I Matched With My Own Boyfriend

It started with the phone.

Derek had always been careless with it — left it face-up on the counter, read me texts out loud, handed it to me to find a song. Then, sometime in our second year, that changed. He began sleeping with it tucked into the pocket of his sweats, zipped in, like a wallet he was afraid of being pickpocketed in his own bed. He stopped pulling it out in front of me at all. When a man who used to share his screen suddenly starts guarding it like a state secret, you already know. You just haven't let yourself say it yet.

I want to be honest about the rest of it, because it matters. By then Derek hadn't worked in nearly a year. He'd lost his job and never seriously looked for another, and somewhere in the fog of loving him I'd become the entire economy of our one-bedroom. My paycheck covered the rent, the groceries, the utilities, my student loans, and him. Whenever I said I was tapped out, he had a line ready, warm and rehearsed: *We're family. Family takes care of each other when times are hard.* He drained my savings a "tough spot" at a time, and I let him, because that sentence did exactly what it was built to do.

So the night the phone finally slipped free, I was almost grateful.

It worked its way out of his pocket while he slept and ended up against my leg, glowing. I genuinely only picked it up to put it on the charger — and the screen was a wall of notifications from a dating app. Match this, message that. Lit up like a slot machine. My first instinct was to slap him awake. Instead I lay there in the dark, heart slamming, and felt something cold and clear settle over me. I wasn't going to scream. I was going to *learn the whole thing.*

The next morning I called my friend Cass. Cass is the kind of friend who, when you explain an unhinged plan at 8 a.m., simply asks what she can do to help. She's also stunning, and — this is the part that mattered — she has the exact blue eyes Derek had always gone soft over, and the two of them had never met. With her blessing and a folder of her photos, I built a woman. I gave her a name, a job, a personality, a little laugh in her bio. Then I let the algorithm do what algorithms do.

We matched within a day. Of course we did.

For a week I was her. We talked constantly — he was funnier with her than he'd been with me in months, more attentive, more alive. He told "her" he was single. He told her he lived with a roommate. He told her things about his future that did not contain me anywhere in them. It should have gutted me. Mostly it just made my hands steady. Every lie was another brick I was quietly stacking.

When the flirting turned heated, I suggested we meet. And because I knew exactly which buttons to press, I suggested *he* book the hotel room — a man who hadn't paid for a meal in a year, who'd asked me only days earlier for cash to buy his mother a birthday gift. I'd handed him fifty dollars for that with a straight face, just to watch him grin, and I still think about that grin. He booked the room. With what money, I didn't ask. We picked a night.

That night, he kissed me goodbye on his way out the door, telling me he was driving to his mom's and would probably crash there. I told him to have the best time. I meant it more than he knew.

The second his car was gone, I went to work. I live in a big city, where a curb is the world's fastest disposal system, so I packed every single thing he owned into bags and boxes and set them out front. Then I called a locksmith. By the time the new lock clicked into place, "she" was texting him apologies — *running so late, I just want to look perfect for you, almost there!* Cass, an absolute saint, even sent over a couple of teasing photos with her face mostly out of frame to keep him on the hook. He sat in that hotel room and waited. And waited. I kept the fantasy alive long enough that he sent things to a woman who did not exist that I'm sure he'd have paid real money to delete.

I let him sit until almost one in the morning.

Then I sent the last message from her account: a photo of his belongings, already out on the sidewalk, being cheerfully sorted through by a stranger who'd beaten me to the good stuff. *Enjoy your stay,* I wrote. His name lit up my real phone half a second later. I blocked him, set it face-down, and slept better than I had in a year.

He was waiting outside my door Monday when I got home from work. Ugly-crying, the theatrical kind. He had nowhere to go, he was homeless, how could I do this to him. When the tears didn't move me, the mask slipped the way it always eventually did, and he got angry — grabbing at the door, trying to force his way past me into an apartment that wasn't his anymore. That was the part that stopped being funny. He threatened me. He threatened my *pets.* So I called the police, and a few days later I filed for a restraining order, and the paperwork did what my own voice never quite had.

I heard later that he moved a few hours away, to the one town where his family still is. And here's the part the universe added just for me: I heard he got a job. Within weeks. A whole year of "I can't find anything" and "we're family," and the moment he had no one left to drain, he managed it in a fortnight.

People ask if I feel bad about any of it. I don't. He went looking for a woman who'd give him everything for nothing. I just made sure he finally found her.