt unsafe. There was a paper trail. The Airbnb guests — the ones who had sat in our kitchen and drunk our wine and eaten his cake — had been given, at some point during those evenings, an impression of me that they would likely confirm if asked. And they could be asked. The platform kept records. He had paid for the Italy holiday himself. That was documented too. Whatever I believed about that, nobody else would….’

What was making it difficult to breathe was not the list itself. It was the timeline. Everything he was describing had been put in place across the entire duration of our relationship — from the early months, before things had even turned difficult, before there was any reason to build a defence unless you had always been planning to need one. The therapists, the GP, Marcel, the guests. He had been constructing it quietly, in the background, while I was there in the foreground thinking I was in a relationship.

He had been building a case. I was the case.

“You’ll stay with me for as long as I need you to,” he said. “And when I go to America, you’ll come. Or you’ll find yourself in a great deal of trouble.”

Then he told me, with the measured tone of someone making a practical observation, that I was brown, Eastern European, no savings, no completed degree, no institutional standing. He had American citizenship, a PhD, published research, money, and a paper trail in which I was the danger and he was the person who had tried, patiently and at personal cost, to manage it.

“Who do you think will believe you?” he said. “Focus on what you need to do. We’ll discuss your duties over the next few days.”

He left the room.

The worst part was that individually, almost everything he said sounded plausible: therapy records, medical records, witnesses, friends, police calls, fragments, nothing dramatic on its own. Together? Horrifying.

I think I started to sweat, I felt like I had fever, while feeling my arms and my chest going cold. I remember trying to say something to him and feeling that it was hard to produce words.

“But none of this is real…you fabricated everything. You’re sick.”

But even while saying it, I understood that the he fabrication was coherent, even I could hear how believable it sounded.

I understood that throughout the entire relationship, while I thought I was surviving chaos, he had apparently been archiving me, curating me, positioning me carefully inside narratives I didn’t even know existed.

At some point, panic took over completely and my thinking became irrational. I became convinced he could genuinely arrange for me to disappear into some legal nightmare if enough people believed I was unstable. America stopped sounding like geography, it started sounding like forced removal.

I understood, distantly, that there were logical responses available. Leave. Call someone. Go to the police myself. From the outside these responses were obvious, and from where I sit now they are obvious, but I was not outside and I was not now. I was inside a year of accumulated confusion, gaslighting, and survival, and when that much of you has been spent on simply maintaining your footing, there is not a lot left for clarity.

He had taken the ground from under me so gradually I hadn’t felt it going. Now there was nothing underneath and I was still standing and I didn’t know how.

In the kitchen, I could hear him talking to his mother, his voice warm and animated, rising and falling with the familiar rhythms of their language.

My brain no longer functioned normally. That year had destroyed my internal baseline for reality. Confusion, fear, gaslighting, survival had had become routine. I had lost the ability to measure what was normal anymore and the most frightening part was not even the threats themselves.

It was how ordinary he became immediately afterwards.

Pleasant, relaxed, jovial even.

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The story starts with episode 35. You can read everything here .

Photo by Kaptured by Kasia on Unsplash

The story starts with episode 35. You can read everything here .

7 weeks left

Eventually, he found a job.

The details were modest in a way that would have been unthinkable to the man I’d met a year earlier. A teaching position at an education establishment.

His actual function, as far as I could establish, was now to prepare PowerPoint slides and then sit quietly in the background of webinars while someone else taught, taking notes on which students had asked questions. He would later respond to those questions, or something. It had been, as he occasionally acknowledged a steep learning curve. Maybe not in an academic sense. But it was a paid job.

One evening, he arrives home with the air of someone trying to gather the stamina to do something really big -‘We needed to have a serious conversation’.

Over the course of our relationship, serious conversations meant that he needed me to marry him so he’d get a visa, he then request a refund on a gift he’d given me while racing on a freeway yelling at me, hitting the steering wheel, a suggestion that I assist with something of debatable legality, insisting that we moved to America, against my will, having a baby while he was an oversized baby, the mental health help “he knew” I needed. We had covered considerable ground. I genuinely couldn’t imagine what remained.

I was wrong. He could always find something new. And serious.

‘He needed me to put my commitments to the relationship in writing.’

“What’s that? Put what in writing?!”

He explained that he no longer felt emotionally safe because I had become “distant”. He needed guarantees that I wasn’t planning to leave him, abandon the marriage or “withdraw support during a difficult period”. Apparently, while his life was collapsing publicly and professionally, I had failed to provide enough reassurance.

According to him, his current state was also partially my fault. My emotional instability, my lack of support, my coldness, my inability to “stand by him properly” had all contributed to his deterioration.

It was unusual that somebody could survive this much humiliation and still maintain such complete certainty in their own innocence.

I considered reminding him that the things destroying his life had happened years before I met him, but I already knew how that conversation would end. He’d distort it, redirect it, produce some deranged emotional algebra where somehow I was responsible for events that predated my existence in his life.

…so I stayed in the present.

“I fuckin’ gave you a country. What else do you need?”

“Commitment! I can’t keep building if I don’t know you’ll stay.”

Building!? This man’s life looked like a burning shopping trolley rolling downhill and he was talking about “building”…

The next day he brought it up again. Then again the day after. Then again.

Commitment. Commitment. Commitment.

Eventually, after four days of this, I sat down to write the email. Substantial. Dense. Numbered. I said that I was infinitely grateful for his support and guidance, that my primary purpose was to help him achieve his goals, that he was entirely right to require my commitment, that it was his due, that I understood now how central my role was to his recovery and his future, that I was there, fully and without reservation, for whatever he needed. Each item, carefully numbered, elegantly phrased, completely sincere in register.

It all felt like an SNL scene.

I had been wanting, for months, to tell him plainly what I thought of him — that he was a fraud, that he had made me feel invisible and interchangeable and occasionally afraid, that I had watched him perform humanity for a year and found the performance increasingly unconvincing and that he made me almost vomit every now and then.

I had never said any of it. But here, in twelve numbered points written in the language of devotion, I had said all of it and wrapped it in the kind of structured sincerity he had always responded to. My email was mean. Not sarcastic — mean - and I never imagined that he would read it straight.

I hesitated for about three seconds, then thought: he asked, he insisted, so I counted to three instead of ten, and hit send.

*

He came home that afternoon having had a productive meeting with his lawyer and he was in good spirits. I waited.

I had prepared for two possible outcomes. The first: he reads it, detects the tone, and the evening becomes something I’d need to manage carefully. The second: he doesn’t read it carefully, and something worse follows later when he does. Oh, there was also a third: he’d have a meltdown and beat me…

He suggested a walk along the canal. He found it calming…

We bought something sweet from a place near the water and walked. He was relaxed in a way I hadn’t seen in months. I stayed quiet and waited for the moment it shifted.

After a while, he started talking. He had been worried, he said. After everything that had happened, he had started to think that I might be considering leaving. That things between us had deteriorated beyond repair. That he had lost me. But the email had changed that.

He knew now that I was there. That I meant it. That the relationship was, despite everything, working.

He said he felt genuinely happy for the first time in months and he wasn’t performing. That was the thing. There was no calculation in it, no angle I could detect. He had read the twelve numbered points of my hate email and received them as proof of devotion. The irony had passed through him without leaving a mark. He was walking next to me along the canal, eating something sweet, telling me that I had made him happy.

We walked home in the early dark, and I thought about logistics, and timelines, and how much longer any of this needed to go on.

*

I’d never thought much about age — mine or anyone else’s. But there was something happening with Oliver that I recognised from a distance. Men in their mid-forties sometimes lose the plot. Not dramatically. Just consistently, incrementally, in ways that are hard to point at directly. A recalibration of what they think they’re owed, an investment in being seen as something they probably weren’t even when they were younger.

Oliver had always struck me as the frog who never became anything else, but had recently decided that he was James Bond – sexy, virile, clever.

Extravagantly delusional.

6 weeks left

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The story starts with episode 35. You can read everything here .

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

While I’m not necessarily very literate in the field, my understanding is that the social media did the great job of convincing everyone that they can do whatever they set their minds to. Sure, there are some common sense caveats to that, but let’s say that I agree. In theory.

