I Dreamed the Perfect Blind Date Was Lying To Me Chapter 08

I didn’t contact Derek for the next week.

But he wasn’t idle.

On Tuesday, my dad called me out of the blue. My dad never called. My mom always relayed messages.

“Emily, I need to tell you something.”

His voice was different, carrying an excitement I couldn’t place, not his usual gruffness.

“Mrs. Walsh said Derek wants to take the whole family out to dinner this weekend. Not a date, just to thank us for our hospitality last time.”

My scalp tightened. “Dad, I don’t think we’re a good—”

“Hold on. He’s being respectful. It’s just a dinner. Not asking you to marry him. Your mom and I talked it over and feel it would be rude to say no. Will you go?”

I took a breath. “I’m not going.”

A few seconds of silence.

“Okay,” my dad said.

One word. But that one word weighed more than a hundred sentences from him.

He hung up, and I knew he was disappointed.

But I couldn’t, because that same afternoon, I had already gathered more information.

Jenna’s lawyer friend was named Clara Vance, a family law attorney in her mid-thirties who spoke sharply. Over one cup of coffee, she laid everything out.

“You’re saying he hid the fact that he has a child?”

“Yes. During the date, he said no kids. Mrs. Walsh told us ‘probably no kids.’ But I found proof of a child.”

Clara flipped through the printout I brought.

“Legally, dating isn’t a contract. Lying about it is wrong, but you can’t sue him for that. However,” she looked up at me, “if you want him to back off permanently, there are more effective tools than the law.”

“Like what?”

“The truth.”

She leaned back in her chair and tapped the table.

“This Mrs. Walsh, who connected you two. If she finds out he lied, her reputation is on the line.”

“And you mentioned he’s a regiment commander? The military takes that kind of thing seriously. Hiding major personal information during dating isn’t a good look.”

I was quiet for a while.

Clara looked me in the eye. “But you didn’t just come to me to make him go away, did you?”

I shook my head. “I want to know why he chose me.”

That was the question the dream had left me with.

Why me? Thirty-two. Unmarried. Good job but nothing extraordinary. Average looks. Independent but not aggressive.

A regiment commander. Six one. On the dating market, he could pick someone younger. More obedient.

Why me? Unless he didn’t need a wife, he needed a specific type of person.

Someone old enough. Someone with enough social pressure. Someone at a disadvantage in the dating market. But also someone with some income and life skills.

That kind of woman, in his calculation, would be easy to control, because she would be grateful.

The dream surfaced again. “You didn’t have any other prospects, right? You should be grateful.”

That night, I opened a social media app and created a new account.

Under a fake name, I joined a few military spouse support groups.

Not to dig into Derek, but to understand what real life was like for military dependents.

For days, I didn’t post anything. I just watched.

I read what they talked about.

One woman said she hadn’t seen her husband in two months. When her kid got a fever, she had to take him to the hospital alone by taxi.

Another woman said her mother-in-law came to stay and complained about her cooking every single day. Her husband always took his mom’s side.

One woman said she argued with her husband. He slammed the door and left. She sat huddled in the hallway of the military housing complex in the middle of the night, crying. The woman next door knocked on her door and brought her a cup of tea.

Another said she used to be a bank manager. After she moved with her husband, she had no job. Three years later, she tried to go back to work and realized she didn’t know how to do anything anymore.

I read every post carefully.

Not every military spouse lived like that. Some were happy, some had supportive husbands.

But I saw another possibility, one that would be very hard to walk away from once I walked into it, especially with a child that wasn’t mine.

I turned off my phone and pulled the blanket up to my chin.

Outside my window, a couple was laughing. The sound was clear, drifting through the glass.

I reached under my pillow, pulled out a pen and a piece of paper, and wrote one sentence in the dark: [When you have an exit, run.]

Then I folded the paper and tucked it back under the pillow.

I made a decision, not just to run, but to find out who he really was.

And then I was going to show him that I was not a chess piece on his board.