clearly, someone else had. With horrifying clarity, I realized exactly who that person was!

“Oh, my god.” I pulled out my phone with shaking hands.

“This can’t be happening.”

I dialed the number. The moment she picked up my call, I said, “You need to get here right now. I’m sending you the address.”

My fingers shook as I texted the location and told her to meet me behind the house.

I still couldn’t believe this was happening, that she could betray me like this, but it was also the only thing that made sense.

Twenty minutes later, I watched her walk around the corner of the house. She froze when she saw Mark. The look on her face was all the confirmation I needed.

“Mom,” I said, my voice surprisingly steady.

“Have you been texting him from my account for the past nine months? The account I made when we joked about mother-daughter double dates last year?”

The silence that followed was deafening. My mother’s mouth opened and closed like a fish out of water.

Mark looked like someone had just told him the earth was flat.

“All those times you visited, and I saw you smiling at your phone, constantly messaging… you were chatting to him, under my profile, weren’t you?”

“I… it was just texts!” My mom finally burst out. “We never met in person! It wasn’t real!”

“Wasn’t real?” Mark’s voice cracked.

“We talked every day. You told me… I thought…”

“He’s married! And you, you stole my identity.

How could you?”

“Mark?”

We all turned to see Jill standing there, and her face was anything but cheerful.

“Get out,” she said to Mark, her voice ice-cold.

“Jill, I can explain—”

“Everything in that house belongs to me. You can pack a bag and leave.”

“But I thought… we were…”

“You thought you were having an affair with my employee, who turns out to be my employee’s mother pretending to be her daughter.” Jill’s voice was steady, but I could see her hands shaking. “Pack your bag.

Now.”

The next morning, I typed up my resignation letter. Two paragraphs, professional and brief. I couldn’t face going back, couldn’t deal with the whispers and stares that would inevitably follow.

As I hit send, my phone lit up with another message from my mom — her 15th since last night.

I deleted it without reading it.

Some things you just can’t fix with an apology. Some betrayals cut too deep.

My mother had stolen my identity to catfish men on a dating app. Mark had fallen in love with a fiction.

And somewhere in between, real lives had shattered.

I closed my laptop and looked at my phone one last time before turning it off. 16 messages now. Each one probably full of explanations and excuses that wouldn’t change anything.

I’d only had this job for three months, but I’d managed to destroy my boss’s marriage before the probation period was even up.

Sometimes, the only thing you can do is walk away and try not to look back.

Source: amomama