The other thing that to this day blows my mind is that social media has convinced everyone that they have a talent. And I’m only gonna use my example - I ain’t got any talent, my mom’s - she has no talent, and my dad’s - no talent whatsoever. Sure, not many data points, but most people don’t possess the extraordinary talent required to become exceptional, yet they invest a lot of time, resources and emotions in nurturing something that will never flourish. And that’s great - having fun with your hobby, but I have a bit of a problem with the general delusion that everybody will end up being a superstar by oiling their talent. Or, in our case, that everybody will end up being Hemingway and cashing in big time.

What social media seems to do exceptionally well is exaggerate the likelihood of huge success. There is this culture where the distinction between participation, competence and excellence has become increasingly blurry. The fact that I can publish something online today does not make me a writer any more than owning a frying pan makes me a chef. Publishing words doesn’t automatically make those words good.

And nowhere is this more obvious than on Substack. I suspect that many of us secretly believe we’re one great essay away from being discovered. Maybe we are. But the barrier to publishing has collapsed while the barrier to producing exceptional work hasn’t - and the two are often confused.

I’ll reiterate my main worry about what happens on Substack more than on any other social medium: the temptation to use AI is big, but…AI loads everything with plenty and the result is more often than not…bland. Sometimes “i went outside just to learn that it was raining” has infinitely more class and personality than “I considered stepping out of that suffocatingly classy abode and found water pouring from the sky and it reminded me of the thousands of generations….” and the nonsense BS sometimes continues to the point where it’s so cringe it makes me scratch my tongue.

Nobody writes like that on Facebook or on Instagram, most people can hardly use punctuation. How come on Substack everybody masters the language like there’s no tomorrow? I think we kinda know the secret, but we rather not talk about it.

AI won’t make anyone a writer, AI will convince everyone that they can make something vapid sound elaborate…but still vapid.

I know, some will think that I’m a cynical bastard, some will think that I’m describing reality and some will wonder why the hell did I need to write this. And I don’t have an answer to that, but I know how I feel almost daily when I log in just to find that half of the pieces in my feed are about how to have success on Substack and I always wonder if one can have success on Substack writing about how to have success on Substack. Because so far it seems that writing on Substack frequently means writing about how to write on Substack.

But maybe I’m wrong.

Please have an opinion. I’m open to being called names, if it serves the argument.

Photo by Francesco Lo Giudice on Unsplash

The story starts with episode 35. You can read everything here .

8 weeks left.

By this point, his mother had become ubiquitous. At times, it looked as if, while he was on the tablet with her in the kitchen, she was also on a video call on his phone in the bedroom, dressed differently and waiting calmly for him to finish whatever else he was doing. And occasionally, the landline would ring, and it would be a third version of her, slightly more anxious than the other two asking me in a lowered voice whether he was alright….

I started thinking of her as quantum Mami - simultaneously everywhere, collapsing into a single location only when directly observed. Otherwise, spinning around him closer and faster, generating her own gravitational field, supporting him so intensely that there was no rom for air between them.

The conversations had changed in texture. Earlier there had been multiple daily exchanges — operatic, expressive, peaks and valleys. Now it was just one long continuous transmission, broken only by logistics. She’d wait through his toilet breaks, his lawyer calls, his dinner. He’d return and she’d still be there, exactly where he’d left her, ready to resume.

They had achieved something most couples spend years pursuing: total, uninterrupted presence. It was suffocating and also, in a specific light, completely hilarious.

On my decision to leave him…the problem was logistics. Unfortunately, my life had stabilised precisely when the relationship collapsed. The Airbnb business was doing well, university had started, I had several writing arrangements bringing money in regularly, and leaving now involved dismantling an entire infrastructure. I needed to get a divorce, housing, I needed to ship about a ton worth of things, change my university commute, abandon my business, less money, change documents, change transport routine… A tedious apocalypse.

Meanwhile, he had resumed talking about America again. He’d mention that maybe the UK had become too toxic for us. Maybe we needed a fresh start. Maybe in America we could finally be happy. Maybe we could adopt eventually. Maybe I could receive “proper support” for my issues there. It was fascinating.

His life had detonated publicly, people were avoiding him, lawyers were draining him financially, he barely slept anymore and had started waking up gasping at 4AM like somebody drowning invisibly — yet somehow I remained the one with issues.

One evening, during one of our walks, we passed a Decathlon and he suddenly stopped.

“Oh, wait.”

“What?”

“I forgot. Come.”

Inside, he pointed at a bicycle - apparently, he had bought it for me.

The whole thing appeared so abruptly that I genuinely thought he was joking for a second. But there it was already assembled, waiting near the counter. A black city bike.

“If you don’t want it….but we should take it, it’s a great bike,” he said quickly.

I remember thinking that after the previous year, a bicycle as compensation wasn’t excessive. I asked him jokingly if he had asked them to “adjust’ the brakes, so that I’d have a traffic accident and he laughed.

On our way home, he complimented me, praised me, bought a whole cake in some fancy box and some expensive red. I knew him too well - this was an investment. Every gift from him came with an invoice attached.

We arrived home, he said that we should be talking seriously about the fact that we were in this together and that I had to step in and help him by doing anything necessary to help him get rid of his problems. And...help him with the stupid character reference.

I told him to take the bike back like….immediately, I was simply not interested in having that discussion.

A few days later, I noticed that £250 had disappeared from my bank account. I called the bank, disputed the transaction, got the money back quickly and moved on. Annoying, but solvable.

Then less than a week later, another payment vanished. £499 - exactly the price of the bike.

This time the bank employee sounded irritated already. According to them, the transaction looked legitimate, properly authenticated. In fact, from their perspective, it looked increasingly like I was buying things and then attempting chargebacks afterward. They politely suggested I request a refund from the shop instead of reporting theft. Fair enough. I hung up already knowing.

When I confronted him, the reaction came instantly — wounded outrage mixed with anger.

“How can you accuse me of something like that after I bought you a gift?”

I let it go. Filed it. Closed the door.

What was taking up more space, by then, was his growing suspicion that I was planning to leave. He wasn’t wrong. He started circling it in conversation. Indirect at first — observations about my energy, my engagement, whether I seemed happy, whether he seemed to be enough. Then less indirect. Was I thinking about leaving? Did I still see a future? Was I committed to what we had?

I was diplomatic. I told him he was exhausted and that exhaustion made everything feel more precarious than it was. I told him I was there. I said it with a straight face and a measured tone and the specific internal distance of someone who has already, in every way that matters, left - I had learned from the best.

He escalated to his mother, who sent me emails listing his qualities: he was warm, devoted, brilliant, misunderstood. She wanted me to understand what I had. My first impulse was to tell her to f/cking mind her own business, but I chose diplomacy – I thanked her for her good intentions. Nothing else.

Later, I lay in bed and found myself returning to the image of his mother. The tablet version, the phone version, the landline version. All simultaneous, all slightly different, all completely devoted to the project of him.

But what if that wasn’t the limit of it? What if quantum-Mami wasn’t three versions but thirty, or three hundred — what if she had been quietly multiplying for years, spinning off iterations of herself into every available space, filling every gap he created, ensuring that no matter how far he travelled or how badly things went, there would always be a version of her already waiting at the destination?

The thought had started as funny.

...a woman who could divide without limit, and a man who needed her to, and somewhere in the middle of all that devotion and replication and breathless spinning orbit, me — taking up space in a system that had never actually had room for a third party and had been, from the beginning, quietly working to make that clear.

One afternoon, he announced that he and Helga - his ex-wife - had agreed to spend a long weekend in Kent together, and that I didn’t need to be jealous.

Apart from feeling faintly sorry for the woman’s inability to extract herself from him, I realised I was so indifferent to the whole arrangement that I probably should have faked a reaction. So I did. I told him I didn’t love the idea and pulled a face that suggested mild devastation. Just to keep things moving.

Meanwhile, Sami — the other ex — kept surfacing. On his phone screen, on the desktop, once in a park where they had apparently just run into each other by complete accident.

