Tora
Appearances
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
His family was incredibly complicated, incredibly damaged, incredibly dysfunctional. And these were the reasons that he's so guarded. These are the reasons that he doesn't have a relationship with them or see them or go to visit them.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
This is an incredible story that sounds like it's made up. It sounds like a soap opera. It sounds like a drama movie. But it's so real and it's not the only one. There are things we might not know about somebody we live with. And there's so many stories like this.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
He got hurt in Iraq. They were on a drive through a city of some kind and hit an IED. And the Humvee in front of them blew up. Theirs didn't. But the impact knocked theirs off its balance. He got hurt. His foot was amputated because of that injury. And he was medically retired and then came home.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
His dad showed up to the hospital and tried to get medical power of attorney so that he could sell Aaron's portion of land that he had been left by his grandparents on the Choctaw Reservation in Oklahoma. So Aaron fought tooth and nail to get better, to get stronger, and kicked his dad out of his life.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
The man was covered in enormous scars. Everything about him screams, I have had a hard life. I have had a physically hard life. I've been injured. I've had surgeries.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
He walked with a very slight limp and kept that leg pretty stiff. But he always kept a sock on that foot. And I just figured he wanted to protect it. He had a couple of different doctors who were working on maybe a better prosthetic. because he ended up injuring his knee on that same leg, and we thought maybe he needed a little bit more support from that prosthetic.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
He was an incredible father. He was so attentive and so loving and so affectionate and just lit up when it came time to go get the boy out of bed or read the boy his bedtime story. We called him the boy. I'm going to call him the boy because I'm not going to say his name.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
The boy and I were just absolutely connected at the hip from day one. When it was time for him to start eating solids, I was the one who decided how that should go because I have 20 years of childcare experience and this is his first child. He and I would just light up to be around each other.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
He's a retired veteran, so he gets some money, but, you know, life is expensive, so... We were always a little bit stressed on money. He really liked being a provider and making sure that the baby had everything he needed. But that usually meant that there was no food in the refrigerator for adults.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
So I started doing things like pitching in on groceries, and I took over the Wi-Fi and the trash bills.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
Oh gosh, it was just never ending. We needed a new roof, but we didn't have any money. We needed to pay off $5,000 in credit cards in order to get a refinance on the mortgage so we didn't lose the house.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
One of the things that they thought might be going on when he was in the ER was that he was having some kind of an infection from his amputation.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
He said that they ended up accusing him of being pain med seeking. And he said that was racist. That was because he was brown. He literally ripped the IV out of his arm and stormed out of the hospital. And I kind of yelled at him all the way home. I'm like, what were you thinking? You obviously need help. Something is going on. He had a very high fever. He was in a lot of pain.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
I could see that he was miserable. It had been a long, awful day sitting in the ER getting tests done on him and all of them coming back negative.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
This whole time I'm icing his back. I'm getting the ice packs for his knee. He had special equipment for icing his shoulder. I'm driving him around to doctor's appointments because he's in too much pain to drive. I can see the pain on his face. I can see him changing and drawing into this pain in his life of being in chronic pain.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
He stopped going to the gym and then he stopped working out in the garage. And then he stopped moving eventually. He just sat around all day. And the house stopped getting cleaned. And this is all because he's in excruciating pain and he's miserable.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
He mentioned, have you ever heard of Stolen Valor? And he pulled up YouTube. And we spent, I would say, probably an hour watching YouTube videos of people being exposed for stolen valor.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
And so there's lots of videos on YouTube of people going up to a person wearing a uniform in, say, a mall and saying, your bars are on the wrong side of your collar. Your patch is upside down. You are not supposed to be in this uniform. You know, shaming them for this act of stolen valor. And this was something that he was very amused by, that these people are getting caught and shamed publicly.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
He loved it. He thought it was so entertaining.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
So as he withdraws into this chronic pain, I'm pushing harder and harder to to make sure that bills are paid, to make sure that the house is taken care of, make sure the baby has everything he needs, make sure the baby got to go to the park today and play outside. I just started picking up more and more of the slack as he withdrew into being miserable.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
It was awful to watch the person that you're so in love with falling apart in front of me.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
And we grew up on a farm, so my life was kind of wild and crazy and great. Grew up super religious in the Seventh-day Adventist church.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
