…”I knew the first time I saw you, we were supposed to be together. I just had to wait until you were ready. Mom thought you’d find it romantic.”
I hung up on him. I didn’t say a word. I just pressed the red button and sat in my car while my phone lit up again and again.
I kept thinking about the day we met. October 2021, a bookstore, both of us reaching for the same book. I’d told that story at our engagement dinner two hours earlier. Everyone laughed. It hadn’t been a coincidence at all. He’d known which bookstore I went to on Saturdays. He’d been there for two years.
The next morning, my phone rang from a number I didn’t know. It was his mother.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, and her voice was shaking. “I gave you that album because I couldn’t say it out loud. He told me they were sweet. I found them in his closet last month, boxes of them, and I knew. I knew I had to get them in front of you before the wedding. I’m his mother. I didn’t know any other way to warn you.”
She’d lied to him about the album. She told him she was giving me a few “romantic” pictures. She gave me the worst ones on purpose.
I went to the police that afternoon, with the album and his mother on speakerphone. She brought the rest of the boxes to the station herself. Hundreds of photos, going back almost three years before we ever spoke.
I got a protective order. Mark was charged with stalking. I moved apartments, changed my number, and started seeing a therapist, who helps me with the hardest part: trusting my own memories of the last three years.
His mother and I still talk, once in a while. Last week she sent me a single photo, the only one left from that album. It was of me at my engagement dinner, laughing, taken by her. On the back she’d written, “This is the only one you ever knew was being taken. I’m so glad you got out.”
