My Best Friend Of 15 Years Asked To “Share” My Husband Because She Saw Him First. Then I Found Out She’s Been Stalking Him For 5 Years. What Should I Do Now?
The Visit to Beatrice
The next morning Leo and I drove to Beatrice’s house. It was about 40 minutes outside the city in a quiet neighborhood with big lawns and American flags on every porch. On the drive, Leo and I talked about what we were going to say.
“We just need information,” I said. “We need to understand what we’re dealing with.”
“What if her mom is just as crazy as she is?” Leo asked. “What if this runs in the family?”
“Then at least we’ll know.” I gripped the steering wheel tighter. “I’m tired of being in the dark. I’m tired of being surprised. Whatever Elena’s been hiding, I want to know.”
We pulled up to a small white house with a garden full of flowers and a cross hanging on the front door. My stomach was in knots. I had no idea what we were walking into. Leo squeezed my hand. “You sure about this?”
I nodded. “We need to know what we’re dealing with.”
We walked up to the front door and I knocked. A moment later the door opened. Elena’s mom was smaller than I expected, a petite woman with gray hair pulled back in a bun, a gold cross around her neck, and eyes that were sharp and tired at the same time. She looked at me, then at Leo, and her face tightened.
“I know who you are,” she said. Not “hello,” not “can I help you,” just that I know who you are.
“I’m Veronica. I’m Elena’s friend. This is my husband Leo. We were hoping we could talk to you about…”
“I know who you are,” she repeated. She looked at Leo with an expression I couldn’t quite read. Resignation maybe, or dread. “You better come inside.”
She led us into a small living room filled with religious artwork and family photos. There was a picture of Elena as a little girl on the mantle smiling in a white communion dress. Beatrice sat down in an armchair and gestured for us to take the couch across from her.
“So,” Beatrice said. “She finally made her move.”
I blinked. “You know what’s happening?”
“I know my daughter,” Beatrice said flatly. “I’ve been waiting for this since the day she told me she met him.” She nodded at Leo. “Why don’t you start from the beginning. Tell me what she’s done.”
I told her everything. The dinner where Elena made her demand, the groceries on our doorstep, breaking in with the copied key, cooking dinner in our kitchen. The months of unanswered texts to Leo. The evidence she’d been sneaking into our house and rearranging things. The drawing she’d made of herself in our wedding photo. Hitting herself and framing Leo. The recording that was useless because of what she’d done.
Beatrice listened without expression. When I finished, she closed her eyes for a long moment. When she opened them, she looked older somehow. “I hoped she’d grown out of this,” she said quietly. “I really thought the therapy had worked.”
“Grown out of what?” I asked. “What do you mean?”
Five Years of Stalking
Beatrice stood up and walked over to a cabinet in the corner of the room. She opened a drawer and pulled out a photo album. She brought it back and set it on the coffee table between us.
“She told me she met Leo about 5 years ago. You were all at some party together. She came home that night and talked about him for 3 hours. 3 hours, Veronica. She didn’t sleep. She just talked and talked about this man she’d met and how he was perfect and how they were going to be together.”
She opened the photo album. It was full of pictures of Leo printed from social media. Some of them I recognized from posts I’d made. Some of them I’d never seen before. He was in the background at parties, walking down the street, coming out of buildings. She’d been following him. Photographing him for years.
“This is the one I found first,” Beatrice said. She pointed to a page near the back. “It was a shrine. Candles arranged around Leo’s photos. A journal lying open, filled with his name written over and over. Mrs. Elena Leo. Elena and Leo forever. Our wedding day. Names for their children. I made her destroy it.”
Beatrice continued. “She didn’t speak to me for 2 weeks.”
I felt like I was going to throw up. This wasn’t an obsession that started at that dinner. This had been building for 5 years, maybe longer. “When did you find out about me?” I asked. My voice came out small.
Beatrice looked at me with something that might have been pity. “She called me sobbing the night she found out you two were dating. She called me every night for months. She’d cry herself sick. She stopped eating. She went to church every single day and prayed for your relationship to fail. She lit candles asking God to bring Leo back to her as if he’d ever been hers in the first place.”
Leo leaned forward. “How long has this been going on? The full truth.”
Beatrice’s face crumbled for just a second before she composed herself. “When you two got engaged, Elena stopped eating completely. I had to force her to drink water. She lost 15 lbs in 3 weeks. And when you got married, she stopped…” Her hands were shaking.
“What happened when we got married?” I asked.
Beatrice wiped her eyes. “She tried to end her life. Swallowed a bottle of pills the night before your wedding. I found her on the bathroom floor. I got her to the hospital just in time. She was in the psych ward for 3 days. She made me swear never to tell anyone.”
I felt the room tilt. 15 years of friendship. Sleepovers, secrets, late night phone calls. And the whole time Elena had been building this fantasy world where Leo belonged to her. She’d tried to kill herself because he married me, and she’d never said a word.
“There’s something else you should know,” Beatrice said. She was looking at me now with that same expression of tired resignation. “She tried to stop your wedding.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Two weeks before you got married, I started getting calls from your wedding venue. They said someone had been calling them repeatedly trying to cancel the event, claiming to be you, saying the wedding was off. I only found out because Elena accidentally used my phone to make one of the calls and they called back.”
I remembered. I remembered getting a panicked call from the venue coordinator asking if we were still having the wedding. I thought it was a mix-up, a glitch in their system. I never even thought to suspect Elena.
“And there was a letter,” Beatrice continued. “She wrote an anonymous letter to Leo about 3 months before the wedding. She sent it to his work address. I found a draft of it on her computer. It said you were cheating on him. That you’d been having an affair with your coworker for months. That he shouldn’t marry you.”
Leo’s face went pale. “I got that letter,” he said quietly. “I threw it away. I didn’t believe it. I thought it was just someone trying to cause trouble.”
“It was Elena,” Beatrice said. “She was trying to destroy you from the inside.”
“I thought she was better,” Beatrice said. “The therapy seemed to help. She got a job. She was functioning. She even told me she was happy for you too. I wanted to believe her.” She looked at Leo. “I should have warned you. Both of you. I kept hoping it would just go away.”
“What do we do now?” Leo asked. His voice was strained.
“She needs help. Real help. She needs to be committed again. But she’s an adult now. I can’t force her. The only way she goes back is if she’s a danger to herself or others.”
“She threatened us,” I said. “She said we’d regret making her the enemy.”
“That might be enough,” Beatrice said. “Combined with everything else. The break-ins, the stalking, the self-harm manipulation. If you document everything and report it, they might be able to get a psychiatric hold on her.”