He was taking oxycodone, I believe, Percocet. Anyway, he was taking one of those and he was supposed to take like one a day. He was taking like
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
One night, before he came to bed... I said, what's that? And he said, oh, it's fentanyl. It's great. I'm not in any pain. It's amazing. And I said, but you took your meds today? He said, yeah. And I said, isn't that how people overdose? I'm not an idiot. It's fine. I'm going to bed. Good night. I've had a bad day. We're not going to have a fight about this.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
Funny enough, I thought as a kid that 20 years old was being a grown-up. And 25-year-olds were old. And so I thought for sure that I would be married by 20. But I never really dated.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
I was so uncomfortable and I just sat there staring at his back, wanting to rip them off, but trusting him at the same time.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
So I grabbed my phone and I called 911 hysterical, said, my husband's not breathing.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
And the whole time I'm doing chest compressions, I'm like, he's cold. He's gone. This man is not alive. The whole time in the background, the boy is just screaming my name out.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
He loved us a little prince and we started saying, you know, daddy went to hang out in the stars with the little prince and the fox.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
We all went up and sat with Aaron and I sat down and I told him, I will miss you every day for the rest of my life. And then he was gone.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
About 10 o'clock, a knock on my door, and the boy's mom showed up and insisted on sitting down and talking to me. I don't know this person at all other than the reputation that I have been very carefully spoon-fed for three years, which is that she is awful and a horrible person.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
And she came in like a blast of cold air, sat down in my living room, and said, if you want to be in my son's life, there's some things you need to know. First of all, Aaron's not Choctaw. Aaron's Black. And I kind of laughed at her. I'm like, okay lady, like really, we're gonna do this right now?
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
It was Aaron's mom and Aaron's brother, who is very much a black man. They came in, they sat down in my living room, and I told them about me and my life with Aaron, how long we'd been together. And she said, he wasn't a good person. And I thought, well, that's a really weird thing to say to a grieving widow.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
I gave it a lot of thought, and I called my family on a Zoom call, and I said, okay, I'm going to vacate the house. I don't own it. The name's not on it. I don't have any right to it. And my friend, the lawyer said, take what's yours, what you bought together and nothing else.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
I finally went on one date with a guy and gave him like a little peck at the end of the night. and was just like, nope, that was not for me. I did not like that. I don't want a date.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
I reached down and I picked him up and I held him really close and I said, never forget I love you and I'm your ama and that will never change. And she fell out of the road, drove away, and I never saw him again.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
I fell apart. I wasn't getting out of bed. I wasn't taking care of myself. I wasn't eating. I was a disaster.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
When I got his autopsy, it was very much an overdose. He had on double the dose, and he had taken double the dose of oxycodone at the same time to go to bed.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
On his autopsy, it said he had a brace on his leg. It said brace on his left leg. And I thought, well, that's a really weird way to say prosthetic. And that was the last I thought of it.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
I stayed very much in grieving widow mode for two months. And it wasn't until after the second month that I opened my eyes finally. So I just let a lot of this stuff slide and thought like, either I'll deal with it later or it's not true or it's a misunderstanding. And then after two months, I opened his computer and everything changed instantly.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
So I opened the computer, got right in on the first try, knew the password. And I opened his pictures and I started looking through and there were some screenshots in there that sent me to his text messages. All of his text messages are on his computer. And immediately, within 20 seconds, I realized that he was in a relationship with somebody long distance.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
I spent an hour combing through their text messages, which were graphic and filthy. And the worst part of all of it, there were two things that were just devastating. The first was that the things he said to her while they were having this like fantasy relationship is the same stuff he would say to me when we were intimate verbatim.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
And he would tell her, well, I have time and I won't have the boy on these dates because I was going to be gone for a conference on those dates. So that was a lot to realize, like he was manipulating her and me to keep us both on the hook back and forth. But then the worst thing I found in everything I found was him saying, nobody has ever loved me. Nobody, except for you.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
I decided to go to college, and I studied history, which was really fun.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
And that is the biggest lie he ever told. And just the most infuriating lie devastating, cruel thing he could have said was that nobody had ever loved him. And here I had just spent eight weeks bottomed out, devastated, flatlined because this man had died. And I had given him everything.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