It was genuinely remarkable. Years of being hollowed out by this man, and not one of them could quite manage to leave.

But was I not in the same situation?

7 weeks left

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The story starts with episode 35. You can read everything here .

Photo by Shawn Day on Unsplash

The story starts with episode 35. You can read everything here .

He returned to London after 3 weeks away. In 10 weeks’ time, everything will have disintegrated.

I told myself that I was going to leave as soon as the things in his life will have calmed down - in part, I was afraid that he’d try to do something really stupid learning that I left just around the time everybody else had left him; in part, I felt that I’d be cruel to live him just them.

At the same time, the quality of my life with him had changed. The calculated meanness, the strange little campaigns, the obsession with whether I left the house, whether I spoke to too many people — all that had faded into the background. Not because he had become kinder, but because his life had started collapsing faster than he could manage it.

Whenever he was home, he’d sit surrounded by papers covered in diagrams, drafting mind maps on how to survive what was happening. Lists of people to contact, lists of institutions. legal options, technical options, countries, deadlines, words circled three times, things underlined aggressively. It looked less like planning and more like negotiating with gravity after already falling off the building.

Still, I caught myself feeling sorry for him.

He had barely slept at all since they sacked him and to both of us it was clear that the lack of sleep was making him more and more irrational and fuelling his paranoia. A clinic eventually assessed him and suggested a CPAP machine. We were both optimistic about it.

The machine arrived two days later. It looked like a coffee maker and it had many tubes, straps, valves, transparent plastic parts. A hose connected the machine to a mask that had to be strapped tightly onto his face while sleeping. The more pieces he unpacked, the more visibly upset he became. Five minutes later, he was insisting it might save his life, then angry again, then quiet...

The thing itself wasn’t funny, but the visual of him sitting on the edge of the bed wearing what looked like a rubber octopus attached to an air pump while trying to preserve some dignity was surreal…weird. The machine forced air into his lungs while he slept. But he couldn’t sleep with it. The second he’d fall asleep, he’d jolt awake, feeling like somebody was strangling him, rip the mask off, sweat, panic, rearrange tubes, try again, repeat. Night after night.

The machine sat on the nightstand between attempts, hissing gently and pumping air into the room, solving nothing.

*

During this time, he was going to great lengths to reconnect with people he hadn’t stayed in touch for a long time with - ‘they knew who he actually was’. I wondered if I was missing something, but the response came quickly - most of them were unwilling to see him, except for an ex, who met him in a restaurant and was glacial upon learning about the increasing pile of problems he was dealing with.

Understanding that nobody was coming to the rescue anytime soon, he started looking for jobs “way below his pay grade”, jobs in various places which didn’t require more than evidence than that he had completed tertiary education, or even a bachelors and he implied that ‘there were ways to circumnavigate the checks’ and I knew what he meant. I remember staring at him, thinking that he was trying to escape a fire by pouring petrol around his feet.

The problem was simple: he couldn’t properly work to rehabilitate himself because the thing destroying his reputation had become the only thing anyone associated him with. His name had detached itself from him and was now moving independently across the internet like something diseased.

This circus where he was getting paraded digitally, locked in a cage that he himself had built was digging hard into anything he had left to survive mentally.

By now, therapy had become fully absurd. The sessions continued every week with the same choreography: him entering the room transformed into a devastated hostage of my emotional brutality, the therapist nodding sympathetically, me sitting there increasingly detached from the entire performance.

He never mentioned the thing swallowing his life whole, not one word about the investigations, the online avalanche, the professional collapse, the panic, the public humiliation. The white elephant sat in the middle of every session while we discussed my alleged emotional coldness and I decided not to mention it either - therapy had become the only remaining place where he could still pretend that he was winning.

*

The yelling also had become ambient. He’d yell...about emails, lawyers, websites, institutions, betrayal, corruption, life being unfair, about me being indifferent — and halfway through I’d realised he wasn’t even talking to me anymore. I could leave the room and he’d continue alone, still making noise somewhere else in the flat like a malfunctioning appliance. I didn’t understand this clearly at the time; I wasn’t psychoanalysing him from above. Mostly, I just felt exhausted and slightly numb from living inside constant instability.

But it was obvious he was deteriorating.

He was a creature who had always operated best in the dark, that was the shape of it. He moved through other people’s structures, took what was useful, and retreated before the lights came on. It had worked for a long time. It had worked, in various configurations, across several countries and a number of institutions. The lights were on now.

One evening he announced excited that things might finally be solved, as he had discovered the “right to be forgotten” legislation and had convinced himself that the solution was simple: obtain legal orders forcing search engines to stop displaying material related to the allegations.

Once the links disappeared – POOF! Life would reset, career restored, reputation repaired, future recovered.

But the core problem remained impossible to solve: he couldn’t erase much because the information had escaped containment. Even if one source vanished, ten others would repost it. His shadow had become self-sustaining.

His attorney was kind and thorough and expensive by the email. Every exchange, every follow-up, every gentle reframing of why the counter-evidence was insufficient arrived as an invoice.

Everything was documented on platforms Google didn’t control, in threads that had been shared and copied and screenshotted across networks he had no reach into. I thought about how the internet works, which is to say how it doesn’t forget. Deciding to sue Google while the evidence of what you did kept accumulating freely everywhere else was a specific kind of extravagance. But he was committed.

Two days later, he asked me to give him a character evidence. There were so many layers to this irony I thought he was joking. But he was not, was adamant and started to almost pressure me to give him something I wouldn’t.

“I’ve known you for only a year, but we’re also married. Any authority will flag the bias immediately.”

And things escalated. First gently, then more abruptly, he starts yelling that nobody from the academia, ex-employers, ex-colleagues, agreed to help him in anyway. He was by now almost yelling at me…

“...you...of all people...need to help me, after everything I’ve done for you…”

“WHAT have you done for me?”

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The story starts with episode 35. You can read everything here .

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You can find the whole story here .

Agnieszka had originally booked the room for forty days. She extended without much deliberation, citing two productive casting days in London versus two largely unproductive years in Warsaw.

Living next to her was its own education. She had no discernible filter and no particular interest in acquiring one. She knocked on my door now — we’d negotiated that early — but beyond that, she moved through the flat with the confidence of someone who had decided that social friction was other people’s problem. She was loud, occasionally outrageous, and possessed the specific emotional detachment of a person who had seen enough of life to find most of it either funny or instructive.

‘She had formed a view on Oliver early on’ and she delivered it one afternoon in the kitchen while I was making coffee, in the tone people use to observe that the weather had turned.

“I don’t trust him.”

I felt something between irritation and relief. Irritation because she had no business having opinions about my relationship. Relief because it had taken me a year to get where she’d arrived in three weeks, and there was something clarifying about watching someone’s unencumbered compass point in the same direction mine had been pointing for months.

She mentioned with the same neutrality she applied to everything that Marcel had visited while I was away, that Oliver had described me, at length, as volatile and unpredictable, that he’d told Marcel he was exhausted but afraid to leave.

Blimey!

Meanwhile, Oliver was still “visiting his mother” on the other side of the world, phoning daily with increasingly empty updates: no progress, no clarity, no resolution.

He had been gone for some time now when we decided, one morning over coffee, to look him up. It was Agnieszka’s idea, technically, though I had been circling it for days. She settled at the kitchen table with her laptop and her cigarette and I went to the bedroom with mine, door open, so we could talk across the corridor.

Until then, I had avoided doing this almost superstitiously. Fragments had reached me through him, through therapy, through panic attacks and wine-fuelled monologues, but I had resisted seeing the full picture directly, partly because I was afraid of discovering something monstrous, partly because I already suspected I would.

I typed his name into Google and before I finished typing, the search engine started completing the sentence. It looked like many people had recently searched the exact same thing.

The academic results — the papers, the institutional profiles, the careful professional architecture he had spent years constructing — were there, but they had been pushed down the page.

Above them: forums, threads, photos of him, archived discussions, blogs, screenshots, arguments, people cross-referencing dates, institutions, names, fragments of projects, fragments of publications, fragments of code, fragments of things I barely understood but immediately recognised emotionally.

