I completed my novel and sent it to my agent, but one editor after another declined to publish it. Though they thought it well-written and challenging ("an exciting and bravura performance," said one in turning it down), they found it didn't quite ring true. And they were right. It wasn't true. I just didn't know it at the time.

It finally fell to me to burst the bubble. In May 1999, more than two years after my lover's decision to divorce his wife to be with me, I called early one morning to find her in the house where he had told me that he now lived alone for part of the week. By then, he and I had been together for three and a half years. Despite being on opposite sides of the Atlantic, we had managed to see each other every few months and, during a period when I was working in the U.S. in the spring of '98, every three weeks. But now his wife, who he had told me rarely set foot in that house and never slept in it, was there on the end of the line at 7 a.m.! I had to speak. A couple of questions confirmed the suspicions I had been trying for so long to suppress and so, tormented by the years of lying, I spilled out the truth to her there and then on the phone. Or at least, some of it. There was not enough time to relate the whole of this complex relationship. And she told me some truths in return, including that it was untrue that they slept in separate rooms and that she had agreed to divorce him.

We two women were incredibly calm at that moment. I answered her questions as honestly and as gently as I could -- after all, I was talking to a woman whose husband was about to leave her for me. But one thing seemed clear: She sounded very level, very human, very nice. Even in that short time I came to like her. I had no idea how to begin unveiling the past few years, could not tell her that he had sent me interior photographs of the house, even a photograph of "his" (soon to be "our") bed. I could not possibly tell her we had even discussed the décor. Now the conversation turns over and over in my head -- what would it have been like if either of us had known what he was really doing? We thought we were discussing the problem of two women and one man, and that was painful enough. But we weren't. We were on the edge of something much nastier. Later that morning, when I called and told him what I had done (she, clearly, had kept her own counsel), he was furious. "Now, thanks to you," he raged, "the divorce will take even longer!"

But late that night he sent the last communication I would ever receive from him. It was in stark contrast to an e-mail he'd sent just four days before, as intense and loving as ever, in which he listed the ways in which his life had changed, saying that every day now revolved around his thoughts with me. But there was a new seed growing in his mind of which I was unaware. I had recently, in passing, related to him the story of Othello, not realizing that I was unwittingly supplying him with the model of a man who deliberately sets out to deceive and then continues the torment to the bitter end by coldly refusing to explain himself. So when my phone call had finally caught him out in the first of what would later prove to be a very long list of lies, he remembered Iago and promptly became him. After all, one thing he was good at was taking on a role.

So, less than 24 hours after the previous day's "Goodnight, I love you," he wrote a single short paragraph ending with "I wish not to speak." And since that day, he has never spoken or written to me again.

Never.

Were this not bad enough, I then discovered the real truth about the man I had planned to marry. Two weeks later, totally estranged from him and still in a state of complete shock, I remembered an anonymous message I had received online some months previously, claiming that Rhyys was cheating on me and that he had a lover in another virtual world called Strangebrew, where he went by the name of Gandore. When I had gone to look, I found the story extremely unlikely, since my ex-lover is something of an old-fashioned dresser, whereas Gandore's description of himself -- wearing "jeans and boots" -- just didn't fit. Nor did his longer description make sense: "Quiet and thoughtful, watching the fireflies dance as he walks unseeing and confident in the nurturing darkness. He hears a drum beat and is comforted, secure and sure in its sound, and in the one who sets the sound ablaze, his loved [name withheld]." "Watching" and "unseeing"? How could that be? He was much more articulate than that. However, there was the clue of the spelling mistake: While imaginative, my ex-lover is a lousy speller, and Gandore's virtual room, called Ethereal Existance, made me demur. The typo was just too familiar ... but ... no ... how could this possibly be the man who was the love of my life? It made no sense. There was no way it was he.

Private Life Romance, relationships, and the personal side of Table Talk