Signs Along The Way

I’ve written a lot about what happened in the relationship I was in—the one that exploded into a web of lies, manipulation, and psychological and emotional abuse six days after my dad died.

I’ve written about the war I didn’t know I was fighting. The poison he brought to the party. How much I loved him and his dogs. The pain of being replaced so quickly. The expensive gifts. The moment of discovery.

All of that writing helped me process the what the fuck happened and how will I come out of the other side forged by the fire instead of destroyed.

What I haven’t really talked about are the clues he dropped along the way—while we were building something I thought was real and meaningful, and he had scheduled date nights with other women from the very beginning.

The first couple of months after discovery were brutal. Physical pain. Missing him like crazy. Sobbing until my body gave out. And the endless mental sorting—replaying memory after memory, trying to determine what was real and what wasn’t from the very beginning.

As I sifted through those memories, a few moments stood out.

The first was early on, during what he called “courting.” We had gone to a local event together and afterward took a walk on the docks. It was a beautiful night. I really enjoyed his company. Honestly, I was smitten. We’d had a couple of drinks when he said he had to pee. He walked to the edge of the dock, and while he did, he kept pointing up at the sky.

“Hey, look at that. Isn’t it interesting?”

Simple statements meant to redirect my attention from what he was actually doing.

And mostly, it worked.

When he finished, he said something about how I was getting to know him better. I laughed, thinking he meant because of bodily functions. Maybe that’s all he meant. But looking back now, the act of pointing me toward something else while he did something different is exactly who I later came to know him to be.

Around that same time, he said something he repeated multiple times while we were together—almost casually—that once I really got to know him, I wouldn’t like him.

I heard it then as humility. Or self-deprecation. Something vulnerable, even endearing.

Now I recognize it as something else entirely: advance notice.

I didn’t know it then, but moments like that would begin to stack—small, ordinary-seeming markers I wouldn’t recognize as directional until much later.

When we became physically intimate—he told me multiple times that he didn’t want me to mistake his intentions.

He said he wanted me to know he saw a future with me. That he didn’t want what we were building to be “just about sex.”

I received it as care. As clarity. As someone trying to do the right thing.

Looking back now, I understand it differently—not as reassurance, but as narrative-setting.

Another stone placed carefully on the path.

Another memory surfaced from early in the relationship while we were watching Bruce Springsteen's Western Stars. He wanted to watch it with me so I "could get to know him better."

There’s a song in it called Stones, about the accumulation of lies and the guilt in a relationship—small untruths growing into something heavy and destructive. “Stones in my mouth.” A field eventually covered. A man confronting his own deceit while his partner is still present, but already estranged.

We talked about that song while we watched it. He even asked me what I thought Bruce’s marriage must be like. I was surprised by the question, I didn't even totally understand what the song was about at the time.

All the while, his own mouth was already full of stones—everything he had withheld from me by then and the stories he had spun.

We did a lot with my kids. I thought it meant something. I thought it represented what we were building. I remember the first time he met them. He came over for dinner. We played games. It was easy. Fun. They liked him.

At some point that evening, motorcycles came up. So did a comment about “secret families.” He said something about how you can’t trust motorcycle guys. I laughed it off. I even joked that I wanted a secret family.

I didn’t know then that secret family was code for double life.

The last memory I’ll share happened months later—after I believed we had been exclusive for a long time. We were sitting in his living room. I had just returned from being away for a few days leading a professional development seminar. We were talking when the subject of kinks came up. I asked him if he had any.

“No,” he said calmly. “I’m a pretty conservative guy.”

I suppose my question now is this:

Is maintaining secret lives—carefully compartmentalized, meticulously performed—while whispering words of love and safety into the head and heart of one woman not a kink?

He framed himself as conservative.

What I see now is something else entirely: an extreme form of compartmentalization, sustained by performance.

And yes—there is a charge in that.

Control. Duplication. The thrill of being known here and hidden there.

Because it certainly wasn’t intimacy.

There are many memories like these—words spoken, songs chosen, things emphasized, things conspicuously left unsaid.

Looking back, I see them for what they were: cairns. Quiet placements. Small stacks of stone left along the path, meant to guide someone who knows how to read the land.

I just didn’t know it then.