It all sounded exactly like him. Reading those pages felt less like discovering new information and more like watching hundreds of strangers independently describe the same person I had been living with.

The details themselves almost stopped mattering after a while because the behavioural fingerprint was so unmistakable. People described how he’d redirect conversations endlessly without answering direct questions, screenshots showed him arguing technicalities instead of denying actions, entire groups were attempting to reconstruct timelines around his activities.

*

I started checking the people posting. Went through the profiles methodically — who they were, what else they’d said, whether there was any pattern that suggested agenda or fabrication. They were clean. Ordinary people. Academics, professionals, students, employees, individuals who had encountered him in various contexts and had eventually found each other online, the way people do when they’re trying to establish whether what happened to them happened to someone else too. It had repeatedly, across years, events and more than one country. All there, reflected back at me from the accounts of people who had never met me and had reached the same conclusions independently.

I wasn’t crazy.

I realised then that one of the reasons Oliver had disturbed me so deeply was because he had forced me into permanent epistemological instability. Every event required reinterpretation. Every memory required checking against his revised versions, but now, for the first time in months, reality outside myself aligned cleanly with my internal experience of him.

From the kitchen, Agnieszka’s voice.

“Noooo! Kurwa!”

Pause….

“Oi, oi, oi! Kurwa! This is insane.”

Footsteps. She was patrolling.

“Matko boska. Do you see this?”

“Yeah...”

“Kurwa mać.” More patrolling. “This is a movie. You have a full movie.”

She appeared in the doorway, laptop in one hand, cigarette in the other, looking at me with the expression of someone who has just watched a building collapse and is genuinely impressed by the engineering of the disaster.

“How did you end up living with him?”

I gave her the short version of the events, she said that I was insane, and in hindsight, I’ll have to admit that my truth sounded insane. Only an idiot enters such a thing without doing some digging. An idiot and myself.

Until then, some part of me had still been entertaining the possibility that I had simply misread him repeatedly. That maybe the relationship itself had become toxic independently of who he actually was. But strangers do not coordinate complex hallucinations around one obscure academic and the volume of material was overwhelming.

She left at the end of her extended stay.

He checked in daily. Brief messages, transactional, the minimum required to maintain the appearance of a relationship he’d temporarily vacated. ‘He had decided to find a new job and to move forward.’ That sounded sensible.

What he was discovering, one silence at a time, was that the professional world he’d operated in for decades ran on reputation and references, and both had been comprehensively withdrawn. Former colleagues weren’t returning calls, ex-supervisors weren’t responding to emails, institutions that had previously been happy to be associated with his name were suddenly unavailable. Nobody wanted to provide references, nobody wanted involvement.

He reported these developments with the indignation of a man who genuinely couldn’t map cause to effect. I listened, I said…things, but I understood what he didn’t seem to: that this was not a temporary setback. What had accumulated online didn’t vanish because he’d left the country, or because he’d instructed himself to move forward, or because he’d decided that life had to continue.

It was going to take him a very long time to climb out of this. Possibly forever.

Listening to him over those calls, I realised that for the first time since I had met him, he was encountering something he could neither manipulate nor charm nor intellectually outmanoeuvre - too many witnesses, too many discussions, too much damage, too much accumulated distrust.

And, underneath the relief, I felt fear started emerging - because if this was what the public version of his life looked like, I began wondering what exactly had happened in all the private parts I had never seen.

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You can find the whole story here .

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You can start from the beginning here .

Life kinda organised itself around routines - Wine in the evenings, tourists in the spare room, him baking things compulsively whenever stressed, me trying to keep the Airbnb permanently occupied, working, preparing for uni.

My policy had been simple from the beginning: charge slightly less than everyone else and never leave the room empty. It worked. The room was almost always booked and, unexpectedly, the business became enjoyable. People arrived from everywhere carrying tiny worlds with them — Australian couples doing Europe in twelve days, Americans permanently enthusiastic about absolutely everything, Korean students moving through London with military precision, Brazilians who somehow made every conversation feel louder and warmer within minutes.

We’d sit with each guest for one evening for an hour or two. Oliver was very good at this version of life. Charming, attentive, theatrical without trying too hard. Guests loved him.

He had also started doing something strange. Every now and then, while we had guests over, he’d suddenly ask me to come into the bedroom because he “needed to discuss something privately.” Once inside, he’d suggest something absurd, I’d find it weird and generally refuse to engage, and then he’d suddenly become over-animated - ‘OMG, why are you reacting like this? Calm down. It was just an idea’.

The first few times I barely noticed it. Then, during one of those evenings, I realised what the guests were actually seeing from the kitchen: him walking me into another room, low voices, then him returning looking patient and conciliatory while making me appeared irritated. He was creating scenes without creating scenes. It was disturbingly clever.

By August, I had secured my university place. I felt exhausted and I booked a flight home for a week. I told him the morning of the departure, while he was dressing to go out. Deliberately late notice.

“I’m flying this afternoon.”

“What? Today?”

“Yes.”

“But…how long?”

“Until I’m back.”

Our Airbnb guest at the time was a Polish actress – Agnieszka - renting the room for over a month. She was loud, chaotic, chain-smoked dramatically out the window and narrated her life as if permanently auditioning for something. I liked her.

My family lived in the same configuration they always had - the same temperatures, the same pressure systems moving through the same rooms. But something was different this visit.

My mother said something on the second afternoon and I felt a recognition that had nothing to do with her. It sounded familiar. The entitlement, the rewriting, the volatility, the way control was exercised through the steady erosion of your confidence in your own account of things. The way love and damage came from the same direction, so that over time you stopped being able to tell them apart.

I had spent months trying to locate Oliver within some diagnostic framework, attaching terms to his behaviour like labels on specimens. But sitting in my mother’s kitchen, the framework dissolved. It wasn’t clinical. It was biographical.

He behaved like her. And I had stayed because it felt like home, as in the specific texture of a place you know so well that its damage has become indistinguishable from its familiarity. I had walked into that flat and recognised something in him I couldn’t name at the time, and I had called it chemistry, or interest, or the particular draw of a complicated person, but it wasn’t any of those things.

I decided, on the flight back, that I was going to leave him.

Meanwhile, from London, he kept sending messages promising change. ‘He’d do better. He understood things now. He wanted peace.’ The apologies themselves felt managerial, shaped to stabilise, rather than express remorse. He also sounded scared. He had felt the ground shift and was repositioning.

*

I arrived back to London into a flat that was immaculate - obsession or paid labour level of clean.. Every surface wiped, every object returned to a position that suggested deliberate thought. He told me he’d spent days on it, that he wanted me to come back to something that felt like respect. The irony…

That evening, the three of us sat in the kitchen — me, him, the actress. Wine open, cake on the table. She was funny and chaotic and said everything she thought, which I had come to appreciate. Oliver was jumpy, he had the energy of someone managing several things at once beneath the surface of a normal conversation.

She was mid-story about something when she detoured.

“Actually — Your cleaner…on Wednesday. In the kitchen. I thought she’d lost her mind, she was slamming things, cursing...”

“More wine?” Oliver said. “This Chilean is really worth your attention.”

“What? No, I’m good. I was saying that your cleaner is next level.”

“Oh... haha. More cake?”

She looked between us, slightly baffled, then let it go.

He asked me to come to the bedroom for a moment. I followed.

“This actress,” he said, “I don’t trust her. I think she should leave tomorrow. What cleaner is she talking about?”

“Look, she’s paid for five more days. She leaves, I lose the rating. Can’t tell her to leave. I like her.”

We went back. The actress finished her story. Oliver refilled everyone’s glass.

Later, after she’d gone to bed, I sat with the image of it. He had hired a cleaner, said nothing, and accepted the credit for days of work he hadn’t done. In the context of everything else — the investigation, the tracking, the therapy sessions — it was almost absurdly minor. And yet it clarified something. The scale didn’t matter to him. The performance was reflexive. He did it because it was available.

Around midnight…he’d been drinking steadily by the time he picked up his phone and turned the screen toward me - Messages. Several of them. I didn’t want to hold his phone so I asked him to read them. He did.

