Chapter Thirty-Eight

Oh What a Tangled Web We Weave When First We Practice to Deceive

I’ve known that saying my whole life. And it is so very true. The other one I’ve learned is not to trust people’s words, but their actions.

So, what happens when their words match their actions? For a very long time? And you don’t see the actions that don’t match because they hide them so well? Because you believed him. Because the only thing you asked of him was not to lie to you and you just know he never has.

Until you suspect he has. Now is where the shock and despair take hold and I cannot breath without forcing myself. I want to throw up every time I swallow. And I do throw up when I walk into the little bookstore where we shared our first kiss. I came to pick up a book I ordered and after getting 10 feet in I feel the wave of loss cresting over my head and I run outside to vomit. The lovely salesman asks if I’m okay and I suppress my tears until I can’t and it all comes tumbling out. And he hands me a tissue and I pay for my book and wish like hell I’d never walked in that door with Mark. I wish it was still just my place and not a place I shared with him.

A few days after the devastation, I decided I needed to write. Yes, I wrote him letters. Angry, bitter, close-to-hate letters that I tore into little pieces and threw away. It helped a little, to feel as if I was throwing away the things he’d done to me. But I needed more. I needed to start telling our story, the whole thing. I thought for sure when I returned to this book it would be to tell you all that I met him, number 21 was the one. The man of my dreams, all of them. Even the dreams I didn’t know I had. He was everything I’d ever wanted and so much more. And for all the actions and words, I just knew he felt the same way.

So, what had happened? What had Mark been keeping a secret from me? Something was hidden and I needed to find it. And I would. Because one thing I know for sure. I am smart. Very smart. I’m smarter than he is, and certainly smarter than HE thinks I am.

And I’m an analyst and I figure things out. Like a private detective, I knew there had to be something going on that he had hidden from me.

I was determined to find it.

Man, I really need to be more careful when I decide to do something.

Sunday, the day “after”. I start crafting an outline for Mark’s chapters. I start making notes - dates places, times. I scroll through my phone and look at all the pictures of or time together. Fifteen months, every weekend but a few. I also look through my Instagram and Facebook posts. And then I decide to look somewhere else.

I look at Mark’s Instagram.

Now, let me reiterate. Mark wasn’t on Instagram before he met me, and the only reason he had an account is because I would send him posts about restaurants and things to do. Funny reels and loving ones, too. So I scroll down my activity, my messages and there was his account. Well, there were two of them. Just like his LinkedIn, he has two accounts. One is Mark Caffarel and uses on of his older pictures. I scroll through it and make some notes of things.

I thought I was done but went back a few hours later and it was no more. He had blocked me. I was sad, but there was nothing I could do about it.

But Mark had always had another account. He used the same picture he did for his Coffee Meets Bagel account. Same one he used for his new-er LinkedIn account.

There was the other account and a different name. When I clicked on it, the page says “Sorry, this page isn’t available”. But it is. I can see the things I sent to this account. Not a lot of things because I rarely sent anything to it. But there it was.

There was something else, though. Something I’d seen dozens of times and never paid it any mind.

Until now.

Now, I want to be clear that I never, ever wanted to see what he was doing 20 out of every 24 hours when he was on Reddit. I never asked him for his profile name, or whatever it’s called. I never asked him what he was doing. He’d send me things from there and I’d consume them but it wasn’t a place that held any fascination for me.

Bottom line, I trusted him. Implicitly. So it never, ever occurred to me that he would ever post anything that would hurt me. Or not be truthful. So there wouldn’t be anything there for me to find.

I looked at the name on his Instagram account. And I went… I wonder. Could it be? Could it be that simple? That it was there all the time and I never realized it?

I picked up my phone and unlocked it. Scrolled through to the Reddit app. Now I’ve been on this app like three times. Once when I created it and another couple of times just to see what this big thing was. I couldn’t see the appeal. At the top of the screen was the search box. I still had his Instagram page open on my laptop so I just entered the same name I saw there.

And hit enter. And poof, there he was. Everything. Everything he’s posted and commented on for years. But more importantly, there was the picture of him, of Marie, I had taken with my phone in the hallway of my apartment the last time we went out with me and he as Marie. He’d used a face app to make him look like a 20-year-old, but when I scrolled a little further down, there she was in several other Cross dressing sub-Reddit’s he belongs to. He’d loved the comments, and he replied to them all.

And I keep scrolling because I can’t stop. There are posts and comments and then I find this from February 9, a week after I’d spent almost $2,000 on his birthday and a week before Valentines Day. He’d had his make-up done and donned the same dress he’d shown me as a possibility to wear when we went out last. But this time he had gone out to meet a possible mistress. He writes that he went to the Keg and she was so taken with him that he played with her clit under the table with his stocking covered toes.

Now I really couldn’t breathe.

It would only get worse.

There were posts alluding to his wife. Wife. Not ex wife, but wife. The April before we met he’d asked for restaurant recommendations in Bellevue and where to get crab legs for the wife. And he posted that he was working out of town and his wife couldn’t change the smoke detector batteries and Baton Rogue fire had come to do it.

Wife.

Not trusting him to tell the truth since it was becoming more clear with every minute that he’s not honest, I decided I needed proof. I look up the state records office in Baton Rogue and paid their fee to look up a filing. I requested a copy of divorce papers or dissolution of marriage between one Mark Edward Caffarel and one Janet Caffarel. Two very nice archivists looked for 2 hours and could find no such record.

They refunded my money.

I read everything he’s posed on Reddit. He’s written stories about us, his sexual fantasies written as true and using my name and referring to me as his girlfriend and all the carnal acts we’ve supposedly performed and none of them are true.

He used my name.

I was sick to my stomach every day. And then I decided to search some more. I went to Google and enter his name. Then the name of his wife. I find her on Facebook, again with two profiles, and the cover photo of each is of the two of them, formal, as on a cruise ship. His wife’s relationship status is Married.

I Google Shadeauxmarie and all of his posts from Reddit and other sites he’s posted to over the years appear. Clearly he isn’t aware that everything you post on the internet is forever. I am sick to my stomach all over again. I see that he’d planned what he’s doing for Halloween, the party he’s going to and what he’s planning to wear, long before he dumped me. I knew he was cheating but now I had proof.

And then I did something I’ve never done before.

I do a real background check on him. I find his house. You know, the one he lost in the divorce that never occurred and it’s still owned by Mark and Janet. No transfer of title. I know the address, what he paid for it, what he pays in taxes.

It’s just as he described it.

There was more. Or should I say, less. He never graduated from LSU. He has every conceivable piece of merchandise LSU sells and he does not have a degree. I found his mother’s obituary and there it was, in black and white - “survived by her son Mark Caffarel and his wife, Janet” November 10, 2023 when he told me they divorced in 2022.

I am so sick to my stomach for weeks that I cannot eat. The revenge diet works. The day of my surgery, November 16, 2023, I was able to pull on and off my old boyfriend jeans that I wore with Mark, when they were tight. Take that asshole.

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