Preston replied: Sorry, I only date people who value others for more than free food.
Then he blocked him.
Adrien lost his mind.
That night, he tried to break into the apartment.
I found out because my doorbell camera pinged: movement detected.
There he was on the screen, jiggling the handle, then pulling a bobby pin from his pocket like he was in a bad spy movie. He leaned close to the lock, tongue out in concentration, and I watched from my couch with a blanket over my lap and a calm I didn’t recognize.
I’d changed the locks.
He hadn’t considered that.
When the lock didn’t budge, he stepped back and kicked the door lightly—not hard enough to break it, just hard enough to feel powerful.
Then he grabbed his phone and started typing furiously.
I didn’t answer.
In the morning, he sent his mother.
Darlene showed up with a rehearsed speech about “real women” and “standing by your man.” She looked me up and down like she was appraising a product.
“You’ll never find someone else like my son,” she snapped.
I smiled politely. “God,” I said. “I hope not.”
She called me immature. So I showed her the screenshots.
Her son calling me a meal ticket. Mocking my personality. Using me like a credit card. Renaming me Free Food with a money bag emoji.
Darlene glanced at them and shrugged like she was reading a grocery receipt.
“Well,” she said, unimpressed, “you are boring. Adrien needs excitement, and frankly, someone who can afford it.”
That was the moment I understood exactly where his entitlement came from.
It wasn’t a glitch. It was a family business.
She left muttering about “this generation of women,” and I shut the door behind her and leaned my forehead against it for a second, letting the quiet settle.
Then Adrien made his biggest mistake.
He filed for unemployment and listed me as his reference.
Claimed he’d worked for me as a personal assistant and social media manager for my business.
I don’t have a business.
He was never my assistant.
It was fraud.
Selene called pretending to be from the unemployment office to verify it. She did a terrible job.
“This is um… the unemployment place,” she said nervously. “We just need to confirm Adrien worked for you doing assistant things.”
I recorded the call.
Then I called the real unemployment office.
They take that kind of thing seriously.
That night, Adrien texted from Selene’s phone: You’re really going to get me in legal trouble over a joke?
I replied calmly: No. You got yourself in legal trouble by committing fraud. I just reported it.
He wrote back: I needed that money. How else am I supposed to live?
I stared at the screen for a long moment before typing.
Maybe try getting a job. Novel concept, I know.
He sent twenty-seven more texts.
I didn’t respond.
Because at that point, I wasn’t reacting anymore.
I was done.
Part 4
I thought reporting the fraud would be the end of it. A clean line. A legal full stop. I underestimated Adrien’s talent for escalation.
The unemployment office didn’t move quietly. Within days, his claim was flagged. Payments frozen. Requests for documentation. He couldn’t produce any, because you can’t document a job you invented.
The panic hit him like a delayed reaction. Sudden. Loud. Irrational.
That’s when the guilt campaign started.
Every morning I woke up to new posts he’d queued overnight: old photos of us—vacations, birthdays, candid shots where I was laughing because I trusted him—each paired with captions like:
Some people promise forever then change overnight.
Loyalty means nothing to narcissists.
I love too hard.
People ate it up.
It’s wild how fast the internet chooses a villain when one person cries first. Sympathy emojis poured in like rain. A couple of people I hadn’t spoken to in years sent vague check-ins that were really accusations in disguise.
You okay? Just saw Adrien’s post. Hope you’re both healing.
Both.
As if we were equally responsible for the fire he’d set.
Then came the fine.
Two thousand dollars, plus repayment of the one unemployment payment that slipped through before the claim was frozen. He texted me like I’d personally robbed him.
They’re punishing me because of you.
I didn’t reply.
Silence is unbearable to people who live on reaction.
So Adrien pivoted.
He decided the problem wasn’t his behavior. It was his image.
He launched a TikTok account called Dating After Narcissistic Abuse.
Profile photo: him staring sadly into the distance.
Bio full of buzzwords: healing, boundaries, self-love.
His first videos were shaky but confident in the way delusion often is.
“How to spot red flags early?” he said into the camera, eyes glossy. “If they cancel plans without explanation, that’s emotional control.”
Financial manipulation is real and men experience it too.
Men in the comments applauded him. Women argued with each other. The algorithm smiled.
Then one video hit fifty thousand views.
Not because it was good.
Because he messed up.
In a screen recording, while he was scrolling through his texts to show “how abusers manipulate,” a notification popped up at the top of his phone from a contact saved as: Rent money, maybe.
The comments detonated.
Not the rent money, maybe notification.