They were threats. Specific enough to suggest that whoever sent them knew what he’d done and wanted him to know that they knew. They referenced the same territory that had been surfacing online for weeks — the work, the data, the projects whose exact nature I still hadn’t looked up directly but whose shape I had assembled from fragments. The people threatening him were not the institution. They were something else. Something less formal, they were “the bad guys".

I asked if he’d been able to trace them.

“Nope. Untraceable.”

I asked if he had a plan. If he was going to do anything, say anything, prove anything.

For fifteen minutes he rotated the same sentence: they had nothing on him, they couldn’t prove anything. I stopped engaging and let him rotate. Outside, there were roughly eighty people on various websites and threads who claimed otherwise, with what appeared to be documentation. Eighty people don’t coordinate a lie. He knew that. I knew that.

I told him I needed air and was going to walk along the river.

“Before you go,” - he set his phone down - “I’ve been thinking we should be more transparent with each other about finances. Pool things. Help each other through this.”

“Sure,” I said. Then I left.

He’d spent months making sure I couldn’t get too stable, too independent, too positioned to leave easily. And now, as the ground was dissolving under him, he wanted transparency.

The next day, I came home and found the bedroom destroyed - suitcase open, clothes everywhere, drawers emptied onto the floor, his passport on the bed. He was on his laptop, frantically looking for reasonably priced plane tickets and said he was going to visit his mother -‘Leaving tonight!’. He looked like someone leaving in a hurry and showed me two new text messages. Short, cold, specific enough to terrify him.

His body had outrun the performance; he was afraid and trying to save his ass. By ten PM that evening, he was fully packed.

“You look like you’re almost fleeing the country after making so much effort to be allowed to live here.”

“No. I just need to see my mother.”

“OK, but leaving at 11PM? Nothing takes off before 6 AM.”

“It’s safer if I leave sooner.”

By 11 PM he left for the Tube carrying far too much luggage for a short family visit. I watched him disappear down the street moving fast, stumbling, trying to drag the suitcase over the pavement. Not leaving. Escaping.

Gone!

An hour later, me and Agnieszka were alone in the flat drinking tea, both of us dancing elegantly around the white elephant in the kitchen. Until she went:

“So… what exactly does he do for a living?”

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Photo by 🇻🇪 Jose G. Ortega Castro 🇲🇽 on Unsplash

You can start from the beginning here .

The Welsh therapist – the one meant to be our permanent therapist - was softer than the German one. Softer voice, softer posture, softer office. Everything in the room seemed designed to prevent conflict from becoming visible. Warm lamp in the corner, tissues placed strategically, a bowl of those wrapped mint sweets nobody under seventy eats voluntarily.

Oliver loved her instantly. In the waiting room he had been normal. Relaxed. We were whispering nonsense about the other couples, trying to guess who was cheating, who had stopped having sex, who already hated each other enough to divide furniture mentally.

Once we entered the therapy room, he changed again. Not dramatically, nothing theatrical. That was the disturbing part. It was subtle enough to almost make me doubt myself. His shoulders lowered, his voice lost energy, his eyes became uncertain. He looked like someone permanently apologising for existing. A pile of BS!

Apparently, ‘he had…spent months trying to….k….keep our relationship…alive while I became increasingly hos…..tile, unstable and emotionally…..abusive. A few mornings earlier, I had caused “another…..frightening scene”’. He spoke carefully, like someone trying not to trigger a dangerous person sitting two feet away.

I interrupted him.

Not loudly. Just:
“That’s not what happened. You yelled at me…”

The therapist immediately raised a hand gently toward me - ‘in therapy, it was important for both partners to feel heard without interruption, especially when discussing painful experiences.’

Oliver nodded slowly, almost embarrassed by my behaviour.

Then he thanked her for creating a “safe environment” where he could finally speak openly because things at home had become “very hard”.

I remember staring at him thinking: this is insane, just fucking insane.

He wasn’t bending reality slightly. He was replacing it completely while sitting next to me.

The rest of the session became procedural. The therapist trying to understand “our dynamic”, Oliver presenting himself as exhausted and frightened, me growing quieter with every minute because I realised that every attempt to correct him only reinforced the image he was constructing.

By the end of the session I already knew what role I had been assigned: cold, aggressive, detached partner.

He had built it within fifty minutes.

Outside, he returned to normal immediately - the change was so quick it almost made me nauseous.

We walked for several minutes without speaking. He looked relieved, lighter somehow. I could feel myself shaking internally, though outwardly I was calm.

Eventually he asked:
“What’s wrong?”

“WTF! You just lied for an hour.”

“You’re emotional now. You know you scare me when you get angry.”

“Don’t start doing that thing where suddenly I’m confused because I react to something insane.”

“You’re overwhelmed. Therapy feels unpleasant at first.”

“You said you were afraid of me.”

“Well… sometimes I am.”

“Oliver, you were screaming naked at me three days ago and almost tried to jump me.”

He turned back toward me with this calm expression, almost concerned.

“I’m sorry, I should have prepared you. Look, therapy is not the most enjoyable thing….and – I’ll give you links to read about it, so you understand the process – they all say that it feels weird and unpleasant before it gets better. Just trust the process, we’re making progress by doing this…and you know how much I love you.”

“But EVERYTHING you said in there was a lie and you very well know that. What progress are you talking about?”

“No, you’re being emotional and confused and it makes sense that you feel like this. It’s gonna be ok.”

I remember looking at his face and realising that he genuinely believed he could stabilise reality simply by speaking calmly enough.

By the time we got home, I was exhausted in a very specific way. Not emotionally. Cognitively. Like my brain had spent too many hours trying to hold two incompatible versions of reality at once.

So I parked it. Not resolved it. Not accepted it. Just moved it somewhere inward where I wouldn’t have to look at it continuously.

A few mornings later, I woke up to shouting.

“FUCK! THEY CAN’T. FUCK!!! FUCK!”

He was already out of bed. Bathroom. Kitchen. Back again. Opening drawers without seeing what was inside them.

Then he called his mother. The conversation was rapid, fragmented, almost breathless, short idioms flying through the flat at machine-gun speed. Every now and then he’d stop talking and listen intensely, pacing barefoot across the kitchen tiles.

Ten minutes later he hangs up and starts telling me the story.

‘They…..his work…had suspended him “temporarily”….privileges, everything…from access to the building….his work email, had been revoked. Locked out over night.’

“They revoked my access while they assess things. FUUUUCK!!”

He then dressed in a hurry and announced he was going to see Marcel, then got back into the bedroom, started pulling drawers, cursing and asked me several times if I had seen his passport.

Like the actual passport?! He was basically in the process of losing his career, while becoming famous for the very wrong reasons and he needed his passport?!

That evening he came home carrying several bottles of wine, drank faster than usual and quickly become not drunk, but chemically flattened. Talking too much, repeating himself, chain smoking, getting up every few minutes to pace around the kitchen.

He’d fall asleep for twenty minutes, then wake suddenly and go drink water. Sometimes stand by the window. Sometimes sit in the kitchen in silence. Sometimes call his mother at absurd hours because “she was awake anyway”.

Later that week, I travelled to Luton with work, came back into the city by train, then cycled for a couple of hours on a very random route — canal, up through Islington, Dalston Kingsland, Hackney, Homerton, across to Victoria Park, home. Nothing unusual, my own route, made up as I went.

I went to turn on my computer - it was too slow. I picked up Oliver’s iPad from the counter to check something quickly. The screen that was already open showed a map.

I had a WTF moment. On the screen, I could see mapped my entire day up to that moment: Luton, the rail line back into St Pancras, the canal route east, the detour north, the straight line home. Every turn I had made, in the order I had made them, rendered in the clean cartography of something that had been watching.

I texted Richie.

‘Wine tonight. Same place as last October. Don’t text back.’

Rich was already there when I arrived. I sat down and told him what I’d seen.

“Show me the phone he gave you.”

I handed it over. He looked at it the way people look at things when they already know what they’re going to find and are just confirming. Turned it over. Opened some settings. Scrolled.

“Yeah.”

“What?”

“There are things running on here that shouldn’t be. Functions that are on that wouldn’t have switched on themselves. He also added software to check everything you do with this phone.”

