I still remember how his expression changed when I said his real name. It was like flipping a switch: the warmth drained, the mask slipped, and what remained was a man irritated that I had ruined his game. There was no denial, no desperate attempt to win me back—just the cold calculation of someone already planning his next target. That was the moment I realized the danger wasn’t bruises or yelling; it was how easily he could make a person doubt their own instincts.
Sitting in a circle—sometimes virtual, sometimes at a café—with women who knew his other aliases, I saw how similar our stories were, even when the details shifted. We weren’t hysterical, bitter, or naive; we were witnesses. We compared timelines, pieced together lies, warned others before he could finish his next performance. In telling our stories, we quietly rewrote the ending: not girl meets boy, but women meet truth, and choose each other.
