WHAT I
DIDN’T KNOW.

ALL I WANTED WAS TO BE LEFT ALONE

All I wanted was to be left alone.

I wanted to raise my son.

Make money.

Build things.

Figure out my life.

Move on.

I wasn’t looking for revenge.

I wasn’t trying to expose anybody.

I wasn’t trying to spend years figuring out why certain things happened.

I wanted my life.

For a long time, I thought silence was the easiest way to get it back.

It wasn’t.

There are things I deliberately left out of Part One.

Some because they were private.

Some because I didn’t think they mattered yet.

And some because I genuinely didn’t understand what I was looking at.

I understand more now.

Not everything.

But enough to know that staying quiet didn’t make any of it disappear.

So this time, I’m going to tell you more.

Not everything.

Just enough.

HALF A MILLION

Remember the wellness business?

I really wanted it to work.

Enough that I met with banks and seriously considered financing it.

The proposed build was somewhere around half a million dollars.

I liked his plans.

I liked his ideas.

I wanted to work with him.

But eventually I had to stop looking at the business as something I wanted and start looking at what I was actually being asked to risk.

A significant loan.

A lot of money committed before I had anything resembling a completed wellness business.

And a project my family was already beginning to arrange our lives around.

He told me he knew people and that certain parts of the process could happen faster.

Then there was the $100,000.

He proposed investing $100,000 in exchange for equity.

Except, as I understood it, his investment would come later.

Mine would go in first.

Why?

There was another question I couldn’t shake.

Why was he this interested in my business?

I wasn’t some established entrepreneur.

I didn’t have an impressive corporate résumé.

I didn’t even have a LinkedIn page.

Yet somehow this man was spending hours talking to me about my project.

At first, I interpreted that as enthusiasm.

Eventually I started wondering:

Doesn’t he have any other projects?

The examples of his previous work I’d seen were projects he’d worked on while working for other companies.

That didn’t mean he couldn’t build what he was proposing.

But when I was the person considering that much debt, it mattered.

Eventually the whole thing started sounding too good to be true.

And I wasn’t willing to find out whether I was right with half a million dollars.

NO

I didn’t want to give up on the business.

But eventually I decided I wasn’t taking out the loan.

No loan.

No build.

No half-million-dollar gamble.

I thought that should’ve been disappointing.

I didn’t expect it to become personal.

He told me he’d invested a lot of time and effort into the project.

And I understood that.

We had spent a lot of time talking about it.

But I hadn’t officially hired him.

I hadn’t paid a deposit.

As far as I was concerned, we were still figuring out whether the project was even going to happen.

Then came accusations that I was going to take his plans and use them with another contractor.

I kept telling him:

I’m not continuing the project.

And even if I had decided to keep exploring the concept, I had every right to get other quotes before committing that kind of money.

There were messages along the lines of:

Do you think you could actually operate this business without me?

This was somebody who made himself sound busy.

Experienced.

Connected.

Like he had plenty going on.

So why was my project suddenly this important?

Maybe losing the project genuinely frustrated him.

I can understand that.

What I couldn’t understand was the reaction.

It felt completely out of proportion to where the business relationship actually was.

And instead of making me reconsider my decision...

It confirmed it.

BEFORE THE MOVE

The wellness business was over.

My life wasn’t.

My mom and her boyfriend were still planning to come to Vancouver.

I was preparing to move into a larger place so we could all live together.

We still wanted to build something.

It just needed to be smaller.

Affordable.

Something we could actually enjoy without putting everything we had into it.

So I started working on what came next.

There were already things happening around me that didn’t feel normal.

Nothing I could properly explain.

And at that point, I wasn’t giving them my full attention.

Then he came back.

HE CAME BACK

We met unexpectedly.

There was an attraction there.

I’m not going to rewrite history and pretend there wasn’t.

But as far as I knew, he had a girlfriend.

I knew because I had met her.

She’d even been present during a meeting about the business.

So whatever attraction existed, I wasn’t exactly looking at him as an available romantic prospect.

During this later interaction, he brought up the amount of time he’d spent helping me with the wellness project.

He implied that normally he would be paid for that time.