“What the f….is that even possible?”

“Everything is possible. Was the phone already set up?”

“Yes.”

“And you just used it normally?”

“Yes…”

Another pause.

“And he works in tech?”

“Sort of.”

“What sort of sort of?”

“He did research but… programming too.”

I told him the whole story up to the point where he’s like:

“You’re making this up, this can’t be. Let me google it.”

He googles the name, takes about 5 minutes to scan, then leans back and shouts:

“Fuck me! This is fucking West End calibre!

So you basically married a sociopath who hacks into companies, tracks your movements, accesses your accounts and he’s now being outed on-fucking-line!! This will soon become very dangerous for you. I don’t think you’re safe.”

He told me to get a second phone and keep it away from the flat. I felt embarrassed hearing it.

“A burner? Me? Come on…seriously?”

“It’s for your safety!”

At around eleven, Oliver started calling. Again. Again. Again. Every thirty seconds. Finally I answered.

“Are you alright?”

“Yes.”

“You’ve been out for a very long time.”

“Uhummm...and?”

“I’m worried. I’ll send you an Uber. You’re still in New Cross?”

I had never mentioned going to New Cross that night.

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One evening, he told me something about his time in Germany. A programmer position, years back. There had been tasks, work he had completed that sat in an ambiguous relation to his official remit. He had understood them to be required. Others, it seemed, had understood them differently. He said this as though it were a minor administrative footnote, a bureaucratic misunderstanding from another chapter of his life, now resolved and filed away. I did not ask the questions that were forming, because by that point in the evening I had already exceeded my daily quota for things I was prepared to know. What I was hearing constantly was that he had been doing things which others had labelled as “illegal”, but ‘they were all idiots’.

In the weeks that followed, the shape of his days began to change.

He had always moved through the world with a particular frictionlessness — arriving at conclusions without visible effort, navigating institutions with the ease of someone who understood intuitively which rules applied to him and which were decorative.

That quality, whatever it was, had been part of what made him compelling in the beginning. He seemed to exist at a slight angle to difficulty.

But difficulty had found its angle back.

At work, the colleague who had raised concerns had not gone away. Others had joined her, quietly, in the way that people in institutions signal collective withdrawal — fewer greetings, shorter responses, a certain deliberate neutrality in shared spaces. He had been moved from his office into a larger open room.

It was presented as practical. More space, more interaction. In reality, it meant visibility. No more closing the door. No more drifting through the day unnoticed. No more long, uninterrupted calls.

The Skype calls with his mother, which had previously been conducted in the privacy of his own four walls, were no longer possible in the same way. He had to be present. He had to be seen to be working.

He couldn’t quite function inside that structure.

The first few days, he tried to maintain the same rhythm. Calls, distractions, half-finished tasks. But now there were eyes. Not hostile—just present. Enough to interrupt the flow he relied on.

Sleep went first.

He’d fall asleep quickly, then wake up thirty minutes later, as if something had pulled him back. Sit up, drink water, stare into nothing, then get up and move through the flat. Kitchen, window, back again. Sometimes he’d step outside. Sometimes he’d smoke. Sometimes both.

Then back to bed. Then up again.

It became a loop.

Then something else surfaced.

His name began appearing in places he had not put it. Online, in forums and threads and documents that accumulated with the quiet momentum of things that have been circulating for a while before anyone thinks to mention them. People who encountered his published research were finding, when they looked further, other material attached to his name — older work, affiliated with projects and institutions that raised questions he was not being given the chance to answer before the questions multiplied. It was not a single accusation. It was a pattern becoming visible to people who had the tools to read patterns, and those people were talking to each other, and the conversation was spreading in the way that these things spread when the underlying material is substantial and the subject is findable.

Within days he was known in his department for reasons that had nothing to do with his research. The institution, which had a reputation to maintain and lawyers to consult, informed him that a formal process was underway. They used words like review and assessment and reputational consideration. He translated these for me each evening with diminishing steadiness.

He was in the process of being outed very publicly for illegal stuff he had been doing for years, hoping nobody will find out. Now it was out and it was impossible for him to gaslight the whole internet, like was doing with me.

I did not look anything up. It was a choice I made consciously, once, and then kept making without examining it too closely. Part of it was simple dread — the specific dread of confirming something you have already suspected, which is its own particular exhaustion. But part of it was something less defensible. I had spent months in this flat absorbing his version of every story, watching him edit and curate and replace. The idea that the internet might now be doing, publicly and at scale, what I had been doing privately and in silence — assembling the pieces he preferred to keep separate — felt like something I needed to hold at a distance. I was not ready for what recognition might require of me.

So I watched him instead.

He was sleeping badly, had been for weeks, but it was worsening. He would surface in the night and I would hear him in the kitchen — water, sometimes, or the particular smell that drifted back under the door when it wasn’t water. He’d return and lie still for a short while, then surface again. By morning he was unrested and slow, phoning in to work with reasons that became less specific over time, arriving late, coming home with the energy of someone who had spent the day being careful.

The pills had been adjusted. Then adjusted again. He was still seeing both therapists. His mother was present in the flat in a way that felt newly physical — her face on the tablet propped at the kitchen counter while he made coffee, her voice during dinner, her name in nearly every sentence he spoke about his day. He needed her closer as everything else receded, and she expanded to fill exactly as much space as he required, which was, by then, considerable.

He began to lash out.

Not dramatically, not with the operatic intensity he saved for public spaces. At home it was smaller — a sharpness over nothing, a door closed with slightly too much purpose, a comment delivered with an edge that was gone by the time I looked up. Once a week, approximately, something would catch and flare. He would say something designed to land, and it would land, and then he would become reasonable again and I would rearrange my face and we would continue.

I watched all of this with a divided attention I couldn’t quite reconcile.

One part of me saw a person under genuine pressure — the accumulated weight of an investigation, a reputation publicly complicated, a job becoming untenable, a brain that had always required significant chemical management now requiring more of everything. That part of me registered something close to pity. He had moved through the world so certain of his own frictionlessness, and now the friction was everywhere, and he had no real tools for it.

The other part of me sat very quietly and watched karma doing its methodical, unhurried work.

I didn’t know which part of me to trust.

What I knew was that I was still there. Still sleeping on my side of the bed, still rearranging my face, still choosing, each morning, not to look anything up. Still waiting, without having agreed to wait, for whatever was coming next.

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You can start from the beginning here .

The university applications had produced conditional offers, which meant I was now working through the entry requirements — maths, English, a couple of interviews. Less about knowledge than about logistics and memorised rituals. I was managing it alongside everything else, which was becoming the default mode of operating: keep moving, keep the plates spinning, don’t look down.

Oliver had a particular relationship with frustration. When something didn’t go his way — an argument lost, a refusal, a boundary that held — he’d erupt briefly and then switch. Thirty seconds of rage, then a complete change of subject, mood apparently reset. I’d found it disorienting at first and then recognised it for what it was: not resolution, just storage and retaliation.

Two weeks after the tax account episode, ‘he wanted to talk seriously - he thought we should see a therapist. I had issues that were preventing us from having a healthy relationship. He was worried that my temperament might put us both in danger, because…’

“...that day, in the car... You scared me.”

“But YOU were racing, shouting and hitting the steering wheel. Not me.”

“No, it wasn’t like that.”

“What???”

“You’re doing it again. Always angry. You need help!”

The inversion was clean. Almost elegant. He was describing the Italy incident — his incident, his rage, his hands on the steering wheel — as something I had done.

He applied for couples therapy. We were put on a waiting list for several weeks.

The therapist was an older German woman. Very polite, very procedural. Her hair was architecturally ambitious — it recalled Tutankhamun or a mid-century communist official’s wife and had the quality of a helmet, solid and load-bearing, which meant that when she wanted to change her angle of attention she’d rotate her entire torso rather than simply turn her head. A full-body pivot. Every time. I found this quietly fascinating and it gave me something to observe during the parts of the sessions that were otherwise vomit-inducing.

