Page 7 of The Love Thief

Barry has been flirting with me forever, and the truth is I was jealous of all the good things that were happening to you. I should have been a better friend and told you what he was doing.

When he invited me over that night, I had no idea he was going to seduce me.

He texted and asked me to stop by to help him plan a surprise for you.

When I got there, he opened a bottle of wine and then showed me some lingerie he had bought for you and asked me to try it on so he could see what it looked like.

It was a bit of a stretch because you know how much bigger I am than you.

But he insisted and, well, with several glasses of wine in me on an empty stomach, I wasn’t thinking straight. And then things got out of control.

I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me. Please forgive me. I can’t imagine my life without you.

Love, Carly

I literally felt like I was going to throw up in my mouth, which would have been a nightmare with my jaw wired shut. I closed my eyes and willed my stomach to settle down.

How did I not see this coming? From the day we met, I suspected Carly was jealous of me.

She had always wanted what I had. Deep down, I knew this but never wanted to confront it.

So, of course, she shows up at my house and seduces my fiancé.

I should have known she would jump at the first chance to take something that was mine.

Waves of rage coursed through me, unlike anything I had ever felt before. The skin on my arms turned pink, my cheeks flared an angry shade of red, my heart raced, and I wanted to scream in the worst way.

If only I could scream.

I would get into her face and, at the top of my voice, yell, “You stupid, mean-spirited, low-life bitch! How could you throw away a lifetime of friendship? How could you betray me like this? How could you dare to think I will ever forgive you?”

If only my right wrist wasn’t broken. I would grab her by the neck and slap her as hard as I could and then kick her with everything I had.

If only this wasn’t happening.

With my very clumsy left hand, I sent Carly a text that read, “Never contact me again.” Then I blocked her number on my phone.

Carly and I were done forever. I mumbled to the aide to get rid of the plant.

Barry was blowing up my phone with voicemails and text messages. I ignored them for days. After my mailbox was full, I knew I needed to begin deleting the messages. I began listening to the voicemails, almost all of them from Barry.

His first message said, “Babe, I know I fucked up.

I am beyond sorry, completely ashamed of myself that I could do anything that would hurt you.

I love you beyond the stars, the moon, and the sun.

I have never loved anyone the way I love you.

I am begging you to forgive me, to give me another chance, to focus on all the amazing times we have had and will have for the rest of our lives.

“Maybe I was subconsciously driven to ‘sow my wild oats’ just one more time. I have a strong appetite that way. But it was a terrible misstep, and you have my word that it was just that—a foolish mistake that will never happen again. Please call me. I miss you so much. I need you so much. Our future children need you.”

A few messages later, he changed his tone. “Listen, be reasonable. We have built a life together already. I am asking that you call me. We have to talk.”

A day later, he switched tactics. Again.

“I keep thinking about how this could have happened. And I think I was drawn to Carly because she is your oldest and dearest friend, like knowing her most intimately was a way to know you more intimately. I know it sounds crazy. And what’s even crazier is that I think the same was true for Carly.

Her getting close to me was a way to be even closer to you.

“We had been talking about you all evening, both of us expressing our love for you. And the more we laughed and the more Carly told me stories about you, the closer we got—until there was an unfortunate blurring of the lines. Yeah, I know it sounds nuts. But I think it really was our mutual adoration for you that lit the flame. I’m so sorry I allowed it to ever get that far. ”

When I did not respond, he flipped the story once again.

“I didn’t want to tell you this, but the truth is Carly has been chasing me for months.

When you weren’t looking, she would blow me kisses across the room.

It was unreal! She just couldn’t resist the temptation.

I only meant well by allowing her to have a taste of your life and showing her the house and the pretty things I had gotten you.

She is so jealous of us! How could you let her ruin our lives like this? ”

In his final message, Barry said, “Holly, we’re done. I can’t believe what an arrogant and unforgiving bitch you are. Clearly, you are not capable of real adult love. For your sake, I hope you find a good shrink to work through your extensive and deep emotional wounds and issues.

“The love we shared was rare and precious and special and you have now thrown away your only chance at happiness and a real family. I am arranging to have your things packed up and sent to your mother’s house, and I fully expect you to return the ring.”

Shit, Mom was right, and it was worse than she could have imagined. The fucker was a toxic narcissist. And then, as much as I didn’t want to, I was overtaken with body-racking sobs and snotty tears and a feeling that I might as well be dead.

I decided it was time to block him on my phone, and as I did, I sent him a psychic vow: By the power vested in me, I now pronounce you blocked and deleted. You may now kiss my ass .

If only that was enough to soothe my misery.

When I wasn’t in physical pain or emotional pain or both, my thoughts would turn to memories of Barry and all the ways in which he said and did things that made me feel, for the first time in my life, cherished, treasured, and protected.

He was a master of big and small romantic gestures, and it sometimes felt like he could reach inside my heart and discover the words I most wanted to hear.

I had visualized him as my safe place to land, my true home, wrapped in the big, strong arms of my real-life knight in shining armor, always there claiming he would take a bullet for me.

If only. I never, ever expected he would be the one shooting at me with an AK-47 to the heart.

I wondered how I had missed signs of trouble, and then I beat myself up for falling for what I now saw was a fantasy. I tried hard to make sense of the conflicting feelings of love and obsession and desire for the Barry I thought I knew with the reality of the Barry I got.

My thirty-eighth birthday arrived just in time for my second day at Mom’s.

It was by far the worst birthday ever. Mom did her best to make things festive.

