Have you ever been a member of an internet forum? I was vaguely aware they existed when I was in college, and that they had been around in various forms since the 80s, but I wasn’t particularly interested in making connections online with strangers. Nor was I an early adopter of social media — I may have been the only person in America in 2006 without a MySpace account, and I didn’t even get on Facebook until well after I’d graduated the year following. I was, perhaps, a bit snobby about my refusal to “do” social media — “I prefer ‘in real life’ connections, virtual ones just seem prone to lies,” I’d say. I didn’t use ICQ or AIM, and while I kept a blog, it wasn’t really social media — it was my online diary, that I shared with few friends, all of whom I had first met in real life.

In my senior year back at Brown, Jenn got me to join a knitting forum with her as a way for us to stay connected. I thought it was silly; after all, she was only an hour away in Boston, and we had text messages and phones and emails to bring us together when we needed to lean on each other. I did have the time to take up knitting again, however. I was coasting a little, generally slacking off. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do after graduation, but it probably involved getting married to Julian, or at least finding a way to be with him, maybe at graduate school. I was trying to convince him to apply to business school in the US, which I thought could be useful but he had no interest in postgraduate education. (“Everything I need to know to succeed in my father’s business I can learn in his office. More school is a colossal waste of cash I could spend on our future instead, Liss.”)

I’d been considering knitting Julian a sweater anyway since we were back in Bristol; it seemed like an impressive gift, an object fashioned out of my love for him. I caved in to Jenn’s wheedling and cajoling and created an account on the forum. I lurked for a good month or two, picking up tips on increasing and decreasing, learning how and where to purchase good wool, and trying to get a sense of how the forum worked as a community. And it was there that I learned of the venerable knitter’s folklore around the “Sweater Curse” — my very first thread online was a question about whether members thought it was real or not. (Generally, yes, though it shouldn’t be.) But there were so many in-jokes and mean girl tactics, and so much outright bullying, I felt unwelcome. I was made to feel dumb — not just uninformed about technique and tools, but naive and laughable in my ignorance. I drifted away from the forum to make a cable-knit hat instead for Julian without dubious online aid, alone in my shitty studio apartment near campus.

If there is one memory I have of late 2006, it is of picking up dropped stitches and unpicking meandering cables I was crafting from russet cashmere yarn, listening to the rain as it patted the windows softly and the furnace kicked in. I was unhurried and the solitude of my studio suited me. I’d fumble with the pastel plastic cable needles, shuttle the little stitch markers around, take my time to understand the mistakes I made as I worked. I subsisted on grilled cheese and Sauvignon Blanc and Marlboro Lights (I’d unfortunately picked up a smoking habit from hanging around Alex too much), played Joni Mitchell and Bloc Party and Art Brut on my aging iPod with its sad and tinny little speaker, lit church tapers in several small candelabras, watched the wan nearly-winter sun bleed away into sunset through the picture window. Late at night I would lie on the hardwood floor, waiting for Julian to call me on Skype as the clock hands inched towards the smallest hours and grew into larger ones. If he didn’t call, I didn’t mind too much. Being alone, beholden to none but myself, was tranquil, slow, serene. The hat was ready for Christmas; it is the most beautiful object I have ever made, creamy soft, not a missed or crooked stitch. Julian was, for a change, impressed with something I had done with no direction from him.

At the same time I was abandoning the forum, Julian was joining one relating to the football team he supports. There he found he fit right in with the general laddish banter and unabashed sports geekery, and made connections with men (mostly men) whom his mother would have dismissed in real life as “NOCD” (Not Our Class, Darling). It was a pressure valve of sorts for him — no one on there knew that he was swimming in cash or possessed of a posh name like “Julian.” He was jc0104 at first, and then “Jocko,” after others kept referring to him as “jco.” He leaned into the masculine repartee and macho ribbing, and built up a reputation as a level-headed peacemaker on the site. (The irony is not lost on me.)

