EP 8 - Torrah
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I'm Andrea Gunning, and this is Betrayal, a show about the people we trust the most and the deceptions that change everything. About a year ago, we heard from a listener with a story that floored us. Tora Giles is a history professor in Colorado, but she grew up on the California coast with her seven siblings. And we grew up on a farm, so my life was kind of wild and crazy and great. Grew up super religious in the Seventh-day Adventist church.

As a kid, the church was Tora's life. She went to a Christian school, her friends and after-school activities were all through the church, and she assumed that her life would follow the same path that was modeled by the women around her: graduate high school, get married, and start having kids. Funny enough, I thought as a kid that 20 years old was being a grown-up, and 25-year-olds were old. And so I thought for sure that I would be married by 20,

After high school, Tora became a full-time nanny, and she tried to give dating a shot. Tora started to realize that the traditional path

wasn't for her. So instead of trying to find a husband, she started planning for a new career. I decided to go to college and I studied history, which was really fun. After undergrad, she moved to Colorado to pursue a PhD in history.

She loved teaching, especially American history. It was so much fun.

keep this in mind it's january of 2017 and i decided it would be a good time to teach conspiracy culture and elections in united states political history by this time toro was in her mid-30s she'd tried dating for years but ultimately decided she didn't need romance her life was complete without it dating and romantic relationships were not going to be part of my life and i was sort of

In that class, she met a student named Aaron. Like her, he was also in his mid-30s. He had a service dog, this really cute English Mastiff named Osa.

And she had the best underbite. And she would be in the back of class chomping on a bone. So I was always very aware of his presence, partially because of her. He would come up after class and we would pet the dog and chat a little bit. Erin was a veteran, a former Army medic who'd lost his foot in an explosion in Iraq.

I knew that he had had an amputation to his leg. He talked about it fairly frequently. He had a handy cat parking pass. The disability was a big part of his life, but it didn't define him. And it certainly didn't hold him back. He was finishing his bachelor's degree on his way to start nursing school. After each class, he would stay behind and chat with Tora. He had a very slow way of speaking. There was no rush for anything in life.

I always had the vibe that he was one of those people that would talk forever if you left them. And so I would start to gather my things and eventually he started walking me to my car because my class was from 7 to 10 p.m. And it was very surface level chat throughout the whole time I was his teacher.

usually about class, usually about some interesting fact. He was like a sponge for information. Erin shared that he was Native American, Choctaw, which was a big part of his identity. And she noticed that he was always immaculately put together. He had kind of long hair that he kept tied back in this low knot on the back of his head, kind of slicked back, low hair.

I hesitate to call it a man bun because I know that would hurt Aaron's feelings, but that's what it was. And he had a cowboy Western vibe almost, not like costumey, but he wore a lot of very nice button-ups and jeans and leather boots. So that was pretty much his uniform. You just have this confident air about him.

That he knew he was smart, he knew he was good looking, but he was also kind and respectful and interesting and funny and talented. And I was a fan very quickly, just of his entire aura. Aaron and Tora kept talking every week after class for the rest of the semester. At some point in those conversations, I brought up the fact that I had been a nanny.

And a few months later, he came to me after class one day and said,

We need to switch where my son is going to daycare. What do you know about maybe hiring a nanny? So we chatted a little bit about that and that's how I found out he had a child. I didn't know that before. He wore a ring, so I knew he was married, but I didn't know that he had a kid. He was a baby at the time, maybe four or five months old. So that was sort of our first foray into anything personal was just that bit of advice he was seeking about finding good childcare.

After the class ended in May, Tora got a Facebook friend request. It was from Aaron. He was already Facebook friends with other teachers, so she accepted the request. Then about a week later, he sent me a message. About 9, 10 o'clock at night, I was already in bed and I thought, well, that's weird. What the heck? And so I rolled over and checked the message. It was from him. And he just said, you know, something very casual. How are you? And I said, oh, I'm good.

They chatted for a few minutes before Aaron revealed why he had reached out. And I said, oh, no, I had no idea.

So we chat a little bit about it. He said, yeah, actually, she was arrested last night. We got into an argument and she got physical. And I said, oh, that's terrible. I'm so sorry to hear that. And then I did the nice thing, which I've since learned not to do, which is I said, is there anything I can do to help? And he said, well, I might need some help with my son.

