This book is a true account of my relationship with Kendal Overbay and the events that followed.
It is told from my perspective, drawing on my memories, messages, photographs, records, and other materials from the time. Written messages retain their original wording wherever possible. Some conversations are reconstructed from memory, as accurately as I can recall them.
What follows is what I experienced, what I was told, what I believed, and what I later came to understand.
Before I became the woman writing this book, I was an attorney.
I spent my days asking questions, sorting through competing accounts, and paying attention to details that didn’t quite fit. I understood that memory could be imperfect and that certainty was not proof.
And yet, when it came to the man I loved, I did almost none of those things.
I believed him.
I have asked myself how someone so careful with facts elsewhere in her life could have accepted one man’s word so readily.
The answer is painfully simple.
I loved him. And I didn’t believe that loving someone was supposed to require an investigation.
By the time I understood what that blind trust had cost me, there was very little in my life his lies had not touched.
I cannot go back and become the woman who knew sooner.
But I can tell her story.
If another woman recognizes something in it before she has explained away too much, sacrificed too much, or lost too much of herself, then maybe what happened to me can become more than what it cost me.
Maybe it can become the warning I wish I had been given.
J.T. Hart