and found more women. He was texting four other girls, couple from Tinder, couple from school. One of my favorites was a girl he had been in school with who had been to our house and knew me. And they were talking about how she could move in and her teenager could live in the basement bedroom. It's a three bedroom house. And his son lives in one of those bedrooms.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
So presumably I'm not living there as she's moving in. So that was like, what the heck is he just going to kick me out? Like, this is recent.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
And he was saying, well, you know, I don't ever have anything going on on Tuesday nights. We could come over for dinner. We could watch a movie. But then I have to go to bed around 10 because I was teaching. I was at class 7 to 10 on Tuesdays. So he knew I would stay at work and go to class. So that was like. I guess kind of opening that box of like, okay, so he's been doing stuff behind my back.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
I don't know what. I still don't. I don't need to. It doesn't matter. He offered it.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
The girlfriend messaged me back. What? No, this isn't real. What's going on? Who are you really? Did you steal his phone? Just And I said, yeah, no, real. Here's some pictures of us. We've been together for this amount of time, three years. And she said, we've been together for longer than that. They've been together when he was married to his other wife.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
I was living in this really cute tiny apartment in the older section of Colorado Springs. So cute. And just loving my life. I felt like I had really kind of arrived. I had a job. I was teaching. I had friends. I was very happy.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
On his computer were all these pictures of his honeymoon, including his two fully attacked feet on the beach. much, much after he was supposedly injured. I just stared at these feet. Like, these are his feet. I recognized one of them, but I'd seen one of them without a sock on.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
He didn't ever recognize like pop off a prosthetic or anything like that in front of me. And he needed to shower downstairs because it was really hard for him to step into the shower upstairs. It was a tub shower combo. So he basically had his own bathroom in the downstairs part of the house. So I never saw him fully unclothed. because he kept a sock on it when we were sleeping.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
So I never questioned it. It was his private business. That's his medical history. And there was nothing for me to say, well, that seems off.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
I said, did you ever look at his prosthetic or look at his amputation site? And she said, oh, I'm sure I did. Well... Maybe not actually, let me think. Maybe I didn't. And I just sat there flabbergasted. And at that point, that was what was finally like, yeah, this man did not have an amputated foot. I don't know what he was wearing.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
I don't know why he was wearing it, but it wasn't a prosthetic foot.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
Found his DD-214, which is like his exit paperwork from the military, and it didn't add up with what he told me.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
And I went out into the kitchen and I poured myself, I am not joking, eight ounces of tequila down to that. My dad lives in the country, thank goodness, walked out way out into the hills and just screamed and screamed and screamed until I lost my voice. The person I had just spent three years loving and caring for and two months devastated over his loss didn't exist.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
It was so much fun. Keep this in mind. It's January of 2017, and I decided it would be a good time to teach conspiracy, culture, and elections in United States political history.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
And I came to this point that day where I said, at the end of the day, he took everything from me. And when there was nothing left to take, The person I had loved and been in a relationship with disappeared. And with him went three years of my life into a black hole.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
I was Googling everything I could. I'm a historian. I can research like nobody's business. So I'm just Googling everything I can think of to try to find out who this person is. I'm looking on Facebook. I'm looking on Instagram, social media.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
You know, now I'm asking questions, right? What about these people? It's not real. Grandparents were not those people. Those people didn't exist at all. I mean, it was an entirely crafted life. His family is fake. His military experience was not his. And I don't know how he kept it all straight.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
So I didn't know about his real mom, even though she's a real person who lives in a real place. I knew about some other version of someone that he could completely control that narrative. And I'm never going to look her up and say, is this the truth? I was the perfect person for him because I chose to trust him. And he practiced different things.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
He tried out different things to test me to see if I would trust him. And I did. I always did. He very carefully curated my life.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
When I finally learned everything and could sort of lay out a life timeline for him, there is about a three to five year capacity on the stories he was telling people. And then he would move on in some way. He would leave town. He would start a new school program, something like that. He'd get married. So he was coming to the end of that. And his stories were getting a little thin.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
He's an addict. So he's always looking for kind of that next better hit of whatever it was. And sometimes it was a partner and sometimes it was becoming a parent and sometimes it was a new degree in school. But, you know, he's tying things together, trying to make himself a life that he would have been happy with.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
