Double trouble: what happens when you discover your boyfriend is dating someone else?

Photographs Suki Dhanda

We had the same job, the same black clothes, the same eyeliner, the same black hair. We had the same passions, too. Both suckers for men who tell lies.

This is about how we fell in love.

It is two weeks after Easter in London, the sky so grey it’s like it’s been dyed in the wash. The news on the radio gives way to the programme I always keep half an ear out for, because it’s hosted by my boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend, “B”.

I am interested in the former partner of the man I loved… the man who has a key to my house, the man I trust to stay in that house when I’m away with my children, to feed my cat, eat from my fridge, sleep in my bed.

My friends are interested, too, and one of them is listening to B’s show on the school run. Gem sometimes texts me if she hears B make a reference to my boyfriend, an anecdote of their life together, though when I ask him why she’s telling it as if it happened last week, he rolls his eyes and tells me that’s just what you do “for the bit”. “She’s probably just trying to be entertaining,” he says. And I believe him.

One time, paranoid and anxious, I ask why B keeps using the words “my boyfriend”. Why is it always present tense? Is she in denial? Shouldn’t he – and I know it’s awkward, but – tell her about me?When he sighs with exasperation that he doesn’t know, hasn’t heard from her in months, that maybe she talks that way because she “isn’t over him,” again, I believe him.

But then a message pops up from Gem. “Are you listening to B’s show? Turn it on, now.”

I crank up the volume on the radio: a second’s pause, that static rush, my heart a snare. B is talking about the Netflix hit Baby Reindeer, a show about trauma and obsessive love. And that’s when I hear it.

“Performers like him are desperate, dark and pathetic,” she laughs, oblivious to my crushing panic. “I should know – I’m in love with one.” Seconds later: “I live with one.”

It is a punch in the gut, a violence. She is talking about my boyfriend.

Wanting to vomit, I call him, but he doesn’t answer. So, I send him a message. “Why is B saying she still lives with you?”

“Oh,” he replies, calm and measured. “That’s interesting.” I back away from my phone like it bites. This time, it’s different. This time, I don’t believe him. So, I do the only thing I can think to do, I open up social media and send B a message.

“Sorry this is out of the blue,” I write. “Are you and X still together? He told me you split, so I wondered, as you mention him as your boyfriend on your radio show. We’ve been seeing each other. Sorry if this is a shock for you. It’s a shock for me, too.”

She replies instantly. “I knew none of this. He’s here in my flat. We didn’t break up and he never moved out.”

Two women, two homes, two cats, two faces, two lives.

What follows moves fast: darting through DMs and iMessage and WhatsApp, leaving how could you and bastard in its wake. What hurts most aren’t the lies, but the words he wields to hurt us both.

I find out that when she confronts him about me, he piggybacks off Baby Reindeer. “Oh, her,” he tells his actual/other girlfriend – “she likes me… if you know what I mean.”

By the time I’ve sent B proof – photos of him at my house and at my parents’ flat, the two of us together over New Year, birthday cards in his handwriting, gifts, his clothes, screenshots of hundreds of messages – he’s forced to admit it happened, but claims we were only together “once”.

At home, I am falling apart and trying not to show it. I run the bath for my son and make dinner for my daughter; trying to be normal, to be “mama”. Inside, my stomach drops, the way it does at the apex of a rollercoaster. I can only do small things: tiny movements, pigeon steps. Everything is loud, my skin sensitive. I have an inexplicable temperature. I can’t tell the kids what’s wrong with me, though they know something is wrong. I call in sick to work.

Shock, the experts say, manifests in lowered blood pressure, clammy skin, rapid breathing. For me and B, it takes the woolly, awkward shape of disclosure; and on that first night, we – “the girlfriends”, shy and sensitive to each other as lovers – send dozens of texts; compare times and dates and locations and even underwear.

A pair of red Under Armour underpants, still lying on her bathroom floor. A pair of identical blue at mine. Under Armour, under siege. Nobody tells you betrayal is so banal.

I marvel at how tricky it must have been for him to pull off – how stressful, to maintain such a complex web of lies. Such an effort – like the time we both went away and he had to feed two cats, twice a day, going back and forth in London traffic! The way he had to flip between two different home screens on his iPhone, depending on who he was with!

We find out that when he was with me on New Year’s Eve in London, he’d told B he was in a different country altogether. That on the nights he was with B, he told me he lived as a “lodger” in a room that turned out to be little more than a cupboard. I couldn’t come over, he’d tell me. I wouldn’t like it.

That the “therapy” he went to on Mondays wasn’t for him alone, but couples’ therapy. That on his birthday, when I booked us a romantic stay at the seaside and he suddenly couldn’t make it, because he had to go to his sister’s, he was with B, eating cake.

That their estrangement; the awkward “I pick up my mail from her doorstep and make polite conversation” was, in fact, only as “estranged” as when one of you is in the bathroom brushing your teeth before climbing into bed.

This story – our story – isn’t unusual, though the similarities between B and I are striking. We even wear the same perfume. Double lives are all too commonplace. The one thing that is different – the thing that stands out – is that we got rid of him but kept each other. The first time we met after our lives unravelled, I was nervous. My hands tingled and I had the urge to swallow and cough simultaneously, as though the words for all we’d been through were climbing on top of each other to get out. I spent ages on my hair.

B arrived first and when I rushed in, late as usual and full of apologies, I knew her immediately. Her face, my face. Her clothes, mine. The same, but different. When we eventually parted that night, I clung to her; felt a strong and instinctive desire to keep her close.

Fast forward a year and that’s exactly what we’ve done.

B is the person I confide in at the dead of night, the person I panic-text when I’m on my way to a date or interview and she tells me, with trademark bluntness, to “get a fucking grip”. When B goes on foreign work trips, she shares her location with me from the back of a taxi, “so you know where to look for my body”. And she knows I would.

It's been more than a year since our lives were shattered, then forever intertwined. It’s our anniversary on the day I write this and we’re going out for dinner to celebrate with champagne.

Our ex was wrong: he told us we were the only ones, but we were always meant to be two.