A Hypothetical Situation

Imagine a hypothetical situation where you’re pretty freshly divorced and have recently resigned from your job. You’ve managed to stretch your money for several months, but you’re running out and rent is due.

Then you meet someone online who, on the surface, looks like the kind of person you should theoretically get along with. You have a lot of common interests, and you think, “This might be a friendship worth exploring.” So, you get to know them a little and they seem very taken with you. It’s initially sort of flattering, but also kind of strange. You get a weird feeling, like there’s something that isn’t quite right, but ignore it. You’re prone to mistrust and can be somewhat paranoid, after all.

You meet them in person, and everything is overall fine, but also a little overwhelming. This person talks about themselves for the better part of the day and, because you’ve been conditioned to not take up space, you listen patiently. They introduce you to their husband and friends, but not before telling you about those people’s individual traumas to, as they put it, “prepare you.” One of the friends is a little weepy, but your new friend’s husband consoles them. You note how his behavior borders on being almost too affectionate, but at the same time don’t want to be judgmental.

Your friend claims to work for FEMA and allows people to believe they're away from home doing humanitarian work, but you eventually learn that isn't exactly true. Your friend actually works for a third-party company that is contracted by the government and does little in the way of helping people. Their job is to gather details about insurance claims, but they let others believe they're on the front lines providing care and support. Whatever it takes to get the neighbors to mow their lawn or have other people constantly applauding how selfless they are.

Against your better discernment, you agree to start housesitting for this couple. You move out of your apartment and into their home. In the beginning it’s fine, but then the text messages and voice notes start — sporadic at first, but they grow in consistency and length with each passing day. Sometimes they send you excerpts from their journal or conversations they’ve had with ChatGPT about you. They regularly call you their angel. It feels like some sort of ploy, but you can’t put your finger on why exactly.

In addition to being an angel, your friend periodically refers to you as their twin flame, but you say nothing. They also call you their sister wife, telling you how they asked permission from another friend for you to be one. You're familiar with the term and it makes you uncomfortable, so you don't respond to the title. When you brush it off, they try to convince you they didn’t know anyone but them used that phrase, and though that’s an obvious lie you still say nothing.

At one point your friend urges you to download and encrypted messaging app and, as soon as you do, they send you a message containing their social security number, stating “in case you need it.” You immediately delete the message and the whole app, because that’s not information you’d ever want access to. You also never wanted to be the recipient of photos of the bug bites on their legs, the sores inside their mouth, or photos of them in the bathtub, but they send them anyway and you give little reply.

After a few weeks, there comes a time where your friend and their husband return home during a break in their assignments and you’re briefly all living together. Your friend regular tells you, “I do everything myself. I never let anyone take care of me.”

You nod and think about how they retire to their bedroom every evening around 4 PM and wait for their husband to provide them with dinner in bed. They invite you to watch TV in bed with them, but you decline every time. You assert that you think bedrooms are personal spaces that shouldn't be intruded upon or shared casually. You say nothing when you come home from work and find what appears to be evidence that someone else has been snooping around in the guest room where you sleep.

Your friend’s husband often looks at you in a strange way, a way that you describe to someone else as making you feel like a piece of meat. He’s never been inappropriate, though, so maybe you’re just misunderstanding things. Your friend regularly tells you how her husband would treat you like a princess, and in a way he does. He frequently makes you meals, including your favorite breakfast. He even goes so far as to have a fruit smoothie ready for you when you stop by the house on your work break. Your co-workers joke that you’re being drugged, and you can’t help but wonder if it’s true.

You like to go for walks every day (primarily to minimize your time at the house) and your friend is quick to comment on your body, making observations about how toned your legs are getting. It should be a compliment, but it makes your stomach feel uneasy. Then they tell you that they have an open relationship with their husband and that they’re both allowed to sleep with other people. They tell you that, if they ever left their husband, they’d rather date a woman because they’re more emotionally intelligent. They tell you how emotionally intelligent they are.

Eventually they leave again and you’re relieved to be alone once more. There are still the text messages, the photos, and the 20-minute-long voice notes, but those are easy to ignore — much easier than the little ways your friend seemed to be trying to trigger a reaction out of you while they were around. Unfortunately, the solitude doesn't last for long. Your friend has an adult daughter who quickly moves into the house with you. You have no proof, but it feels like she's there to monitor you. She does remote work and sets up her desk in the center of the living room, the space where you used to spend the most time. Now you spend most of your time in the guest room where you sleep and feel trapped.

You begin, very quietly, to think about ways to get away. You don’t feel like you’re in danger necessarily, more so that you’ll never find peace as long as you’re dealing with these people. You say nothing, but you’re always searching for a way out. You silently beg God, the Universe, your ancestors for an escape route. That’s when the winds of change shift, quite literally.

A hurricane blows into town, which forces you to evacuate to a neighboring state. It’s there that you’re serendipitously reintroduced to an ex-boyfriend, someone with a warm and steady presence who seems to breathe a sigh of relief upon seeing you again. Your prior separation had felt like a "right person, wrong time" scenario and the two of you are able to pick up right where you had left off months earlier. While it feels a bit like rushing, he makes plans for you to move in with him a few weeks later.

You tell your friend that you’re moving out a couple days before it happens, pointing out that since their daughter was now staying at the house, they no longer need a house sitter. They, of course, don’t react well and start sending you articles about how to spot a narcissist, playing on fears you had foolishly confessed before realizing they were not to be trusted. Their daughter does too. Something tells you their intentions are to scare you away from your boyfriend, but mostly the articles remind you of the friend you’ve been plotting to escape.

Months later you're no longer in contact with your friend. You've blocked them on social media, changed your phone number, and moved across the country. Every now and then you still think of them and feel sick to your stomach. You have a new therapist now and you eventually tell her about that strange summer you spent housesitting.

"It sounds like they were grooming you," she says, right before asking, "What are you feeling in your body right now?"

Again, this is all hypothetical.