I only know all this because of Alex, by then working as a trainee analyst at Goldman Sachs. Now at some remove from Julian after their graduation in June, he had come to regard his best friend as an atrocity, a fairy tale villain set on capturing me and immuring me to serve as his consort. For despite the oft-cruel comments Alex made about me in the last two months I was in the UK, his speech was only purchased by Julian — it was not genuine. In order to eradicate all affection I still had for him after our affair, Alex was to make himself the type of monster he now wants to destroy: heartless, ferocious, terrifically brutal. Alex hadn’t stopped caring about me, loving me, really, despite these games.

I understand now why he took the money and crushed my heart. Depression had seized Fenn once more, and the family needed cash to pay for another stay at the Priory. Cora feared Fenn might look for a way out like John had; the situation was urgent, but the budget did not stretch enough to permit her to be a private patient, and the time to be referred by the NHS was unacceptable given the danger Fenn seemed to be in. She had responded well during her stay there two years before, after she’d returned from Glasgow with a broken heart and a broken mind. Julian was willing to pay for Fenn’s treatment and continue to provide Alex with small stipends if I appeared to be content being Julian’s alone, and Al did not pursue me further now our affair had been ended. It was an emergency and Alex saw no way out; it would be callous not to forgive and and absolve him.

Once the emergency had passed, and Alex was earning (almost) enough to support himself in his new job, he asked to be released from his promise to Julian. “It’s not like I’m going to seduce Mel away from you now, Jules,” he explained. “What you’ve done for our family… Mum and I can’t thank you enough. We’ve got a cousin coming up from Edinburgh — one of Uncle B’s daughters — to come stay with Fenn for a while, give her some company. The doctors say she needs companionship, and, well, you know how lonely it is out there.” Julian, ever happy to clip unneeded expenses, set Alex free on the proviso that he would never “sniff” around me again.

Alex wasn’t great about keeping to his word. That September, he wrote me a long email apologizing for his behavior, blaming Miranda (poor Miranda!) for exerting too much influence over him, for convincing him that I was sleeping with him only to make Julian jealous and not out of any genuine affection. With time to reflect, and his own relationship with Miranda now over, he’d come to understand my affection was real — at least at the time — but that our moment had passed. “I do not deserve your forgiveness, but I would like to be friends. At least friendly. If you ever need an ear, I am here for you. I will always pick up the phone for you.” I didn’t think I would be likely to want to speak with him again, but I carefully copied his numbers onto my phone and saved his Skype name in my day planner.

By October, I was speaking with him nearly every afternoon as he rode the No. 11 bus home from the City to Chelsea, as it edged from Fleet Street around Trafalgar Square, past the Banqueting House where a king once lost his head, Big Ben and Westminster Abbey, through the miserable and touristy environs near Victoria, onto Pimlico and plummy Sloane Square, and at last down the Kings Road where he’d disembark. Sometimes we’d keep talking even as he let himself into his little flat, kicked off his John Lobb monk-straps and poured himself a glass of wine. Alex was the only person I trusted with my worries about my future with Julian. And in kind, Alex divulged his own misgivings about whether throwing in my lot with Julian was in my best interests.

Al was still in search of escape routes for me, even if he did not know whether he would be at the end of them. “He sees you only defined in terms of himself, Mel,” he told me late one night his time. “What will you bring him? You are beautiful, a decoration for his arm and his home. You are happiest when you are bringing joy to others, brightening the darkest corners of even a spiteful sod like Julian. You are forgiving and gentle and kind even when others do not deserve your mercy. All of these are true. But Melissa, you are also clever and well-read, shrewd and funny and far more able than he will ever be, and Julian does not care. He’d rather that none of those be true. He’d rather all of your pointy edges, the edges that make you so very brilliant, be smoothed away ’til you are nothing but a fine, reflective surface. A surface to reflect him in a better light.”