She brought me a bowl of my favorite hot fudge–covered coffee ice cream, nicely softened to near-soup consistency, with a birthday candle in it.

I felt nothing but misery, certain that I was now damaged goods on all levels.

My mind was on a negative feedback loop that screamed nonstop insults at me, such as, “You are a stupid, na?ve airhead who should have known you are unlovable, unmarriageable, ugly, and possibly destined to be an angry cat woman.”

Mom couldn’t have been sweeter or kinder to me.

She made me delicious chocolate protein shakes to sip through a straw for breakfast, and she left me nutritious pureed chicken and veggie soups to enjoy for lunch and dinner.

Each day, she came home from work as early as she could to drive me to the park to take long, slow walks.

And she didn’t force me to attempt to talk, knowing that I hated sounding like a drunken Aussie when I did.

We watched movies together every evening.

One of our movies was a comedy from the 1970s called Heaven Can Wait , starring Warren Beatty.

Mom confessed she had been crazy in lust with Warren back in the day and that he was the Ryan Gosling of her generation.

I had to agree with her that he was quite the sexy specimen and the movie was fun.

It’s the story about a quarterback for the L.A.

Rams, Joe Pendleton, who is about to play in the Super Bowl.

After practicing in the stadium, Joe rides his bike along Kanan-Dume Road in Malibu on his way back to his home.

We see him pedal into a long dark tunnel, and then there is a big truck headed toward him.

It appears he is about to get crushed. The scene jumps to what looks like heaven, and we see Joe in his tracksuit and sneakers walking around, looking baffled and lost. An overanxious man in a suit, the “escort,” tells Joe he is there to lead him to his next destination.

Joe argues with the guy, telling him he needs to get back to where he was because he has the Super Bowl coming up in a few days.

The escort tells him that is impossible.

Joe continues to protest until the escort’s supervisor, Mr. Jordan, arrives.

Mr. Jordan questions the escort who, on his first day on the job, was certain that Joe was about to be crushed by the truck.

He didn’t want to witness the accident, so he snatched Joe out of his body a second before impact.

Mr. Jordan then gently explains to the escort that Joe, being the elite athlete he was, would have swerved and avoided the collision and that, technically, he wasn’t supposed to die until much later—10:17 A.M. on March 20, 2025, to be exact.

Mr. Jordan now has to tell Joe that his highly tuned athletic body has been cremated, and it is impossible for him to return. Joe, while slightly relieved to discover that this was all a big mistake, continues to insist that a NEW body be found, pronto. Because he has to play in the Super Bowl.

The comedy continues with Joe inhabiting not one but ultimately two new bodies. In the end, he does get to play in the Super Bowl.

Watching Heaven Can Wait with Mom was entertaining, and it did have a sweet love story intertwined into it, but what really got me thinking was, What if God does make mistakes??? Is it possible this whole disaster with Barry was a mistake? Maybe we should have never met?

That night I barely slept. I kept thinking about the mistakes I had made along the way with Barry, especially signing those legal documents without reading them or having them reviewed.

I realized that I needed to ask Mom and Auntie for help to recover my $100,000.

There was no way I wanted to be an investor in a home, no matter how great the potential financial upside, with a man I would never speak to again.

The next day on our walk through the park, I slowly filled Mom in on what I had done with my retirement account and explained that I didn’t even have a copy of the papers I had signed.

While she didn’t say so, I could see the look of shock and disappointment on her face, and then she confessed something horrifying to me.

“Holly, there’s no easy way to tell you this,” she began slowly.

“You know I have always had my suspicions about Barry, so I hired Auntie’s investigator to do a background check on him.

I think you’re going to want to sit down to hear what I’m about to say. ”

We walked in silence to a nearby bench. Mom paused briefly to gather her thoughts and then proceeded to drop a bomb—several of them, in fact, in rapid-fire succession.

“Holly, Barry did not go to an Ivy League law school.

He graduated from a law school neither Geeta nor I have ever heard of, and ranked close to the bottom of his class.

He was disbarred within three years of practicing law for fraud: commingling and stealing funds from his clients.

And for several other unscrupulous offenses.

“For the past twenty years, Barry has earned his living filing frivolous lawsuits against wealthy people and major corporations, and he currently has over a hundred active lawsuits just in San Diego County alone. His career, if you can call it that, is weaponizing the legal system against the innocent. Generally, people settle with him because it’s ultimately cheaper than litigating.

Some of these settlements have been more than a half-million dollars. ”

We sat in silence for several minutes as I tried my best to absorb the news.

I asked her to give me a copy of the report.

She said, “I will, but first, let me prepare you for the rest of it. There’s more.

We discovered Barry is forty-nine, not forty-two, like he told you.

And we also found out that he has been married three times.

In addition to the twins, he has a son who was born with severe multiple defects whom he abandoned within days of the birth.

This left the mother and infant homeless and living in a shelter for several weeks.

A generous citizen then took them in and gave them a home. ”

Mom told me all of it in a whisper. No response was possible.

I felt paralyzed and a bit dizzy. Unable to formulate a single sentence, I put my head between my knees and sobbed.

Mom held me as I cried until I gasped for air.

“Holly, I’m so sorry . . . there is no way you could have known. He is a true sociopath. He turned on the charm, and you became his prey. This isn’t your fault. You will get past this, and tomorrow I will ask Auntie to start working on getting your money back from him.”

I didn’t just want my money. I wanted revenge to ensure Barry would never be able to con another person for the rest of his life.