A sociopath’s capacity for deception and betrayal is almost unfathomable

Every week, a chapter of my book, “Husband, Liar, Sociopath: How He Lied, Why I Fell For It & The Painful Lessons Learned” (available via Amazon.com, just click on the title or book cover) will be published here on Lovefraud. To read prior chapters, please see the links at the bottom of the post.

Chapter 50A: Oh My GOD! 

On my lawyer’s advice, I called all the locksmiths in the area, and they agreed to refuse Paul entry to the house without my consent. Fortunately, the threat of me moving out with the kids and incurring the rent of an additional apartment big enough for two kids, two dogs, and me had worked. Paul never moved back into the house.

At one of my early meetings with my divorce lawyer, she handed me a standard form and told me I needed to document all of our financial assets to prepare for the separation and the divorce. In addition, I would need to show how much my life with the children cost. I was not working, so this would be used to determine financial support from Paul during our separation as well as during the legally mandated divorce mediation. I did not have any electronic or paper copies of credit card statements for the past several years, but I recalled a year-end summary we had received for a prior year. I had never reviewed it, but I had filed it away.

Line by line, I poured through the annual summary from two years earlier, categorizing each item on a spreadsheet I had created with line items like, “food at home,” “food at restaurants,” “education expenses for the kids,” “Jessica’s lacrosse,” “Daniel’s karate,” and so on. As I looked at each expenditure, a memory of the event flashed to mind. I looked at many of them so differently now that I knew my life at the time had been a sham. The expense for an evening with Paul at a dinner theater in New Haven now had a completely different hue. Should I put it under “food at restaurants” or “Onna gets set up?” Tough call.

When I got to the section labeled “entertainment,” I was shocked by how large the total was for the year. How could we have spent that much money on entertainment—ever? My eyes widened as I looked at expense after expense for $1,000, $750, $2,200, totaling over $6,000 for a two-day period from a place I had never heard of. I did a web search for the name on the page. As the website materialized on my computer, my heart sank. It was a high-end “gentlemen’s club” in Chicago. Repelled and shocked, I dug through the website. To end up with bills that large, Paul was paying for “private sessions.” Feeling sick, I checked our bank statements. Significant cash withdrawals from ATMs in Chicago coincided with the same time period. I scanned down the page. There were other clusters of such expenses a month later, and then two months later. The bills were enormous.

The dates were familiar. I flipped through my old calendars to find the date of the surgery that I had to keep rescheduling, and which Paul could not attend due to a “critical client situation.” It overlapped perfectly with the obscene spending sprees on strippers. Nausea rose in me. I fought it back. Instead of attending to his wife while she was having surgery, he had been pawing and probably screwing a stripper, maybe multiple strippers. Fueled by adrenaline, I kept going.

Under the “travel” section of the credit card were hotel bills—bills for a hotel one town away from our home in Connecticut. They appeared religiously for five months almost exactly one month apart. What else could it be but evidence of an affair? I kept looking. A $600 expenditure in the “services” section of the credit card summary popped up. It was a name I did not recognize, accompanied by a telephone number. A few strokes of my keyboard later, a website for a Chicago escort service appeared on my screen. Incredulous, I rechecked the name on the credit card statement and rechecked the phone number. It was no mistake. Everything matched. Paul had hired a prostitute.

Start from the beginning:

Chapter 1

Go to previous chapter:

Chapter 49B

Go to the next chapter:

Chapter 50B

Notes

Identifying names, places, events, characteristics, etc. that I discuss here and in my book have been altered to protect the identity of everyone involved.