In the waiting room before the first session, Oliver was in good form. We made up backstories for the other couples — how they’d arrived here, how much longer they had before calling it — and giggled in the low, conspiratorial way that reminded me of the version of us that had existed before everything calcified. It was almost companionable. I noted that, and filed it.

Then we were called in.

He walked through the door and became someone I didn’t recognise.

Everything changed. His posture folded slightly forward, his hands moved with a kind of confused, searching energy, as if he’d lost something and wasn’t sure where to begin looking. His gaze went somewhere unfocused. His face arranged itself into an expression of such exhausted, layered grief that I had to concentrate to keep my own face neutral. When he spoke, the words came out in pieces.

“...and…it is h….ard.”

‘Every….thing was hard. He was experiencing im….mense sad….sadness. He was….terribly afraid that he...was going to lose me and…wh….what was h…he gonna do without….me? He was….desperate...”

The therapist leaned toward him with the careful attention of someone handling something that might break.

I watched. This new act?

I understood immediately that nothing he said in this room was going to be real. He hadn’t come to fix anything. He’d come to perform. What I couldn’t quite locate was the edge of my own astonishment, because he was doing this in front of me. Not behind my back. Right there, in a room I was also sitting in, with full knowledge that I could see every second of it.

When she turned to me, her expression had already shifted.

“You seem very detached. Do you understand what you’ve put him through?”

I hadn’t opened my mouth yet.

I almost admired it. As an opening move, it was close to perfect — establish the devastated victim, establish the cold unfeeling partner, do it before the partner has said a single word. The rest of the session proceeded on those terms. She returned, several times and with genuine concern, to the question of whether I had any empathy at all.

I answered her questions. I didn’t perform anything. I thought about what it would mean to match his register, to produce my own version of the wounded fragility he was offering the room, and decided I wasn’t able to do it and wouldn’t if I could.

We left. He walked out of the room with the same slow exhaustion he’d walked in with, and then, somewhere between the therapy door and the corridor, he reassembled. By the time we reached the street he was himself again — slightly distracted, thinking about what to eat, already elsewhere.

I didn’t challenge him about it. I was too busy with a question that had started in that room and didn’t have an obvious answer: how much of any of this was real to him? Not to me, not to the therapist, not to anyone he was performing for — but to himself. Did he know when he was doing it? Was there a version of him underneath, or was it performance all the way down?

The second assessment session was a rerun. Oliver arriving broken, the therapist offering him careful compassion, me sitting across from both of them wondering if he was able to keep the act throughout the entire session.

Several days later, he circled back to a theme that he seemed to enjoy bringing about – ‘he wasn’t comfortable with me leaving the house’. It was beginning to get on my nerves. He thought that ‘I had enough on my plate - the airbnb business, studying for my exams, the theatre shows, I had things to cook, things to clean, a garden...why did I need to leave the house?”

“Look…..I don’t know much about your culture, but this is Europe...you’re making me vomit.”

“No! I get stressed when you’re out...something might happen to you.”

“Then talk to your therapist...your mother. Don’t make me hear that shit again! You’re embarassing yourself.”

He was nice and sweet on many occasions, but I never heard him worrying about anyone.

I biked to the Thames and sat on a bench facing the water. I put my headphones in. Let YouTube pick something. It gave me love songs. One after another. Earnest, overproduced, entirely misplaced. There’s something unintentionally funny about algorithms insisting on romance at the wrong time. Like a waiter bringing dessert to the wrong table and refusing to take it back.

I wondered, briefly, whether there were songs about this - the process of realising something is fundamentally off, and deciding what to do with that information. YouTube didn’t have a category for it. It kept offering love.

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The following days were quiet; he oscillated between excited and tense - two months left on his visa. Timing mattered, the certificate needed to arrive, processes needed to start.

A part of me understood him completely. I knew what it meant to need a country to say ‘yes’….kind of. The difference was that I never needed one to. He did. That imbalance sat between us, unspoken but active.

He felt he needed a bigger dose, as he was too stressed about his documents.

“But you’re already talking to you mom non-stop. Do you think you need more chemicals?”

“It’s not like that. You don’t understand.”

Maybe I didn’t...fully.

We’d have wine almost every night and he’d decide to smoke…’that thing’ to take the edge off. I realised that there was no way of me convincing him to cut down on chemicals, so I decided to let him be. But by now, he was a fully responsible adult, on a cocktail of online violence he was watching compulsively, alcohol, antidepressants, hashish, mami calls, you name it...

“Do you need to watch that much violence online? It makes you even more nervous...”

“No, it relaxes me.”

I was keen on making things right for me. One day, I suggested.

“Things aren’t working for me financially. We should use the spare part of the flat for Airbnb. I’ll handle everything,”

He frowned.

“The contract is in my name. The money should come to me. I’ll send you what you need.”

“No. I don’t need you to manage me.”

“But the contract on this flat is on my name, so the money should be mine.”

“You have a decent salary already. I don’t…these days.”

We went back and forth. Same arguments, different wording. Ownership, control, entitlement disguised as practicality.

At some point, I stopped trying to keep it neutral.

“If I change my mind, you might have a problem keeping this flat.”

He understood immediately and the conversation ended. He agreed.

We set it up. Listings, photos, bookings. Within a week, we had our first guests. Functional. Efficient. Transactional.

At night, I’d think about the shift - how easily I had moved from trying to understand him to negotiating with him. About how quickly principles adjust when the environment doesn’t support them. Part of me was fine with it. Practical. Necessary.

Part of me wasn’t, because I knew this wasn’t a system you win, not long term. If you stay principled, you lose ground. If you adapt, you lose something else.

And somewhere in between, you start recognising the rules not because you agree with them — but because you’re already playing.

Nothing changed. We just kept moving, on terms that changed quietly, continuously, without ever being agreed on. And somehow, that felt more definitive than any argument.

+++

I started writing for a living in my early twenties by accident. I’d applied for a job and wrote the kind of cover letter that HR guidelines would consider catastrophically misjudged — entirely myself, no performance of bland competence. A HR woman called me in, not to offer the job but to tell me I should be writing for a living, and then introduced me to people who could make that happen. It became a quiet constant in my life. Reliable. Useful. Hidden. Most of my friends didn’t know I wrote; most of them didn’t read, anyway. Oliver didn’t need to know either.

By then, he’d made clear he wanted to know everything about my finances and equally clear he wanted me dependent on him. He’d argued I didn’t need the Airbnb income — ‘he was happy to support me…’.

I wasn’t interested in learning more about the ways he could ‘support’ me, as I had seen enough already. I needed to diversify, grow, develop.

I asked him to think about what he believed I could do for a second business, knowing precisely what that exercise would produce. He pointed me toward jobs listings that required things I demonstrably didn’t have, but the idea of me building something of my own was taboo!

After Sardinia, I’d changed in other ways too. Less patient, less accommodating, less willing to cushion things. I knew I had reasons. I also knew it had happened fast enough to be disorienting for him.

One Friday afternoon, he came home agitated and suggested quickly that he wanted me to move out.

(At times – in moments like that, for instance – I could have sworn that the connection between his brain and the rest of whatever he was was severed.)

I almost looked up. It had come from nowhere and landed like something said to fill a room. But he continued: ‘This wasn’t working! He couldn’t stay with someone if there was no sex! He’d made a mistake! He was unhappy! He was this, he was that, he was….’

I let him be the soundtrack to me folding clothes, because I just hate folding clothes and he was a distraction from my textured misery.

He then baked a cake and there was something surreal about it — the timing, the precision. He moved around the kitchen with quiet irritation, measuring, mixing, controlling variables.

Was he gonna pee in my shoes next?

We ate the cake later - it was excellent. He was still sour.

After complimenting him for his obvious baking skills, I asked in passing about the marriage certificate, whether it had arrived, whether he had checked the post, his emails and added that

“It will come eventually. Though, if I move out, that goes with me.”

The next morning’s breakfast was a three-person event: me, him, and a screen propped against a mug. She was present in a way that didn’t feel mediated. They discussed everything— his work, his decisions, small logistics that somehow required consultation. At some point, they made a salad together, step by step, across distance.

There was something undeniably human in it. Devotion, continuity and also a dependency that didn’t leave room for anything — or anyone — else. Sweet and sick, in equal measure, and none of my business.

