Chapter 13
Callum
I didn’t sleep.
I didn’t even come close.
Every time I shut my eyes, I saw Ginny’s face right before she walked away from me, quiet, careful, heartbroken. And worse than the heartbreak was the way she’d looked like she was trying to protect herself. From me.
The guilt sat in my chest like a stone. Heavy. Solid. Unavoidable.
But underneath the guilt was something else. Something I didn’t want to name, but couldn’t ignore anymore: confusion. Because the more I replayed the argument, the more I replayed the words I’d said, the ones I thought were protecting her, the more they cracked apart.
Nothing about Ashley’s story lined up.
Ginny saw it faster than I did. And I hated that she had to see it at all.
Around four in the morning, after tossing and turning on the couch and staring at the ceiling until my eyes burned, I sat up and pressed the heels of my palms into my forehead.
Ashley’s “ex” was supposed to be unhinged. Obsessed with her. Dangerous.
So why hadn’t she done anything meaningful to protect herself?
Why were the texts always vague?
Why was the “police report” picture cropped at the edges?
Why did the timeline shift every time she told it?
And why the hell did she “need” me specifically?
The more I thought, the louder the inconsistencies became, until I couldn’t pretend to ignore them anymore. And I couldn’t ask Ashley for answers, not without getting sucked deeper into whatever whirlpool she was creating.
I needed the truth.
But not from her.
I needed it from the only other person involved.
Greg.
I didn’t know his last name, but Ashley had mentioned him enough times, dramatically, vaguely, strategically, that I had breadcrumbs. A workplace, “somewhere in the medical tech field.” Mutual friends “from the gym.” A city.
It was something.
And I was desperate enough to use it.
· · ─ ·?· ─ · ·
By nine in the morning, I was sitting in my car in the parking lot of a medical supply distribution center, staring at the building like it was going to swallow me whole.
I’d found him online from a tagged photo from an old gym event, and then found his LinkedIn profile which seemed to match the clues that Ashley had given me.
I had no plan, just adrenaline and dread.
Ginny was right. And I needed to know how right.
I got out of the car before I had time to think better of it.
Inside the lobby, a receptionist led me to a small break room when I asked for Greg and said it was about “a personal matter.” That lie felt heavy on my tongue.
A minute later, a guy walked in. He was tall and fit, probably in his late twenties, maybe early thirties. Clean-cut but tired-looking.
He paused when he saw me. “Can I help you?”
“Are you Greg Mitchell?”
He nodded, cautious. “Yeah.”
I swallowed. “I’m Callum. I… I am having issues with someone you used to be with.”
Confusion flashed in his eyes. “Who?”
“Ashley.”
I barely got the name out before something in his expression snapped into place, not shock, not fear.
Exasperation. Like a man who’d been waiting for a shoe to drop.
He dragged a hand down his face. “Christ. She’s doing it again, isn’t she?”
It felt like the floor shifted. “Doing what?”
He gave a humorless laugh. “Let me guess, she told you I’m stalking her.”
My mouth went dry. “She said you were showing up places. Messaging her from new numbers. That she filed reports.”
“Yeah,” he said flatly. “She told everyone that.”
“That’s not… true?”
He looked at me with a mixture of sympathy and irritation I didn’t know what to do with. “Not even close.”
He gestured for me to sit, and I followed numbly. He leaned against a counter, arms crossed.
“Look,” he said, “I don’t know what she told you, but the reality is a hell of a lot different.”
I braced myself.
“I broke up with her a while ago,” he said simply. “Not the other way around. And she didn’t take it well.”
My throat tightened. “She said you were controlling.”
He snorted and shook his head. “She said I was obsessed. Then she started pretending I was still texting her. She showed people screenshots, except they were edited. Chopped up. Missing timestamps. Or she’d send herself messages and claim they were me.”
My heart thudded painfully. “Edited?”
“Yeah. She’s done it before.”
He looked at me, something almost apologetic in his eyes.
“She’s done it to more than one person.”
I swallowed, hard. “She told me she was scared of you.”
“Yeah,” he said again, bitterness softening into resignation. “She told me she was scared of her neighbor once too. Said he was watching her. Then she decided it was the mailman. Then her coworker. Then me. It’s a cycle.”
My pulse rang in my ears.
“She said she filed police reports,” I managed.
Greg’s eyebrows lifted. “Let me guess, one was conveniently ‘still being processed’ and the other she couldn’t show you because it had ‘personal details’? Or how about that she was too scared that they wouldn’t believe her?”