Tora read between the lines. Aaron was desperate. He was about to start an intensive two-year nursing program, and now he would likely have full custody of his infant son. She felt for his situation. And the next day, while Aaron was on campus, he swung by Tora's office with his baby in tow. He wanted to thank Tora for the semester and for offering to help.

And I sat and listened to him and I held the baby. And oh my gosh, he was the cutest little thing. And then as we sort of wrapped up that conversation, it was the end of my day. And I said, okay, well, if you need anything, let me know. And he said, well, actually, I have a paper I have to work on tonight. Would you be able to come over and just hang out with him while I do my homework for an hour or two? And then I'll make dinner. Almost reflexively, she said yes. It was more this like Christian sense of duty that I had been trained into.

Someone needs help, you show up even if it's inconvenient or you don't really want to. And that was my first thought is I don't really want to. I don't really want someone who's going to rely on me. I don't really want to be involved in someone else's drama. And I have a full-time job. I'm teaching. I'm busy. In addition to that, she didn't want Aaron to mistake her kindness for something else. I'm worried all the time that

Men are going to take my presence as some sort of an invitation. And I was so anti-dating and relationships that it was just something I never wanted to foster. So I'm thinking about all this as I'm driving the 20 minutes to his house. Like, okay, I'm going to have to think of boundaries. I'm going to have to be careful with saying yes. When she got to his house, her anxiety dissipated.

He was just Aaron, and that made her feel comfortable. He was himself, the way he always was with me after class, just very warm and friendly and kind and thoughtful. So I stayed, had dinner, and then, you know, stay and we'll have an adult beverage is what he used to call them. Stay and we'll have an adult beverage after the boy goes to bed. And I didn't really have anything going on, so why not?

So I stayed and we had a beer, sat on the back patio and he told me a little bit more about what was going on and it was pretty bad. There were holes in the wall going up the stairs. There was a hole in the wall in the dining room and we just talked and talked and talked and talked. He shared a little bit of the emotions that came up with him. Oh, I feel bad and she is my son's mother, but also we can't keep doing this and I need to get out of this marriage.

That night, they ended up talking until 1 a.m. I have work at 8 a.m. And he said, just crash in my guest room. Here's some clean pajamas. Here's a toothbrush. Just crash downstairs. And I did, which is so out of character for me. I felt a little weird, but I was very happy to be around him and just wanted to stay there and be helpful. I love to be helpful. I love to be needed.

Soon, she was going over to Aaron's every few days to help out with his son. It felt like the right thing to do. I was always sleeping in the guest room. I made it very clear to him, I don't let people touch me. I'm not interested in a romantic relationship. I'm just here to help.

I want to be your friend. I want you to feel supported. But that's as far as this is going to go." And I just kept telling him, like, "We're just friends. I don't let people touch me. The fact that I give you hugs is kind of exceptional. You have to respect that." And he really did. After Aaron would put his son to bed, the two of them would stay up and have a drink on the back patio and just talk about life. It became their little ritual.

He was a very guarded person. So a lot of what he would talk about was things that were very present right now. If he brought up the past, it always felt like kind of an honor that he trusted me with that story. And he would point that out in a very subtle way of, oh, I don't really tell people this story, but you're different. We just never ran out of things to say. After about two months of this, Tora went back home to visit her family in California.

The whole time I'm with my family, I'm bringing him up and I'm talking with him on the phone. And they're seeing that this person is making me kind of giddy and smiley and those kinds of things. She had never talked about a friend like this before. When she got home from that trip, she went straight to Aaron's house. He had cleaned the whole house.

He had some of my favorite music on. Baby was in bed. He had, you know, a bouquet of flowers and a card welcoming me home and thanking me for being his friend. And that was my first sort of inkling, like, hmm, I'm gonna have to keep an eye on this because here I was at home kind of being giddy about this person and here he is bringing me flowers. So there was this undercurrent starting where I'm repeatedly saying to him, like, we're just friends, but we're friends who are...

snuggling on the couch watching a movie, not touching. He just started just leaning, like, my head on his shoulder or something. So benign, so middle school. But it was perfect for me because I wasn't ready to do that. One night, while they were up late talking on the patio, Aaron finally said what they had both been thinking. He said something to me like, I think you're in love with me. And I said, I think you're in love with me. And that was it. We were in a relationship after that. Ha ha ha ha.