Alex thought he found a path out for me when he discovered Julian’s membership on the forum. I say “discovered,” but there was no fortuitous revelation of its existence. Julian was amused by a particular thread in the forum about the opening of the new Emirates stadium in North London and sent Alex a link to it, chiefly because Alex really hates Arsenal. “I’m Jocko in there, if you can’t figure it out,” the message said. “I’m, as they say, ‘kind of a big deal on the internet’ in this forum.” Jules didn’t know it, but he had extended an invitation to Alex to comb through his posting history. And while nearly all of it was about the second-rate football team to which the forum was dedicated, he did find a few “off topic” posts in which Jules had mentioned me in mostly glowing terms: “a gorgeous American bird who thinks I hang the moon”; and less lovingly, “quite simply the best shag I’ve ever had. Even if it’s just for that, I will marry her, so she can never share herself with any other man.”

It occurred to Alex that Julian might eventually trip up, say something even cruder, even crasser about me one day when he thought he was unobserved. Al bookmarked the site and checked Jules’ posts once a week to find some fissure he might eventually crack open to expose the man I thought I wanted to marry.

Julian was then, as he is now, a man possessed with a singular zeal to control his life with a firm hand, to leverage his money and influence, even at that young age, that he might have the whip hand over all others in his life, and damn the consequences. And chief among those Julian wished to control was me, though distance made this more challenging after I returned to the US for my senior year. Alone in Providence, I could float quietly through classes and study sessions and parties under the watchful eye of no one. I could meet men. I could take them home to my room with the candelabras and the red canvas couch and the overflowing smoked glass ashtrays. I might find the open bottle of Edradour and a couple of mugs from Cora’s studio. They might kiss me, or I might kiss them first. We might play strip Trivial Pursuit until we shivered in our underwear, then abandon the game in embarrassment, or lust. And Julian did not know, could not know.

But Alex knew. He knew the extent of my treachery, my unfaithfulness. He knew because I told him on evenings when night and morning slipped into each other, when my consciousness was malleable, when Julian had promised to call, but had not, and I pretended not to care. I began calling early in the morning London time, when I knew Alex would be at his desk, and I knew he’d always take my calls. I knew he was cataloguing my attempts to sabotage my relationship with Julian, savoring each one as evidence that I was not ready to be tamed into a bride. I think I probably would have been all right with disclosure of these transgressions at the time, just as easily as I was with becoming Jules’ wife. I was drifting into matrimony, like a small boat unmoored, carried to a jagged and perilous shore, out of sight of any captain or crew. Except Alex, the only person paying attention to how I was silently cracking up, crumbling under the influence of alcohol and casual sex.

Spring term brought me a greater commitment to school, if only not to embarrass my parents and Julian at graduation in May if I somehow didn’t have enough credits (I’d just about squeaked some satisfactories during the fall — failure was a real possibility). I cut down on drinking and stopped sleeping with randos I met at parties or in the library. Jules came out to visit during Spring Break and we spent two weeks mostly in bed, reconnecting, recharging, recommitting. He flattered me about my intelligence, which he knew was a sore spot for me; my father went to Brown as well, and I was aware that some of my classmates saw me as purely a legacy admission. (That would have been true if Rachel had been admitted, but I at least had the grades and the scores to prove I belonged, even if others disagreed.) We cooked roast chicken together in my little ill-lit kitchen, with Julian acting as my happy sous-chef, listening to the Decemberists and Peter, Bjorn and John on the new stereo he’d bought me. I was myself again, chattering and bright and light, and Julian was my mirror, beaming my love right back to me. He’d made me his again so completely, but this time without the tension and strain of having Alex around to remind me of my errors.

If you’d asked me about Al at the time, I might have said: Alex, who he? I stopped taking his calls when Julian was visiting, and it soon became habit to ignore them, even after graduation. “I was so afraid of what was happening to you, sweetest,” Alex would tell me years later. “You weren’t speaking to any of the rest of us until you came to live with Julian in 2008. I knew you were still together from Facebook, of course — all those nauseating pictures of the two of you practically eating each other’s faces off. And if I’d ask Jules how you were, he’d rub my nose in how if I’d only played my cards right, I might be the one getting ready to propose to you. Bastard.”

