So, I decided to find out what happened when I stopped trying to be good—and started doing whatever the hell I wanted.

I mean, everyone else seemed to be doing whatever they wanted and thriving. Why not me? Maybe I’d missed a memo.

Everyone else seemed to be lying and cheating.

Maybe adultery came with punch cards.

There was a guy from swing dancing. Charly. Very attractive. Married.

Which, in my brief post-divorce villain era, felt less like a dealbreaker and more like a personality challenge.

I approached him.

He said he was flattered. But married.

Then he added they were separated. Getting divorced.

Which immediately deflated my whole rebellious, burn-it-all-down fantasy. I wasn’t trying to be reasonable. I was trying to be bad.

That said, my commitment to being selfish and cruel lasted about five minutes before the Golden Rule kicked down the door like an unpaid bill. Turns out “treat others how you want to be treated” is still inconveniently true.

Given that my own divorce had been filed in December and wasn’t finalized until April—because the state wanted to give us time to reconsider—I understood that divorce could be a process. A gray area. A bureaucratic purgatory.

So, we started up.

And we carried on.

Unfortunately, his story kept… developing.

They were separated—but they hadn’t filed yet because his wife was ill.
They were separated—but her rich uncle might leave them money and he wanted to see how that played out first.
They were separated—but maybe they weren’t getting a divorce… yet.

But they were separated.

Logistically, I told myself at least that had to be true. Their house was two and a half hours away. He couldn’t possibly be commuting that much unless he was fueled entirely by lies and Red Bull.

Reader: he was.

I ended it because the math wasn’t mathing and the moral nausea was becoming inconvenient.

A couple of days later, I got a notice that my street was being resurfaced, and everyone had to park elsewhere. My car ended up in the church parking lot three doors down.

It was late—maybe two in the morning—and Charly had been texting and calling all day. I hadn’t answered.

So he escalated.

He showed up at my door.

Knocking.
Ringing the bell.
Then yelling.

“I know you’re home,” he called out. “I saw your car in the church parking lot. Why are you hiding from me?”

I want to be very clear: up until that moment, I had no reason to expect violence from him. He had never raised his voice. Never threatened me. Never done anything that would look alarming on paper.

But paper doesn’t account for tone.
Or entitlement.
Or the feeling of someone deciding they were owed access to you.

I sat in the dark, crying, trying not to make a sound, suddenly very aware of how alone I was in that house. My brain ran through my options.

I called Alan.

I told him what was happening. Where I was. What Charly was doing.

Alan—who is not confrontational, not intimidating, and not remotely interested in drama—said, without hesitation, “I’m on my way.”

I could have called Jason. Jason is large. Jason is protective. Jason has the kind of energy that says someone will learn a lesson tonight.

But I didn’t want police reports or court dates or a story that grew any bigger than it already was.

Eventually, there was silence. No knocking. No yelling. Just my own breathing, which I was trying very hard to keep quiet.

Then another knock.

I froze.

And then I heard Alan’s voice.

“It’s me. Alan.”

Ah yes. It is time I give Alan a more official role in this story.

You may recognize Alan Bellows from his uncredited role in Footloose as a small boy in a sportsball-looking shirt who is picked up by a woman and carried offscreen. He was about six. Watch for him. He’s adorable.

He is one degree from Kevin Bacon.

Alan is my middle brother, closest to my age, which meant he endured me the most. We played together constantly—until one of us got tired or hungry, at which point we pivoted seamlessly into bickering. This happened daily. Sorry, Mom.

We rode our bikes everywhere: to the Rec Center, to the mall, to drink Orange Julius and buy posters, which I made Alan carry home on his bike. This once resulted in a spectacular crash down “Killer Hill,” when my new kitty cat poster jammed into his wheel. I blame the hill. It was aggressive. Possibly sentient.

Alan is brilliant in the deeply annoying way. He codes. He writes. He cooks. He photographs. He comes up with devastatingly fast puns. He knows all the swear words. He once programmed a calculator to play Russian Roulette while I was still delighted by spelling “boobies” upside down.

He embraced computers before they were cool and eventually built DamnInteresting.com, which meant I started meeting people who already knew who my brother was. Alan once met Brandon Sanderson, who had read his work and was a fan. Alan had to ask him what he’d written. I cherish that story.

Alan got married. Then divorced. With the full support of the family. Watching him do that helped me realize I could survive my own. Five stars. Highly recommended.

At the time all this was happening, Alan was living with roommates, working, rebuilding, and quietly becoming himself again.

Which is why, when I called him that night, scared and whispering in the dark, he didn’t ask questions. He didn’t hesitate.

He just said, “I’m on my way.”

Coming back to the story—

Charly had left. I don’t know when. I don’t know why. I don’t know what he planned to do if I’d opened the door.

I only know that whatever it was, it didn’t feel good.

And although no confrontation took place, Alan came ready to meet one. Once again, my family showed up to get me out of trouble.

Not long after, everything detonated.

It turned out Charly and his wife were not separated.
Not divorcing.
Not anything.

He was just cheating.

On her.
With me.
And with a frankly impressive number of other women.

This surfaced in a massive, chaotic Facebook post—every woman tagged. Shock. Horror. Solidarity. Receipts.

What followed was less gossip and more emergency town hall.

Women compared notes.
Stories lined up.
Timelines clicked into place like a true-crime podcast.

There was no infighting. No “well, he told me—.”
Just a collective, stunned realization that we had all been sold the same lies in slightly different fonts.

The response was swift and brutal in the most satisfying way: no excuses, no minimizing, no “but he’s such a nice dancer.” Just warnings, accountability, and the social equivalent of locking the doors and turning off the lights.

I later found out Charly and his wife did eventually divorce.

Because he discovered she was cheating on him.

Apparently, fidelity matters deeply—
as long as you’re the one being betrayed.

Turns out, the rules were real.
They just never protected the people who followed them.