The blood drained from my face.
He didn’t need my answer. He already knew it.
“She’s lying to you,” he said quietly, not cruel, just certain. “The same way she lied to me.”
My stomach twisted. Shame. Anger. Fear. All tangled.
“Why would she—”
“To keep you close,” he said. “To feel protected. To feel important. It’s all manipulation to get what she wants.”
My mind went white with noise.
Everything Ashley had said to me flickered through my head like a bad movie.
I think he’s watching me again.
I don’t know who else to trust.
You’re the only person who gets it.
I’d believed her. Worse, I’d rearranged my life around her. I’d held secrets from Ginny because of her.
I felt sick.
Greg watched me, then sighed and reached for his phone. “Look, I’m not trying to ruin your day. But you might want to see this.”
He tapped something, then held the screen out to me.
A message thread. Ashley’s name at the top, dated from months after they broke up.
And the messages - God. The messages were almost identical to the ones she’d sent me last week.
I’m scared.
I think he’s back.
Please, you’re the only one who understands me.
The same cadence. The same emotional hooks. The same manipulative pull.
My stomach dropped so sharply I had to grip the edge of the table.
Greg lowered the phone. “She didn’t hurt me, not physically. But she messed with my head for a long time. And she’ll keep doing it to other people if they let her.”
“She told me…” My voice cracked. “She said she needed help.”
“She likes being rescued,” he said. “And she knows exactly how to make someone feel like the only one who can do it.”
My chest tightened painfully.
Because I had believed that. I had fallen for every word. And Ginny, my wife, was the one who’d suffered for it.
“I’m sorry,” Greg said softly, and it was the worst part, he meant it. “I know this is probably the last thing you expected when you walked in here.”
I shook my head. I couldn’t speak.
I couldn’t think.
I felt like a fool.
A used fool.
And underneath the humiliation was something colder, sharper: rage.
Not at Ashley. At myself.
Because while I’d been trying to “protect” someone who didn’t need protecting, I’d been hurting the person who did.
I stood on unsteady legs. “Thank you,” I managed.
“Be careful,” Greg said. “She doesn’t like being cut off.”
The warning hit me like a second blow.
I nodded once, barely, and walked out.
The moment the door closed behind me, the air felt too thin. The parking lot spun, and my hands wouldn’t stop shaking.
Because now I knew.
Ashley hadn’t been scared. She hadn’t been hunted. She hadn’t been reaching out for safety or sanity.
She’d been lying from the beginning.
Manipulating me, pulling me into a familiar pattern, one I should’ve seen sooner, and I’d let her. Worse, I’d let it cost me trust with Ginny.
I got into my car, shut the door, and sat there, breathing hard, heartbeat punching against my ribs.
I needed more answers, all of them. Every single one. Not because they would change anything, but because my mind wouldn’t let it go. If Ashley lied about Greg, if she fabricated the fear, the danger, the entire narrative, then I had been a fool on a scale I wasn’t ready to face.
I had to verify the police report.
And for the first time since this entire nightmare started, I didn’t fear the truth. I feared how much worse it might be.
I didn’t start the car right away.
I couldn’t. Even knowing my next steps, my hands were shaking too badly, and every breath felt thin, scraped raw. The lot around me was quiet, just a few trees, the distant hum of a ventilation unit, the muted sounds of people on lunch break, but inside the car it felt suffocating.
Greg’s words kept circling my mind like they were carved there.
I squeezed the steering wheel so hard my knuckles whitened.
I had been manipulated in a way that should have been obvious, and somehow I had missed it.
I had spent nights worrying about her, talked her through panic spirals, and rearranged my life around a threat that wasn’t even real.
All the while, I had been pulling away from Ginny, convincing myself I was protecting her from the stress.
I felt sick.
I forced myself to breathe evenly, steadying my pulse, then finally turned the engine on and drove a few streets away to a quiet strip mall. I parked near the end of the lot where no one would overhear me.
My hands hovered over my phone for a long moment before I opened it.
After I had told her over and over again that she needed to go to the police, she had eventually sent me a photo of a document with the case number and a detective’s first and last name.
I pulled up the screenshot she’d sent.
The image itself had always bothered me, but I’d ignored it. The edges were cropped strangely. The text blurry. The date missing.
I swallowed hard and opened my browser.
Maybe she’d spelled the detective’s name wrong. Maybe she’d given me the wrong district. Maybe there was a reasonable explanation.