Fast forward to 2009: two years after graduation, I was living in another shitty little apartment, this one in Pasadena with a slight upgrade to a separate bedroom, and working for a marketing firm at a job that I mostly enjoyed. (I pretended to myself that I wasn’t in the role only because my mom had been the matron of honor in the owner’s wedding.) I now had a three-carat diamond on my ring finger; near the end of my six-month sojourn in Britain, Julian had presented me with a ring from Garrard that wasn’t completely my style (too fussy, too big) but it seemed rude to quibble. We had agreed that Julian would move to the US after it became clear even to my husband-to-be that I was deeply unhappy with the prospect of being stuck in Suffolk most of the time. It was a great sacrifice he would make for me — this point was driven home to me again and again by the fearsome Jocasta and Julian himself, who had reverted to his high-handed and dismissive treatment of me. I was too in love to realize none of this was right, or normal, or sustainable.

I prepared the petition for the visa, collecting ticket stubs and evidence of our time together in England, methodically filling out the form in pencil before committing in pen. At his request, I was sending details of grand Pasadena homes to Julian so we might purchase a house to be ready for his arrival. The Jen(n)s and I began dress shopping, and I chose our wedding colors, Wedgwood blue and a soft brown. Even Julian seemed excited at the prospect of expanding his family business to America, which had long been a dream of his father’s. (“So much less costly to marry you and move to the States than get an investment visa. My father appreciates your business acumen, Melissa,” Julian told me with a wink in a Skype session.)

And then, it was over. I mean, I made it be over. One July morning at work, I opened an email from Alex with the subject line, “BELIEVE ME NOW?????” Alex is not prone to writing in all caps or with multiple punctuation marks, unlike Rachel, so I knew I should look and not look at the same time. I put it this way once, in a post on my old blog about another email Alex sent me a year later with more proof of Julian’s perfidy:

I should know better than to open anything from Alex, but I… sometimes I can’t help myself. It’s like when you have fruit in the crisper in your fridge, and you leave it there for AGES and you think, well, maybe it isn’t so bad, I’ll open the crisper because you think you see one strawberry through the frosted plastic that isn’t rotten, and you open the crisper and the strawberries are all moldy and gross and you think: I knew it was going to be rotten but I looked anyway. It’s a lot like that. Which is a roundabout way of saying that I knew that whatever was in the email was going to hurt me, whether it was true or not, but I wanted to know anyway.

Well, yes, that precisely. It was a link to that football forum where Julian was Jocko the peacemaker, a link to a thread in which the participants were bragging about their wives and girlfriends, posting sexy pictures of us almost certainly without permission. And there it was, a selfie I had sent Julian only the week before. I mean, it was sexy but more in the sense of being provocative — I was fully clothed in a deep V-neck t-shirt and shorts, but the shirt was snug and the “V” was very low, the shorts were very short. I was bending over to show my cleavage, a finger resting on my pouting lips, my hair tossed back, my eyes fairly pleading for sex. It was a picture meant for him alone, and yet here it was, on the internet, with the caption: “Best fuck I’ve ever had. Marrying her soon so she’ll be on ‘lock down.’ Devil of a time getting her to agree, really had to work on her for years before I wore her down. Flattered her incessantly, let her think she’s a bit brainy, but look at her. Not much going on in the old brainbox — who cares, that’s not why I want her. Eventually she understood who wears the trousers. Who doesn’t love a tamed tiger? As long as I remove her claws and remind her who’s the master, happy life for old Jocko.”

I shut the window immediately. I didn’t need to know more, didn’t need to see the posts from the other users congratulating Julian on how lucky he was. (I read these in later weeks to torment myself.) Moving to an empty conference room, I made myself a cup of coffee and dialed Alex’s number in Bristol. (He was studying there again, finishing a Master’s in mathematics on a yearlong sabbatical.) He picked up my call on the first ring.

“Do you believe me now?” I heard the sound of a kettle boiling and turning off, water pouring into a cup.