That day became their anniversary. I leaned in and it was the most fulfilling time of my whole entire existence. I'm getting emotional just talking about it because that part is perfect in my mind.

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Tora moved into his house and their relationship deepened. That's when Aaron opened up about his traumatic childhood. He said that both of his parents were abusive. His family was incredibly complicated, incredibly damaged, incredibly dysfunctional. And these were the reasons that he's so guarded. These are the reasons that he doesn't have a relationship with them or see them or go to visit them. When he was 18, he ran away from home and joined the military. At the time, the war in Iraq was just beginning.

He worked his way up to become a special forces medic, but his military career ended in tragedy. He got hurt in Iraq. They were on a drive through a city of some kind and hit an IED and the Humvee in front of them blew up. Theirs didn't, but the impact knocked theirs off its balance. He got hurt. His foot was amputated because of that injury and he was medically retired and then came home

Aaron spent weeks in the hospital recovering from his injury. And even in this time of crisis, his family turmoil continued. His dad showed up to the hospital and tried to get medical power of attorney so that he could sell Aaron's portion of land that he had been left by his grandparents on the Choctaw Reservation in Oklahoma.

So Aaron fought tooth and nail to get better, to get stronger, and kicked his dad out of his life. This is one of the reasons he needed Tora's help, because he didn't have anyone. His family and his ex-wife, they weren't safe people. Tora realized he'd spent his entire life moving from one traumatic situation to another. The man was covered in enormous scars.

Everything about him screams, I have had a hard life. I have had a physically hard life. I've been injured. I've had surgeries. Even though it had been years since Aaron was injured in the war, it was part of his everyday life. He walked with a very slight limp and kept that leg pretty stiff, but he always kept a sock on that foot. And I just figured he wanted to protect it.

He had a couple of different doctors who were working on maybe a better prosthetic because he ended up injuring his knee on that same leg and we thought maybe he needed a little bit more support from that prosthetic. And that wasn't his only injury from the war. He'd also injured his back, his shoulder, and his arm. They were constantly getting re-injured, causing Aaron to go to the doctor in pain. But despite all this, he still fought for full custody.

Especially because of his childhood, Aaron was determined to show up for his son. He was an incredible father. He was so attentive and so loving and so affectionate and just lit up when it came time to go get the boy out of bed or read the boy his bedtime story. We called him the boy. I'm going to call him the boy because I'm not going to say his name.

The boy was only a few months old when Tora met him, and she was there for all of his big firsts. The boy and I were just absolutely connected at the hip from day one. When it was time for him to start eating solids, I was the one who decided how that should go because I have 20 years of child care experience, and this is his first child. He and I would just light up to be around each other.

The boy took his first steps to Torah. The three of them fell into a kind of domestic bliss based on a foundation of love for each other and love for Aaron's son. After a year together, Torah felt like this was her family now. She didn't want to go through the formalities of a wedding and marriage. So instead, they lived as common-law spouses. They just started calling each other husband and wife. With Aaron in school, Torah took on more financial responsibility. He's a retired pastor.

veteran, so he gets some money, but you know, life is expensive. So we were always a little bit stressed on money. He really liked being a provider and making sure that the baby had everything he needed. But that usually meant that there was no food in the refrigerator for adults. So I started doing things like pitching it on groceries and I took over the Wi-Fi and the trash bills.

Aaron had to make a monthly home equity payment to his ex-wife, and the expenses just kept coming. Oh gosh, it was just never-ending. We needed a new roof, but we didn't have any money. We needed to pay off $5,000 in credit cards in order to get a refinance on the mortgage so we didn't lose the house. Despite the stress of living paycheck to paycheck, Tora was filled with love for her family. Everything was precariously perfectly balanced.

That was until Aaron got sick. One day, he woke up in excruciating pain with a very high fever. Tora had to go to work, so Aaron went to see their family doctor by himself. And when he got there, his fever was so high, he needed to go to the ER right away. One of the things that they thought might be going on when he was in the ER was that he was having some kind of an infection from his amputation.

