It Happened To Me: My Boyfriend's Ex Faked Suicide to Lure Him Back

Happy leave your old Valentines alone Day! That's the message I hope all exes get from my crazy cautionary tale, today and always.

By Sarah Swinwood

The first time I lived with a boyfriend, I was in my 40s. Ricky and I met when he was 51 but we didn’t actually start dating until a year later when we ran into each other by chance. We loved to sleep wrapped up in each other's arms, snuggling and giving each other little kisses. It didn’t take long for us to figure out we wanted to always sleep beside each other, his huge, muscular arms and legs, my slender, tiny little frame. Our bodies fit together like a Japanese puzzle box. We loved love.

He had a place upstate and would come to the city just a few days a week. When we started seeing each other, he was still staying those days at his ex-girlfriend’s apartment, but not in the same bed, he told me. They hadn’t been intimate in over a year. At our age, it was understandable that we both had people from our pasts around. I didn’t like the arrangement, but I didn’t feel threatened by it either. He was transparent and had no reason to lie.

It wasn’t until week three when she phoned him while I was sitting in the truck beside him and I could hear her yelling at him about when he was coming home and how long he planned on staying before leaving her with his dog.

“That sounds like a woman who thinks she is in a relationship with you,” I said.

“Don’t worry,” he told me. “It’s not how it sounds. That’s actually why we are not together anymore, her constant yelling and erratic temper.”

“If you and I are going to continue pursuing a relationship, this is not going to be sustainable,” I insisted.

How could we allow falling in love if he had an ex that he was not only staying with but would call and yell at him? I didn’t know her— and I had a feeling that she didn’t know about me. We had been unfolding so organically, Ricky and I, that our mutual affection and attraction was the only thing I’d been noticing. But, after her call, I wondered what this woman looked like. She had no social media and he only had one blurry photo of her. I couldn’t get a read.

Then, I started noticing her name pop up on his phone more frequently. He’d brought me to his country house, introduced me to his friends and taken me for dinner every other night in the city. He wasn’t hiding me… but she couldn’t have known about us.

Ricky took me to his beach house. His efforts to make space for our blossoming relationship were sincere. I couldn’t shake the feeling that his ex’s life was more interwoven with his than he had admitted to me, or to himself. Her sneakers were at the back door, hair elastics stacked on the base of his drive shift in the truck. I finally saw a clear picture of her on the side of the fridge, with Ricky, in a photo booth, him in a rugby jersey and baseball cap, bashfully smirking and revealing his slight sexy gap tooth and bright blue eyes. Sadie with a golden tan, long blonde hair and toothpaste commercial smile. There was another photo of him with a woman who had long, curly hair, a huge grin and a helmet on, her arms wrapped around him on the back of a scooter.

Ricky and me. LOVE SAVES THE DAY.

“Is this Sadie?” I asked him about the blonde in the photo.

“Oh yeah, I forgot those were there. I’ll take them down,” he replied.

“And who’s this girl on the back of the moped with you?” I asked.

“That’s my other ex, Veronica. She and Sadie are friends. They put those up there.”

“Your two exes are friends and came here together?” I blurted.

“Veronica stalked me after we broke up. When Sadie and I started dating, she told her to back off. Eventually, they ended up friends and now the two of them gang up on anyone I try to date. That’s probably why they put those pictures up there. They don’t want me to move on,” he told me, as he took the photos down.

As a teenager, I had been obsessed with New Kids On The Block. I was convinced Jordan was singing exclusively to me. Years later, on their reunion tour, I responded to a Craigslist ad: “Were you The New Kids’ number one fan? We want to hear from you.” I sat there and banged out a two-page reply about my visceral experience. The next day I received a phone call,

“Hi, we're calling from the Rachael Ray Show and we are having some fans on to talk about what it’s like being a number one fan. Would you be willing to come on and share your story?”

Say less. Rachael Ray wanted to know, “Were we excited for the reunion tour?” While the other women shrieked and squealed, I thought to myself, “Sure, I had been a fan when I was a teenager …but I wasn’t anymore.”

The damage was done. My understanding of love and romance has been permanently skewed.

Here I am on the ‘Rachael Ray Show’ in 2008.

It’s what I thought about that night, when his phone started ringing with Sadie’s name on the screen. She called so many times that he turned his phone off. I fell into a restless sleep of vivid dreams, her calling and texting. I told him about the dreams the next morning and he replied that he’d had a weird sleep, too, with similar dreams.

When I looked at my phone, there was a text from an unknown number.

“Are you at the beach house? On Rhode Island?” It read.

Then, a voice message from another unknown number, a raspy, growling voice that said, “Stay away from my husband.”