And then there was another implication.

That perhaps I could compensate him...

somehow.

I understood what I thought he meant.

Honestly?

I found it amusing.

There was also something he said that gave me a brief internal:

Wait.

I don’t remember exactly what he said.

And whatever crossed my mind, I didn’t put two and two together.

If anything, I avoided it.

It was an intuitive thought.

A flicker.

And then I moved on.

I’m not going to reconstruct words I can’t remember or pretend that moment proved something it didn’t.

Afterward, we stayed in touch mostly through text.

He talked about problems with his girlfriend.

Sometimes it took me hours to reply.

Mostly I remember thinking:

Why are you telling me this?

Honestly, I think I was annoyed.

Then I moved.

AFTER I MOVED

Shortly after the move, my attention went somewhere completely different.

My grandfather had been diagnosed with cancer.

He was living in a care home and ultimately chose medical assistance in dying.

I was dealing with something painful and very real happening directly in front of me.

But whatever had felt strange before the move didn’t disappear with it.

It got harder to ignore.

SOMETHING WAS WRONG

At some point, weird stopped feeling like a good enough word.

It wasn’t only my phone or internet anymore.

Things inside my home would be out of place.

Sometimes they were specific things that immediately meant something to me.

My tires kept ending up with nails in them more often than I considered normal.

Ordinary situations sometimes left me with an overwhelming feeling that I was being watched.

Eventually, my sense of privacy inside my own home started disappearing too.

By then, I wasn’t asking myself whether everything felt normal.

I knew it didn’t.

And I had become convinced I was being watched inside my own home.

What I couldn’t answer was how.

Who.

Or why.

I had already been talking to a friend about my phone and internet.

Eventually, I started changing my behaviour.

I unplugged my Wi-Fi.

I changed devices.

I sold devices.

I tried to isolate whatever I thought was happening.

I wasn’t trying to become a detective.

I wanted it to stop.

My circle was tiny.

I could count the people I regularly spoke to on one hand.

So naturally, I started mentally going through that list.

Who knew what?

Who was new?

There was one obvious answer to the second question.

Him.

That didn’t prove he was responsible.

But I noticed it.

I WANTED IT TO STOP

That is the part I keep coming back to.

I wanted my privacy back.

I wanted to work on the next business.

I wanted my family.

I wanted my life.

But wanting something to stop doesn’t tell you how to stop it when you don’t understand what it is.

And eventually another thought started bothering me.

What if this had something to do with what they thought I knew?

Because if it did, there was one very obvious problem.

I didn’t know.

I had assumptions.

Questions.

Things I’d noticed.

But I didn’t have confirmation of whatever they might have thought I knew.

And the irony was that everything happening around me was doing the exact opposite of keeping me ignorant.

It was making me look closer.

Every strange incident created another question.

Every question made earlier moments look different.

If this was about something they thought I knew...

I didn’t know it.

But whatever was happening was making me look.

Which brought me back to the question I couldn’t answer.

WHY?

I spent an unbelievable amount of time trying to answer one question:

Why?

Maybe they wanted silence.

Maybe they expected me never to question what was happening.

At my most confused, I even wondered whether the point was the opposite.

What if they wanted exposure?

Because I couldn’t understand the alternative.

Why keep pushing someone you supposedly wanted quiet?

Why keep giving that person reasons to look closer?

I could make a theory fit almost anything.

That became the problem.

So eventually I stopped trying to read people’s minds.

I went back to what I actually knew.

What was said.

What happened.

What I could verify.

And what I still couldn’t explain.

I didn’t know what anybody wanted from me.

I still don’t.

And I’m not going to turn the only explanation I can think of into the truth simply because I don’t have a better one.

Maybe I’ll eventually find the answer.

Maybe I won’t.

But eventually, another possibility entered my mind.

What if I had been trying to understand all of this at the wrong scale?

What if this wasn’t about one person?

What if I wasn’t dealing with something personal at all?

I didn’t have the answer.

Not yet.

But the question had changed.

I wasn’t asking:

Why is he doing this?

anymore.

I was asking:

WHO EXACTLY AM I DEALING WITH?