So he just kept shifting it into this story that he liked a little better and a little better, a little better. And it still didn't satisfy him. He still needed narcotics. I feel very strongly that he wanted to stay in our life, but wasn't sure how to do that. Do I think that he put the patches on and hoped he would fall asleep and never wake up? Yeah, I do.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
Dating and romantic relationships were not going to be part of my life, and I was sort of settled into that in a very comfortable way where it didn't bother me. It wasn't something I was seeking out. I wasn't on dating apps. I wasn't looking for it. And I certainly was not looking for him.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
My doctor had me talk to the therapist in her office. And I owe everything to his methods. He gave me terminology, and that terminology completely changed how I was going through this. He was the first person to say, you have PTSD. And I thought, no, no, no, PTSD is for soldiers, which is a really common thought, that PTSD is for people who've been to war or through war. He was really good about
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
This is what I think might be going on. Read it and let's talk about it next time. He was providing me information to heal myself.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
I'll still be driving down the road and have a random memory and go, oh, yeah, that's probably what happened. I'm still less and less and less and less putting things together and making the pieces fit. but I'll never know everything and I'll never have closure. And I think that's probably the most important thing. It's like closure isn't necessary for you to move on and heal. It's really not.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
It would help, but it's not necessary.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
He was broken. He was broken by a world that breaks people and spits them out. I think he grew up feeling inadequate. He grew up feeling unloved. And he wanted to write himself a better story than that. And instead of becoming someone who would be loved, he became someone who he thought was lovable. and adjusted it for each person as he met them.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
This is an incredible story that sounds like it's made up. It sounds like a soap opera. It sounds like a drama movie. But it's so real and it's not the only one. And there's so many stories like this. The more we talk about it, the more out in the open we bring these people who exist in the shadows and want to operate from the shadows. We have to understand
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
assign terminology to the disorders that cause them to act in these ways. And we have to support people who've been through it. And my mission through all of this became sort of explaining to more and more people that you can heal. You will heal. What you're experiencing is valid. Something that I say so often to this day is my story was true and my experiences were valid. My story was true.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
I went out into the garage area. The car was gone. Like, where did he go?
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
He had a service dog, this really cute English Mastiff named Osa. And she had the best underbite, and she would be in the back of class chomping on a bone. So I was always very aware of his presence, partially because of her. He would come up after class, and we would pet the dog and chat a little bit.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
I knew that he had had an amputation to his leg. He talked about it fairly frequently. He had a handy cat parking pass.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
He had a very slow way of speaking. There was no rush for anything in life. I always had the vibe that he was one of those people that would talk forever if you let them. And so I would start to gather my things and eventually he started walking me to my car because my class was from 7 to 10 p.m. And it was very surface level chat.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
Throughout the whole time I was his teacher, usually about class and usually about some interesting fact, he was like a sponge for information.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
He had kind of long hair that he kept tied back in this low knot on the back of his head, kind of slicked back, low hair. I hesitate to call it a man bun because I know that would hurt Aaron's feelings, but that's what it was. And he had a cowboy western vibe almost, not like costumey, but he wore a lot of very nice button-ups and jeans and leather boots. So that was pretty much his uniform.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
I just had this confident air about him that he knew he was smart, he knew he was good looking, but he was also kind and respectful and interesting and funny and talented. And I was a fan very quickly, just of his entire aura.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
At some point in those conversations, I brought up the fact that I had been a nanny. And a few months later, he came to me after class one day and said, we need to switch where my son is going to daycare. What do you know about maybe hiring a nanny? So we chatted a little bit about that. And that's how I found out he had a child. I didn't know that before.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
He wore a ring, so I knew he was married, but I didn't know that he had a kid. He was a baby at the time, maybe four or five months old. So that was sort of our first foray into anything personal was just that bit of advice he was seeking about finding good childcare.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
And then about a week later, he sent me a message about nine, 10 o'clock at night. I was already in bed and I thought, well, that's weird. What the heck? And so rolled over and checked the message. It was from him. And he just said, you know, something very casual. How are you? And I said, oh, I'm good. The whole time thinking like, what does this guy want?
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
Keep in mind, I am very single, very happy to be single, not looking for anything. I think he's great. Hadn't really given any thought. The man's married with a baby, right?