“Yes, Al.” I was not crying yet, that would come later in the day. I felt dead. Duped. Empty of all feeling, like a shunt had been stuck in my side and all the emotion had gushed out. I meant nothing to Julian beyond how I looked and how good I was in bed. I wasn’t smart, as I’d always feared, my claws were gone and I’d been tricked into giving over control of my life to this… villain. This monster I did not know, not really.

“I know who you are. You are far more clever than he will ever be, and he knows that. He’s afraid of that, and he’s been working hard for the past two years to take away any power you have over him. He charms you and chastises you, praises you and slurs you, again and again and again until you don’t know who you are. But I know you, Mel. I know you.”

I looked out the second story window onto Raymond Street, another blandly sunny day in Pasadena. My coffee was as mediocre as yesterday. The whiteboard still held marks from an early morning meeting about our new client in the Netherlands. Nothing here had changed, and everything had changed. I took the ring off my finger and shoved it in the pocket of my black ponte trousers.

“How did you even find this out?” I felt the tears beginning to prick the corners of my eyes, the heat rising in my face, but I would not let myself cry, not yet. Julian didn’t deserve my tears, but I certainly did, and I wanted to shed them alone.

Alex explained how he’d known for years about the forum, and how he’d been waiting for years for Julian to make an offensive post about me in an unguarded moment, that I might finally understand that marriage to Julian was a charnel house for my mind and spirit. “After you got engaged, I had to force the point. I joined the forum pretending to be someone else, got chummy with him over time, started this topic just to see if he’d bite. He bit.”

“What am I supposed to do now? We’re supposed to be meeting up in Vancouver next month for a romantic long weekend after he wraps up a deal there with his father. I have tickets and the hotel is booked. Maybe I should go and try and work it out.” This seemed rational — surely it was a joke, or a mistake that could be explained.

“NO! Melissa, all he will do is wear you down like he always does, convince you that you didn’t see what was right in front of your own eyes — your very own degradation. He’ll make you feel like you’re the monster, you’re the horror show.” Alex swore lightly under his breath; he’d burned his tongue on the too-hot tea he’d prepared.

“I should end it, shouldn’t I.” My voice was faint even to myself.

There was no reply at first. Eventually, a groan floated over the ether. “You know you have to — he doesn’t respect you, and you can’t trust that he won’t continue to infantilize and condescend to you. Without respect and trust, how can you in good conscience marry him, bear his children?”

I thanked Alex coolly, promised I’d call later and ended the discussion. I walked into HR and explained that I had a family emergency that required me to leave the office immediately. When pressed, I lied and claimed my grandmother had fallen at home. (I felt terrible about the lie, but it was easier than explaining the brutal reality of Alex’s email.) On my short car ride home, I listened to AirTalk on KPCC, something about healthcare reform. I couldn’t listen to music; I didn’t want to be made to feel anything, not just yet. I stopped by the liquor store on Summit and picked up two six-packs of Michelob Ultra and a carton of Marlboro Lights — I wanted to drink a lot of alcohol, but I didn’t want to get drunk immediately. I still hadn’t cracked.

The mail had already arrived — early for a Wednesday — and that month’s issue of Brides magazine was shoved in my letterbox, like a frothy white middle finger. I ignored it. Inside, my cat Tibbs meowed in surprise at my early return from work, rubbed his plump white and orange marmalade body on my legs in greeting and love. I picked him up, hugged him closely, told him he was beautiful and perfect and I would never, ever leave him. Only then did I give myself permission to cry. Big, irregular sobs, visceral moans, the fattest tears I thought I could ever produce. I sat on the floor of my living room, my legs extended before me like a child, my face in my hands. I cried until I could force nothing else out. I opened a beer, lit a cigarette and called Julian.

“Darling, not a good time right now,” he yelled above what sounded like an extremely loud pub crowd. “I’m out with Charlie and Jamie right now. I’ll call you when I’m on the way home.”