He called Tora from the hospital and she rushed over. But when she got there, he wasn't in a hospital room. Aaron was just sitting by the hospital entrance in a wheelchair. He said that they ended up accusing him of being pain med seeking. And he said that was racist. That was because he was brown. He literally ripped the IV out of his arm and stormed out of the hospital. And I kind of yelled at him all the way home. I'm like, what were you thinking? You obviously need help. Something is going on.

In addition to the fever, Aaron was in excruciating pain, debilitating chronic pain from his old combat injuries. But this time, his doctors weren't able to figure out what was going on. So Tora stepped in to take care of him.

This whole time I'm icing his back, I'm getting the ice packs for his knee. He had special equipment for icing his shoulder. I'm driving him around to doctor's appointments because he's in too much pain to drive. I can see the pain on his face. I can see him changing and drawing into this pain and his life of being in chronic pain.

He stopped going to the gym and then he stopped working out in the garage and then he stopped moving eventually. He just sat around all day and the house stopped getting cleaned. And this is all because he's in excruciating pain and he's miserable. He spent weeks on the couch, unable to function. To keep his spirits up, he showed Tora his favorite YouTube videos. He mentioned, "Have you ever heard of Stolen Valor?" And he pulled up YouTube

And we spent, I would say, probably an hour watching YouTube videos of people being exposed for "stolen valor." "Stolen valor" is the term for people who impersonate military service members and veterans.

And so there's lots of videos on YouTube of people going up to a person wearing a uniform in, say, a mall and saying, your bars are on the wrong side of your collar. Your patch is upside down. You are not supposed to be in this uniform. You know, shaming them for this act of stolen valor. And this was something that he was very amused by.

that these people are getting caught and shamed publicly. He loved it. He thought it was so entertaining. It was a welcome distraction from his pain, especially considering the price he was paying for his military service. She understood why he liked the Stolen Valor video so much. So as he withdraws into this chronic pain, I'm pushing harder and harder

to make sure that bills are paid, to make sure the house is taken care of, make sure the baby has everything he needs, make sure the baby got to go to the park today and play outside. I just started picking up more and more of the slack as he withdrew into being miserable. It was awful to watch the person that you're so in love with falling apart in front of me.

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One thing I love about Guardian Bikes is their focus on safety. They've got this unique sure-stop braking system that makes it super easy for kids to stop safely, so you don't have to worry about your little ones taking any tumbles. If you're thinking about what to get your kids or grandkids this holiday season, I can't recommend Guardian Bikes enough.

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Aaron eventually started pain management therapy, and Tora felt helpless. He was taking oxycodone, I believe, Percocet. Anyway, he was taking one of those. And he was supposed to take like one a day. He was taking like two or three because he was in so much pain. He said he knew what he was doing. He was in nursing school and had years of training as an army medic. One night before he came to bed. He went to the shower, he came back into the room and he had a patch on his shoulder. I said, what's that?

And he said, oh, it's fentanyl. It's great. I'm not in any pain. It's amazing. And I said, but you took your meds today? He said, yeah. And I said, isn't that how people overdose? And he kind of poo-pooed me. I know what I'm doing. I'm not an idiot. It's fine. I'm going to bed. Good night. I've had a bad day. We're not going to have a fight about this. I was so uncomfortable. And I just sat there staring at his back, wanting to rip them off, but trusting him at the same time.

In the morning, Erin was unresponsive. So I grabbed my phone and I called 911, hysterical, said, my husband's not breathing. He was asleep and he's not waking up. The 911 operator instructed her to begin chest compressions until the paramedics arrived. And the whole time I'm doing chest compressions, I'm like, he's cold. He's gone. This man is not alive.

The whole time in the background, the boy is just screaming my name. The paramedics arrived and confirmed what she already knew. There was no bringing Aaron back. She called friends to come over and together they waited for the coroner. Not knowing what else to do, she fixated on the boy. He was three. Tora tried to distract him, play with him, but he wanted to know what was going on.

He loved us a little Prince and we started saying, you know, daddy went to hang out in the stars with the little Prince and the Fox. Before the coroner came, Tora and their friends took turns saying goodbye. We all went up and sat with Aaron and I sat down and I, I told him I will miss you every day for the rest of my life. And then he was gone.

