After my boyfriend and I broke up, I found out he and my best friend had been discussing a cheap rental on her family's property for months. Months when I was still his girlfriend. What I had understood as his enthusiasm about a place to live suddenly looked like a conversation I hadn't been invited into.
Before the breakup, he'd talked about how great her family was and how much he wanted to spend time with her. I was uncomfortable with his eagerness to move closer, but I trusted them both. I'd introduced them. I'd even encouraged them to hang out, which makes their later claim that I wouldn't let him have friends especially hard to take.
We split up a few months after the moving question first came up. Only afterward did I start hearing about the things that had been happening while we were together: private messages, meetings I hadn't known about, parties they attended without telling me. He'd sometimes said he was home or busy with family. Apparently, he was out with my best friend.
I also learned that she had feelings for him. From where I stood, her interest and his plans to move onto her family's property no longer looked like unrelated details. I suspected she'd been trying to pull him away from me. I still don't know exactly what happened between them, including whether they had sex. The secrecy gave me reasons to suspect an affair, not a complete account of one.
Then a woman from one of those parties messaged to ask whether we were still together. She'd thought he was single. Later, I heard he'd been telling people we were basically broken up. Meanwhile, I'd still been planning our anniversary. Apparently, we had very different information about the status of the same relationship.
A friend also told me she'd seen the two of them sitting in a car outside a gas station around eleven at night. My best friend's explanation was that they were talking. She had a boyfriend, too. Sitting in a car doesn't tell me everything that happened, but hearing about another undisclosed meeting made the earlier explanations harder to believe.
When I asked questions, my ex and my former best friend said I was harassing them and creating drama. She told people I was jealous and couldn't handle seeing him happy. They also described me as controlling. I kept thinking about how willingly I'd made room for their friendship, while they were making plans I knew nothing about.
Now little things keep coming back to me: her asking where he was, him getting defensive about his phone, the two of them laughing about things I wasn't part of. At the time, I hadn't treated those moments as evidence. Looking back, it's difficult to leave any of them alone.
I've since heard they argued at a party and apparently aren't speaking anymore. I don't know how much of that account is accurate, either. My ex has been posting sad quotes about betrayal, which is a lot to encounter while I'm still finding out where he actually was when he told me he was home. And apparently, my former best friend told someone she never meant for things to happen this way. I'm still trying to work out what she meant by “things.”
