hands in my hair. It was September 30, and I spent the day fighting back tears, my stomach constantly on the verge of spilling its contents, though it was empty. When he started a game that night, I told him I couldn’t talk to him anymore, or ever again. That I was deleting Words With Friends. We went back and forth about the whys and the wherefores for a little while, but I knew I was right. It had become undeniable.
This could not be. It would destroy me, body and soul, just like God had promised.
Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death. Can a man take fire in his bosom, and his clothes not be burned?
I’d already let this ungodly affection for an unbeliever take root in my heart. If I didn’t rip it out with both hands, I would fall away and lose everything—my family, my friends, my whole life in this world—and in the world to come I’d be tormented in Hell for all of eternity, where the worm that consumes your flesh never dies and the fire is never quenched.
I didn’t imagine it was possible for this to be any more gut-wrenching than it already was, but I was swiftly corrected when the messages kept coming:
You know I love you. You know I do. It’s not just the idea of you. I know you.
You also know I’m not coming to Topeka.
My heart hit the floor with a sickening thud. It was what I’d unconsciously ached to hear for so many long months, followed by what I’d feared was true all along. I thought bitterly of Jack Boughton, a character from Gilead, the first book he’d ever recommended to me: “I think hope is the worst thing in the world. I really do. It makes a fool of you while it lasts. And then, when it’s gone, it’s like there’s nothing left of you at all.”
I hated myself.
Just before I deleted the app, he said, “South Dakota.”
It took me less than two minutes to find his name. On a list of South Dakota State’s Attorneys, there it was: “Chad Fjelland, Clark County.” C.G.’s username included that foreign letter combination—“F/j”—and I was sure this had to be him. I looked him up on Google and found a photo: there he is, sitting in an office at a big wooden desk with papers strewn about, law books filling the shelves against the far wall. He’s wearing a white button-up shirt, his tie thrown casually over his shoulder. I stared for a minute, feeling so strange to finally have a face.
I had to cut him out of my life forever, but first I had to know more. I wanted to know if he’d been honest. Online research had always been a strength of mine, so I spent a few minutes using my talents to uncover as much about him as I could, to see if he’d told me the truth. My mind swept through seven months of talk and came to rest on three data points that could possibly be confirmed independently: the size of the community he lived in and two deaths that had occurred there.
First, I looked up the funeral home’s website and searched through the obituaries. It only took a moment to find what I was looking for, and my heart swelled a little.
He’d told me the truth.
“Clark, SD” was my next search term. Population: 1,139.
Truth.
I felt frantic, pathetic, and out of control. I was entering true stalker territory, but I couldn’t stop; I paid $6.95 for a public records search.
POSSIBLE ALIASES: Chad G Fjelland.
“C. G.” Truth.
AGE: 39.
Older than I’d believed—fourteen years my senior—but he’d never told me otherwise. Truth.
MARRIAGE INDEX: No Records Found.
The most important part. Truth.
There was a list of addresses and phone numbers, but they meant nothing to me. I sat in the empty office staring at my computer screen for a long time. In the span of twenty minutes I’d gone from total ignorance to stalker-level scrutiny, and I finally had answers. I had a name and a face, proof that I’d been conversing with a real man who really existed in the real world. His name was Chad, even, just as I’d dreamed.
And now he was gone forever.
I crawled into bed and cried until I slept.
* * *
I tried to undo it all the next night, to take back my insistence that we never speak again.