But his death would reveal an avalanche of discoveries. It began on that very day when his ex-wife showed up at the front door. The police had notified her of Aaron's death and his ex-wife called his family, his estranged family. About 10 o'clock, they knock on my door and the boy's mom showed up.

and insisted on sitting down and talking to me. I don't know this person at all other than the reputation that I have been very carefully spoon-fed for three years, which is that she is awful and a horrible person. And she came in like a blast of cold air, sat down in my living room and said, "If you want to be in my son's life, there's some things you need to know." First of all, Aaron's not Choctaw, Aaron's Black.

And I kind of laughed at her. I'm like, "Okay, lady, like really? We're gonna do this right now?" Given the circumstances, this comment seemed absurd and irrelevant. But his ex-wife insisted that there were truths about Aaron that Tora needed to know. Before she could share more, Aaron's biological family arrived. They were surprised to meet Tora. They didn't know she existed.

It was Aaron's mom and Aaron's brother, who is very much a black man. They came in, they sat down in my living room, and I told them about me and my life with Aaron, how long we'd been together. And she said, he wasn't a good person. And I thought, well, that's a really weird thing to say to a grieving widow.

Tora had seen pictures of Aaron's mother, father, and brother. But these people in her house, they weren't the same ones she'd seen photos of. Nothing made sense. From Aaron's sudden death to the arrival of this family she didn't recognize. But they were his family. And now, they wanted the house back right away. I gave it a lot of thought and I called my family on a Zoom call and I said, okay, I'm going to make it the house.

I don't own it. The name's not on it. I don't have any right to it. And my friend, the lawyer said, take what's yours, what you bought together and nothing else.

Tora packed her car with a few boxes and prepared to leave. She'd also be leaving the boys she'd raised from infancy to nearly age four. But she knew she wasn't part of his biological family. It was clear that with Aaron gone, Tora just didn't have a place in the boys' life. I reached down and I picked him up and I held him really close and I said, never forget I love you and I'm your ama and that will never change. And she fell out of the road and drove away and I never saw him again.

Before walking out of the house for the last time, she decided to take Aaron's laptop with her. Her brother came to meet her and together they drove back to their parents' house in California. I fell apart. I fell apart. I wasn't getting out of bed. I wasn't taking care of myself. I was eating. I was a disaster. At first, she fixated on his death, how and why it happened. She got a copy of his autopsy report.

When I got his autopsy, it was very much an overdose. He had on double the dose and he had taken double the dose of oxycodone at the same time to go to bed. And there was something else on his autopsy that stood out. On his autopsy, it said he had a brace on his leg. It said brace on his left leg. And I thought, well, that's a really weird way to say prosthetic. And that was the last I thought of it.

The questions that came up right after his death about his family, his race, she just didn't have the capacity to think about all of that at the time. I stayed very much in grieving widow mode for two months. And it wasn't until after the second month that I opened my eyes finally. So I just let a lot of this stuff slide and thought like, either I'll deal with it later or it's not true or it's a misunderstanding. And then after two months, I opened his computer again.

And everything changed instantly. So I opened the computer, got right in on the first try, knew the password. And I opened his pictures and I started looking through and there were some screenshots in there that sent me to his text messages. All of his text messages are on his computer. And immediately, within 20 seconds, I realized that he was in a relationship with somebody long distance. I spent an hour combing through their text messages, which were...

and filthy. And the worst part of all of it, there were two things that were just devastating. The first was that the things he said to her while they were having this like fantasy relationship is the same stuff he would say to me when we were intimate verbatim. And he would tell her, well, I have time and I won't have the boy on these dates because I was going to be gone for a conference on those dates. So that was devastating.

a lot to realize that he was manipulating her and me to keep us both on the hook back and forth. But then the worst thing I found in everything I found was him saying, nobody has ever loved me. Nobody. Except for you. And that is the biggest lie he ever told. And just the most infuriating, devastating, cruel thing he could have said was that nobody had ever loved him.

And here I had just spent eight weeks, bottomed out, devastated, flatlined because this man had died. And I had given him everything. She kept looking through his texts and found more women. He was texting four other girls, couple from Tinder, couple from school. One of my favorites was a girl he had been in school with who had been to our house and knew me. And they were talking about how she could move in and her teenager could live in the basement bedroom.