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
He said, do you know that I'm going through a pretty bad divorce? And I said, oh, no, I had no idea. So we chat a little bit about it. He said, yeah, actually, she was arrested last night. We got into an argument and she got physical. And I said, oh, that's terrible. I'm so sorry to hear that.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
And then I did the nice thing, which I've since learned not to do, which is I said, is there anything I can do to help? And he said, well, I might need some help with my son.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
And I sat and listened to him and I held the baby. And oh, my gosh, he was the cutest little thing. And then as we sort of wrapped up that conversation, it was the end of my day. And I said, OK, well, if you need anything, let me know. And he said, well, actually, I have paper I have to work on tonight.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
Would you be able to come over and just hang out with him while I do my homework for an hour or two? And then I'll make dinner.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
It was more this like Christian sense of duty that I had been trained into. Someone needs help, you show up even if it's inconvenient or you don't really want to. And that was my first thought is I don't really want to. I don't really want someone who's going to rely on me. I don't really want to be involved in someone else's drama. And I have a full-time job. I'm teaching. I'm busy.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
I'm worried all the time that men are going to take my presence as some sort of an invitation. And I was so anti-dating and relationships that it was just something I never wanted to foster. So I'm thinking about all this as I'm driving the 20 minutes to his house. Like, okay, I'm going to have to think of boundaries. I'm going to have to be careful with saying yes.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
He was just Aaron, and that made her feel comfortable. He was himself, the way he always was with me after class, just very warm and friendly and kind and thoughtful. So I stayed, had dinner, and then, you know, stay and we'll have an adult beverage is what he used to call them. Stay and we'll have an adult beverage after the boy goes to bed. And I didn't really have anything going on, so why not?
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
So I stayed and we had a beer, sat on the back patio. And he told me a little bit more about what was going on. And it was pretty bad. There were holes in the wall going up the stairs. There was a hole in the wall in the dining room. And we just talked and talked and talked and talked. He shared a little bit of the emotions that came up with him.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
Oh, I feel bad, and she is my son's mother, but also we can't keep doing this, and I need to get out of this marriage. That night, they ended up talking until 1 a.m. I have work at 8 a.m., and he said, just crash in my guest room. Here's some clean pajamas. Here's a toothbrush. Just crash downstairs. And I did, which is so out of character for me.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
I felt a little weird, but I was very happy to be around him and just wanted to stay there and be helpful. I love to be helpful. I love to be needed. So I stayed the night, got up in the morning, trucked off to work. And then the next day he said, hey, I've got a test coming up if you're free later on. I went back over there.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
I was always sleeping in the guest room. I made it very clear to him. I don't let people touch me. I'm not interested in a romantic relationship. I'm just here to help. I want to be your friend. I want you to feel supported. But that's as far as this is going to go. And I just kept telling him, like, we're just friends. I don't let people touch me.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
The fact that I give you hugs is kind of exceptional. You have to respect that. And he really did.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
He was a very guarded person. So a lot of what he would talk about was things that were very present right now. If he brought up the past, it always felt like kind of an honor that he trusted me with that story. And he would point that out in a very subtle way of, oh, I don't really tell people this story, but you're different.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
The whole time I'm with my family, I'm bringing him up and I'm talking with him on the phone. And they're seeing that this person is making me kind of giddy and smiley and those kinds of things.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
He had cleaned the whole house. He had some of my favorite music on. Baby was in bed. He had, you know, a bouquet of flowers and a card welcoming me home and thanking me for being his friend. And that was my first sort of inkling, like, hmm, I'm going to have to keep an eye on this because here I was at home kind of being giddy about this person. Here he is bringing me flowers.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
So there was this undercurrent starting where I'm repeatedly saying, like, we're just friends, but we're friends who are snuggling on the couch watching a movie and not touching, he just started just leaning like my head on his shoulder or something. So benign, so middle school, but it was perfect for me because I wasn't ready to do that.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
He said something to me like, I think you're in love with me. And I said, I think you're in love with me. And that was it. We were in a relationship after that.
Betrayal: Season 4
Betrayal Weekly: RE-RELEASE: EP 10 - Torrah
I leaned in and it was the most fulfilling time of my whole entire existence. I'm getting emotional just talking about it because that part is perfect in my mind.