Later, I went out to see friends. On my way out, he offered to look over my tax statements. I told him I was good.

I was at a bar when a text came through. A code... I assumed spam and ignored it. Two minutes later, a message from him: please give me the code.

He’d gone into my online tax account.

I told him to sign out.

An hour later, another code. I repeated myself, more directly this time. Then a third. I called him and said, as clearly as I could manage, that I hadn’t asked him to do this and I wanted him to stop.

“Ok, ok. I’ll stop.”

The fourth text came five minutes later. I was already heading home.

He was at my computer when I walked in at ten. Not trying to look like he wasn’t. He pointed at the screen and began explaining something about a potential error in my accounts, as if the previous six hours hadn’t happened. Ended up telling me that I didn’t have to be so melodramatic about him helping.

I went to bed and said nothing else.

The following evening, I came home earlier than usual to see him doing the same thing. He explained that he’d arranged for the verification codes to come by email rather than text. That way he wouldn’t need to ask me to forward them. He’d identified the friction in the system and removed it.

I was realising that something has moved into a new category.

The next morning, I changed every password. I deleted the decoy document I’d been keeping on the desktop — Richie, a tech-minded friend who’d clocked what was happening months earlier, had taught me to leave something visible and innocuous while keeping everything I didn’t want him to have access to ‘in the cloud’ and access it only from outside the house. I hadn’t thought I’d need the full version of that advice this quickly.

Oliver didn’t mention the passwords. Didn’t ask why the document had gone. He moved on, smoothly, to mocking me for several days about how little I appeared to have across my two UK accounts. He said, without much preamble, that I needed to show him everything if he was going to have any respect for me.

“But you have access...our shared account.” I said. The one he’d made efforts to keep away from me – ironically.

He still insisted that I had to show him everything, because ‘things didn’t add up’.

But they did. Just not in a way he could map.

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You can start from the beginning here .

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We hit the road and he looked and felt like he was boiling - braking a bit too sharply, pouting, looking at me like I had just eaten his favourite toy…

“I want the money back!”

“The money?”

“For the holiday.”

“You offered this holiday as a gift.”

“I never said that. I need the money back!”

He slapped the steering wheel several times while shouting. I was afraid - the thought of the car overturning or hitting the panels on the side of the road was keeping me alert. I hoped he’d calm down, but he continued shouting, punching the steering wheel. I was sure he’d cause the airbags to hit him in the face.

We were running with 140 km/hour.

“Stop the car!”

“No!”

He accelerated instead, then, abruptly, pulled over.

“I’ll call the police,” I said. “They can escort me somewhere safe.”

He turned, genuinely startled.

“You can’t call the police. I didn’t mean it.”

Fifteen minutes later he was almost normal again. Not quite the same, but close enough.

Later, as if picking up something unfinished, he decided that my refusal to be intimate with him had destroyed his erections, hence….basically, I was ruining him and I was cruel and I was….sure I wasn’t gonna hear the end of it unless I gave him something that always worked.

“Why don’t you just fuck off for now?”

Oliver had tantrums and ways of making people surrender to his will, but couldn’t process being told to fuck off. His mind would simply write it off - stop halfway through whatever he was shouting about and start talking about something completely different, because the “fuck off” moment ‘simply didn’t happen’. He had to rewrite the entire scene, so that it worked for him – rewriting was his trademark.

“Do you wanna have wine?” he asked.

“Sure…later, once we’re done driving for the day.”

Ten minutes later, a road sign appeared on the left - ‘Onani, 3 km’. I pointed.

“They’ll give you residence here in no time.”

For the remaining days of the holiday, he was nice. Not performatively nice—just…smooth. As if nothing had happened.

One afternoon, we were in Oristano, sitting outside a café, drinking coffee in the kind of heat that presses everything down into silence. The streets were empty. No cars, no footsteps, no urgency. He was talking about his job — something about...whatever — and I was there, listening just enough to respond if needed.

“We’re going to be so happy once we get married.”

“Because…what changes then?”

He smiled, indulgent.

“Don’t be like that. You know I love you. This is not about a bloody visa.”

Inside, the owner had vinyl playing — sounding like the golden years of Cinecittà. Italian voices drifted out into the heat, theatrical and distant, like ghosts rehearsing something important. Then, abruptly, English. Guy Lombardo.

‘Enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think.’

The line repeated. Light, almost playful. By the end of the song my face had changed completely. He noticed.

“You ok?”

I nodded. I wasn’t.

Flying back home was uneventful. We had a stop-over in Berlin, he reminisced a bit about the happy days of being married to Helga and called her to brag about how wonderful our holiday had been. I listened without listening.

Then my phone started to play up.

“I’ll buy you a new phone, as a gift.”

Hell! Three days earlier, he had nearly killed us on the freeway, trying to rewrite the terms of another “gift.”

“No. Keep your gifts.”

He went quiet. Not offended — just paused, recalibrating, then bounced back:

“But what a lovely holiday this has been!”

I didn’t engage for the rest of the flight.

The next morning, he placed an iPhone on the table.

“I know you don’t want me to buy you one. This is my old one. It works. You need a phone.”

“I told you how I feel about your gifts.”

“Please.”

I said no again. Ten minutes later, he asked again. Same tone, same argument. Not pushy — persistent. Eventually, I said yes - refusing it required more energy than accepting it.

The ceremony was approaching. I told him I didn’t want a restaurant after, as I didn’t want for him to pay the bill then suffocate me in my sleep. I wasn’t planning on letting that go any time soon. He said I was being mean.

We agreed on four witnesses — two of mine, two of his.

His, didn’t make it. So predictable! No drama, no explanation that made sense. I inferred that he hadn’t in fact even told anyone about this, as he was still embarrassed with me, which he denied, by telling me that he had a black friend...

I looked at him and that sentence - fully formed, perfectly useless.

Nothing ceremonious about the ceremony. Two of my friends came from Manchester, the others from west London. We signed the papers, shook hands with the registrar, stepped outside. That was it.

On the way back, he was visibly lighter. Excited, but relieved. It showed in his driving.

At home, I told him to go buy drinks, cake — something to acknowledge the people who had shown up, but he was ‘tired’ and ‘didn’t care’.

“Those people travelled for you,” I replied. “They didn’t owe you anything. Just go, buy something, and show up. Fake it if you need to.”

He goes, returns, we go to the park, but he made sure to tell everyone how exhausted he was.

“But you’ve been home for two days,” one of my friends said, casually. “Are you alright?”

The other friend added, lightly,

“Just don’t drive anywhere. We saw you in action earlier..”

He laughed briefly then suddenly stood up, offered to give people a lift to the underground, they declined politely and off he went - mission accomplished, no need to be nice anymore.

We stayed a while longer. The air softened. At some point, my friends left too.

I remained on the bench.

And the thought came, fully formed:

‘This was a mistake. He lied, shifted, had cost me work, time, energy, and was still negotiating terms as if everything were provisional. And I was an idiot. No! Actually, I had been an idiot up to that point. Not anymore.’

I knew that I could gen an annulment within the first 48 hours after the deed. I text the witnesses to let them know that I’m calling the thing off and I march home fuming. But home?….was it really a home?

I opened the door harder than necessary.

“This was a mistake, I don’t want this. I’ll get it annulled tomorrow.”

He had been asleep and now he was sitting up, disoriented, learning for the first time that I also had what looked like a second, more abrasive personality.

“No,” he said. “You’re confused. It’s normal. Marriage is scary. I had doubts too.”

“What the hell did YOU have doubts about???”

“Let’s go out,” he said. “I’ll buy you something.”

“Another gift?!”

We went out anyway. Walked without direction.

I calmed down, realising that I was indeed in rare form and maybe I was a bit confused, maybe I was overreacting. Maybe this was what it looked like when something became real. Maybe I was, as he kept suggesting, confused.

We went back home.

“Do you want to cuddle?” Do you want to make love?”

God help me!!

I throw my head back in disbelief. I can’t can’t look at him, I’m gonna get sick.

“I’ll go out. Taking your bike. Don’t wait up.”

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