It's a three-bedroom house, and his son lives in one of those bedrooms. So presumably I'm not living there as she's moving in. So that was like, what the heck? Is he just going to kick me out? Like, this is recent. Aaron was talking to these women up until the week he died, making plans with them and inviting them over. And he was saying, well, you know, I don't ever have anything going on on Tuesday nights.

We could come over for dinner, we could watch a movie, but then I have to go to bed around 10. Because I was teaching. I was at class 7 to 10 on Tuesdays. So he knew I would stay at work and go to class. So that was like, I guess, kind of opening that box of like, okay, so he's been doing stuff behind my back. I don't know what. I still don't. I don't need to. It doesn't matter. He offered it. In the two months since Aaron died, these women had been trying to get in touch with him.

So Tora messaged them back to let them know he was gone. The girlfriend messaged me back. What? No, this isn't real. What's going on? Who are you really? Did you steal his phone? Just total disbelief, which is fair. It was completely fair. And I said, yeah, no, real. Here's some pictures of us. We've been together for this amount of time, three years. And she said, we've been together for longer than that. They've been together when he was married to his other wife.

Tora kept digging through his laptop, and that's when she saw the photo that changed everything. On his computer were all these pictures of his honeymoon, including his two fully attacked feet on the beach, much, much after he was supposedly injured. I just stared at these feet, like, these are his feet. I recognized one of them, but I'd seen one of them without a sock on.

The entire time they were together, Erin kept a sock and a brace on his prosthetic foot. She had never actually seen his amputation site. He didn't ever, like, pop off a prosthetic or anything like that in front of me. And he needed to shower downstairs because it was really hard for him to step into the shower upstairs because it was a tub-shower combo.

So he basically had his own bathroom in the downstairs part of the house. So I never saw him fully unclothed because he kept a sock on it when we were, you know, sleeping. So I never questioned it. It was his private business. That's his medical history. And there was nothing for me to say, well, that seems off.

She saw the monthly checks coming in from the military. She heard the hard prosthetic foot hitting the ground when he walked. Plus, he was self-conscious about his injury. She never pressed him further. Why would I question that? Who would that make me? But after she saw the photo of Aaron's two feet in the sand on his honeymoon, Tora called their family doctor, the doctor who'd done physical exams on her and Aaron in the past year.

I said, did you ever look at his prosthetic or looked at his amputation site? And she said, oh, I'm sure I did. Well, maybe not actually. Let me think. Maybe I didn't. And I just sat there flabbergasted. And at that point, that was what was finally like, yeah, this man did not have an amputated foot. I don't know what he was wearing. I don't know why he was wearing it, but it wasn't a prosthetic foot.

This shocking revelation caused her to question the whole story she'd been told about his military career. Found his DD-214, which is like his exit paperwork from the military, and it didn't add up with what he told me. On his discharge papers, it said he did join the military at 18, and he did go to combat once, not four times like he'd said. He wasn't a special forces medic like he'd claimed.

She doesn't know why he left the army, but it wasn't because of an injury. Her entire understanding of Aaron changed. And I went out into the kitchen and I poured myself, I am not joking, eight ounces of tequila down to that. My dad lives in the country. Thank goodness. Walked out way out into the hills and just screamed and screamed and screamed until I lost my voice.

The person I had just spent three years loving and caring for and two months devastated over his loss didn't exist. And I came to this point that day where I said, at the end of the day, he took everything from me. And when there was nothing left to take, he took himself from me. The person I had loved and been in a relationship with disappeared.

And with him went three years of my life into a black hole. Who was Aaron? And what was his real-life story? I was Googling everything I could. I'm a historian. I can research like nobody's business. So I'm just Googling everything I can think of to try to find out who this person is. I'm looking on Facebook. I'm looking on Instagram, social media. She started reaching out to people who were connected to Aaron. You know, now I'm asking questions, right? What about these people? It's not real.

She found out that the family who showed up at Aaron's house, those people she didn't recognize, they were his biological family. And they were very different from what Aaron described.