I searched the name exactly as she’d sent it.
No results.
I tried variations.
Nothing.
My stomach tightened, but I forced myself not to jump to conclusions. Mistakes happen. People panic. People misremember.
I tried adding “detective,” “department,” even the precinct number she claimed to have filed with.
Still nothing.
My mouth went dry.
I sat there staring at the screen like if I blinked, the information would suddenly appear. Like maybe the universe just hadn’t loaded the truth yet.
But it didn’t come.
I needed something official. Verification from a real person.
I opened the keypad and dialed the non-emergency police line. My thumb hovered over the call button for a long time before I finally pressed it.
The call connected. A receptionist answered with a polite, professional greeting.
“Hi,” I said, and my voice sounded thin, shaky. “I… I was hoping to verify a case number. I’m not involved directly, but someone shared a screenshot with me, and I just want to confirm it's real.”
“Okay,” she said patiently. “What’s the number?”
I read it off. Slowly. Carefully.
“Can you repeat that?” she asked after a pause.
I repeated it exactly.
More typing. More clicking.
“Do you have the name of the reporting victim?”
I gave her Ashley’s full name. Every letter felt heavy.
Another long pause. I could hear the faint hum of the office behind her, the clacking of keyboards, the muffled conversations.
Then: “I’m sorry,” she said gently, “but we don’t have anything under that case number.”
My heart dropped. “Is there maybe… a processing delay? Or a different system—”
“No,” she said, still calm but firm. “It would at least appear in our pending reports, even if incomplete.”
I closed my eyes.
“What about the detective she said was assigned? The form says Detective Samson.”
“We don’t have anyone by that name in our district,” she said. “I can check another precinct if you’d like?”
“No,” I whispered. “That’s okay. Thank you.”
“Are you safe?” she asked suddenly, her tone changing. “Is the person who gave you the screenshot threatening you in any way?”
The words hit harder than they should have.
“No,” I said quickly. “No, nothing like that. I’m fine.”
“If that changes,” she said gently, “you can call us back.”
“I will. Thanks.”
I hung up.
Then I just sat there.
Time seemed to stall around me. My hands stayed locked around the phone while my mind struggled to catch up to what I’d just heard.
Because the truth was absolute now.
There was no report, no detective, no stalker.
Ashley had lied.
About everything.
A cold, hollow feeling spread through my chest, creeping up my throat until I felt like I might choke on it.
I had spent nights reassuring her. I had jumped every time my phone buzzed. I had comforted her through fake panic attacks. I had distanced myself from my wife to “protect” her from stress.
All of it for nothing.
No, worse than nothing.
For manipulation. For control. For attention.
And I had fallen for it like a complete idiot.
I pressed my palms to my eyes, trying to breathe, but the air felt too thick. My pulse thundered in my ears.
Ginny had been right, and she had seen through the lies the moment she heard them. And I had stood there in our living room defending someone who had fabricated a crisis.
I had told Ginny she didn’t need to know, that I didn’t want to stress her.
And she had looked at me like I was the one hurting her. Because I was, I was hurting her.
I leaned back in the seat, staring at the roof of the car. The guilt sat in my lungs like smoke.
I had been manipulated by an ex who knew exactly which emotional switches to hit, but Ginny, my wife, was the one who paid for it.
She was the one left in the dark, the one wondering why I flinched at my phone, the one who had to see me sneaking around in the name of “helping” someone else while she was dealing with her health issue.
My hands shook as I rested them on the steering wheel.
I had to tell her. I had to fix this. I had to make sure Ashley never had access to me, or my life, ever again.
But just the thought of facing Ginny made my throat tighten.
Because how could I look her in the eye and explain that the reason I’d been distant, secretive, withdrawn… was because I’d been tricked like this? How did I admit that I let someone else’s crisis, fake or not, take priority over the woman I loved? Especially when I was completely fooled.
The shame was almost physical.
I breathed through it. One slow inhale. One slow exhale. Just enough to keep the panic from cresting.
Then I turned the key in the ignition.
The drive home blurred, just streetlights, the dull hum of the engine, and the steady beat of my own self-loathing.
I wasn’t just ashamed.
I was terrified.
Terrified of what this would do to us, of how deeply I’d let things go, of facing the truth with her.
But I had no choice anymore.
The truth wasn’t just undeniable.
It was waiting for me at home.
And as I was trapped in my own head, dreading the reckoning, I didn’t even hear my phone buzzing beside me.