“No, Julian. We’re talking now.” I took a sharp and deep breath. “I know who you are, Jocko. I know you think I’m a tiger you’ve tamed. Fuck you.”

That got his attention. Giving his excuses to his friends, I heard him pass through the pub, crests of laughter and shouting peaking and falling as he moved through the room to the street.

“It’s not what you think. How did you even see that?” His rising voice gave lie to the panic he must have been feeling. “Did someone send that to you? Who sent it to you? There’s a simple explanation for all of it. You just have to listen to me.”

I felt a grand emptiness within myself, like I was cast upon an Arctic plain or the steppe, with nothing to see, nothing to feel except the coldness filling up my every pore. “Yes, someone sent it to me. I don’t know who, from some anonymous Gmail address.” (I was beyond caring about my own falsehoods that day.) “There is NO explanation for all of this, Julian, and I really don’t feel like listening to you. I’m calling to say we are over. I am sick of your condescension. I’m sick of the way you…” I reached for words. “You charm me and chastise me, praise me and slur me,” Alex’s seemed good enough, so I stole them, still fresh in my mind. “And you do it over and over and faster and faster and confuse me so much that I don’t know who I am anymore. There is nothing you could say to me that will change my mind today.”

“Liss, sweetheart,” Julian’s voice was cloying, syrupy. “I love you. You are the only true and good and honest thing in my life. I would never hurt you on purpose. It was all just a laugh. It’s just an online persona, it’s not who I really am. You know me.”

“Do I? Have I ever? Who the fuck are you, Julian Cranford?” I yelled at him.

“A man who loves you, completely. Utterly. A man who would leave his own country for you. A man who would give you everything you ever wanted. Melissa, please. Be angry with me. Yell at me. Feel the rage. That’s all fine, it’s fine!” His voice wavered again. “But you have to listen to me. You have to see it was just a joke that went too far. I wanted to fit in with the guys, and you’d just sent me that picture… I’d been thinking about it all morning, looking at it again and again, knowing I am the luckiest man to have a woman like you as my partner. You’re not only gorgeous — don’t pretend you don’t know it — you’re so accomplished, so brilliant.”

I didn’t trust a word he was saying. “Then why did you say, wait, what was it? ‘Not much going on in the old brainbox’? Why did you post a picture of me meant only for you, and then degrade me, make me nothing more than how I look? Mock me for what? For whom?”

“You have to understand, these guys aren’t like you and me. They don’t have a lot going on in their lives. Having a fit girl is the most they can hope for; brainy women scare them. I was just trying to fit in. I mean something to them. They like me. If they knew I was rich, that my fiancee was not only stunning but brilliant, I’d be mocked. I’d be toast.”

“So you would have me forgive you because you’re afraid your internet friends might find out you’re a big fat phony and leave you? Guess what? Your real life fiancee found out you’re a big fat phony and a terrible person and she’s leaving you. I don’t want to hear from you again.” The tears started again, the deep sobs as I recognized how very much I had lost being with Julian. “I’ve wasted four years of my life on you, and that’s more than enough. Goodbye, Jules. Good luck with your friends, Jocko.”

I pressed the end button on my phone and threw it across the room at the sofa. A wail came out of my body that didn’t even sound human to me. I finally saw Julian for what he was, what he had always been: a coward. A coward who was so desperately insecure, so in need of love and validation, and yet so incapable of loving anyone but himself.

From across the room, I heard my phone trill Bloc Party’s “This Modern Love” — Julian’s ringtone. I screamed in frustration but stalked across the room and picked it up anyway. (Maybe I was a tamed tiger after all.) “YES?”

“Darling, what will you do with the ring?” Julian’s composure had returned, and with it the gelid tone I associated with his reactions to my greatest transgressions.

“I hadn’t thought about it.” Which was true. All I knew is I didn’t want it on my hand any longer. “I threw it in a drawer.”

“Keep it. I’ll have it back on your hand in six months.”

I hung up on him again. What cheek! The nerve of him!

His pronouncement was, of course, completely correct.