So I didn't know about his real mom, even though she's a real person who lives in a real place. I knew about some other version of someone that he could completely control that narrative. And I'm never going to look her up and say, is this the truth? I was the perfect person for him because I chose to trust him. And he practiced different things. He tried out different things to test me to see if I would trust him. And I did. I always did. He very carefully curated my life.

When she started looking back on it, she realized that Aaron had slowly isolated her from anyone who'd known him for more than four years. Anyone who would contradict the narrative he was telling her.

When I finally learned everything and could sort of lay out a life timeline for him, there is about a three to five year capacity on the stories he was telling people. And then he would move on in some way. He would leave town. He would start a new school program, something like that. He'd get married. So he was coming to the end of that. And his stories were getting a little thin eventually.

The amputation, the chronic pain from combat wounds, even his Native American ancestry. It was all a lie. The one thing that was real is that he was sick. He had an opioid addiction. She sees that clearly now. And she sees that as a part of a larger pattern of behavior. He's an addict. So he's always looking for kind of that next better hit of whatever it was. And sometimes it was a partner and sometimes it was...

becoming a parent and sometimes it was a new degree in school. But, you know, he's tying things together, trying to make himself a life that he would have been happy with. So he just kept shifting it into this story that he liked a little better and a little better, a little better. And it still didn't satisfy him. He still needed narcotics. I feel very strongly that he wanted to stay in our life, but wasn't sure how to do that.

Do I think that he put the patches on and hoped he would fall asleep and never wake up? Yeah, I do. You can probably tell that Tora's been through years of therapy to understand and heal from what happened to her. My doctor had me talk to the therapist in her office, and I owe everything to his methods. He gave me terminology, and that terminology completely changed how I was going through this.

It's been four years since Erin died, and she discovered that the man she was building a life with was a fraud.

I'll still be driving down the road and have a random memory and go, "Oh, yeah, that's probably what happened." I'm still less and less and less and less putting things together and making the pieces fit. But I'll never know everything and I'll never have closure. And I think that's probably the most important thing. It's like closure isn't necessary for you to move on and heal. It's really not. It would help, but it's not necessary.

Instead, she's tried to find understanding for the real person Aaron was. With him gone, she's been able to access a kind of empathy. Not to excuse his behavior, but to make peace with it. He was broken. He was broken by a world that breaks people and spits them out. I think he grew up feeling inadequate. He grew up feeling unloved. And he wanted to write himself a better story than that. And instead of becoming someone who would be loved...

He became someone who he thought was lovable and adjusted it for each person as he met them. Tora moved back to Colorado where she still teaches history, but she says that this time around, she's a different person. She's forever changed by the love she had with Aaron and the pain he put her through. We end every episode with the same question. Why did you want to tell your story?

This is an incredible story that sounds like it's made up, it sounds like a soap opera, sounds like a drama movie, but it's so real and it's not the only one. And there's so many stories like this. The more we talk about it, the more out in the open we bring these people who exist in the shadows and want to operate from the shadows. We have to understand them. We have to assign terminology to the disorders that cause them to act in these ways.

and we have to support people who've been through it. And my mission through all of this became sort of explaining to more and more people that you can heal, you will heal, what you're experiencing is valid. Something that I say so often to this day is my story was true and my experiences were valid. My story was true, even if his wasn't, mine was.

On the next episode of Betrayal. I went out into the garage area. The car was gone. Like, where did he go? If you would like to reach out to the Betrayal team or want to tell us your betrayal story, email us at BetrayalPod at gmail.com. That's BetrayalPod at gmail.com. We're grateful for your support.

One way to show support is by subscribing to our show on Apple Podcasts. And don't forget to rate and review Betrayal. Five-star reviews go a long way. A big thank you to all of our listeners. Betrayal is a production of Glass Podcasts, a division of Glass Entertainment Group in partnership with iHeart Podcasts. The show is executive produced by Nancy Glass and Jennifer Faison. Hosted and produced by me, Andrea Gunning. Written and produced by Monique Laborde. Also produced by Ben Fetterman.

Associate producers are Kristen Malkuri and Caitlin Golden. Our iHeart team is Allie Perry and Jessica Kreincheck. Audio editing and mixing by Matt DelVecchio. Additional editing support from Nico Arruca. Betrayals theme composed by Oliver Baines. Music library provided by MIB Music. And for more podcasts from iHeart, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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