C (31:48)
She's up out of her bed and she's now standing in the middle of the reward in her gown. The doctor replies, I'm sorry, but you can't leave. You need to get back into bed. Claire challenges her, you don't have any legal basis to keep me here. I'm going to leave. As the words come out of her mouth, I'm suddenly aware that there's movement in my peripheral vision. Nurses and security are now silently sweeping in to surround Claire. Then the doctor says, if we think there's something wrong with you that might endanger you or others, then we can't let you leave. You need to get back into bed because if you try to leave, we're going to have to inject you with something that's going to make you feel all woozy and then handcuff you. But that will make it much harder for us to figure this all out. Eventually, the staff offer to move Claire to her private room to make her feel more comfortable. And after a while she agrees. When we get into this room, we have company. There's a lady sat in the corner with a clipboard on her lap and she's writing things down on it every once in a while. And from where I'm standing next to Claire's bed, I can read upside down that at the top of this clipboard is written suspected paranoid delusions. I really don't know what to think at this stage. But I do know that I have to try and give Claire a shot at avoiding the psych ward. So I ask if I can have a moment alone with Claire, and the hospital employee goes and stands outside the door, guarding it. On the off chance that I was planning an impromptu jailbreak. I tell Claire that she needs to give the doctors some more information, a better explanation of what's been going on, because currently the story isn't checking out and they think that she's mentally ill. But she's quite firm that there's nothing more to share, and she says that the phone calls probably didn't check out because everything relating to the case against Emma is extremely confidential. After my conversation with Claire, I'm spending a lot of time walking backwards and forwards to the water cooler because it provides a few minutes in which I can talk to the others to try and figure out what the hell is going on. When we get back from probably the third trip in 20 minutes, there is a hospital administrator stood in Claire's room, and she asks us, are any of you related to the patients? We tell her, no, we're just her friends. And she says, in that case, I'm going to have to ask you all to leave. And we get kicked out into the waiting room. We're not really sure what to do at this point. Dan goes outside to make some calls because there's no cell phone signal inside. And I was just left with Ruth, who I didn't really know, but I was just talking to her about everything that was going on. I remember I was saying, this has been such a crazy week. I can't even begin to make sense of what's happening. It was only a few days ago that Claire was calling me and saying that she was stuck in ICU and there were no family members who could get to her, and she was terrified that she wasn't going to get out again. As I was saying this, Ruth started to look confused. And then she said to me, wait, which night was that? And I thought for a second and said, I think that was on Thursday nights. The second that these words left my lips, I'd never seen all of the blood drain from somebody's face so quickly. She just said, but I was at her apartment on Thursday. We were in front of the TV smoking pot and eating pizza. And in that moment, this single little thread was cut loose. And I knew that if I started to pull on this, then an entire web was about to unravel. I remember I just leapt out of my seat without saying anything to Ruth and ran straight out to the sidewalk because I needed to get cell phone signal and I needed to phone Claire's mum. I was hyperventilating and shaking and I remember that I was struggling to dial the number because my fingers were shaking so much. So when I got through, I immediately began bombarding this poor woman with questions. But I really, really needed answers. I started checking facts one by one, and with very few exceptions, they don't check out at all. Claire's mother knew about the break in, but had only learned about it a few days before. She'd actually texted me earlier that week to check in because she hadn't heard from Claire in a while. And in my response, I alluded to some of the things that had been going on. It was only after this that Claire had actually mentioned anything to her. The doctors had been in contact with Claire's mother that day, so she was very aware that there was something really strange going on. But crucially, she had absolutely no knowledge of the cancer diagnosis, the poisoning or any of the treatment and surgeries. And this was unbelievably confusing because I'd received text messages sent from her phone that mentioned many of those things. There were still so many unanswered questions, but the conversation did confirm two things. Claire wasn't imagining this. She was faking and I was the intended audience of her hoax. Once I was there, not, I was walking back inside to go and talk to the doctor and I received a text message from Claire. It said, don't worry, the police are here now and it's all getting sorted out. You're going to be let back in soon. I get there to talk to the doctor and say, I just received this message and I'm pretty sure that it's not true. And she told me, no, it wasn't. There were no police. Then I said, well, look, for what it's worth, I don't think she's delusional. I think this is all a massive hoax that she's been using to manipulate. And the doctor thanked me for sharing the information, but said it was now out of her hands. Claire was going to be held for the next three days and evaluated by the psychiatric team. So I walked back outside and Ruth and Dan asked me, what are we going to do now? And it didn't take us very long to realise that there was only one sensible option at a time like this. Go to a bar and try very hard to drink the place dry. As we're in the cab going down Lexington Avenue My phone rings. It's Claire. She's telling me the same story that was in the text message. I cut across her and say, look, we've already left the hospital. We know exactly what's going on and if you want to get out, you're going to have to start telling the truth. And then I hung up and switched off the phone. Over the next few days, I spent a lot of time, including many of the hours when I should have been sleeping, picking apart the last three months. What I was able to figure out made my blood run cold. Claire had most likely been deliberately overdosing on her anxiety medication in order to poison herself and fake symptoms more disturbing than that, she'd been cutting herself in order to fake surgical scars. Early on, I would often ask why her parents weren't more involved. Then she came back from a visit home sporting a huge black eye, which, in retrospect, I guess, was probably just makeup. But in any case, it was more than sufficient to stop me from asking that question anymore. On the occasions that her mother was in the city visiting, she would steal her mother's phone and use it to send fake health updates to me, claiming that treatment or surgery was underway. And as for the appointments that I collected her from, she was probably just going down to the hospital and sitting in their lobby waiting for me. Along the way, she'd acted out dozens of phone conversations with cops and doctors, with nobody at the other end of the line. And what about Emma's campaign of harassment? Well, that was relatively simple to fake. Claire simply entered her own phone number into her phonebook and labelled it as being Emma. She could then send threats to herself and just delete the outbound messages to be left with an unbroken stream of harassment that looked like it was coming from Emma. And as for the break in, Claire faked the phone call from the doorman, went home, trashed the place just enough for a decent photoshoot, and then sent me the pictures. A question that really needs to be answered is what was the deal with Emma? Well, firstly, all of that stuff about her difficult past, that is, as far as I'm aware, actually true. So when we were really worried about how far things might escalate and what. What might possibly happen to Claire, we actually went looking around online and we managed to find an old online advert from when she was a call girl, for example. I did think about contacting Emma and trying to understand what had happened, but I was worried that maybe that might be opening a can of worms and inviting more drama that I really just didn't want to deal with. As for all the other stuff, well, I don't know for sure, but my best guess is that the two of them did fall out with other. Each. Each other. But I think the real reason for that was that Emma knew about Claire's hoax, and she didn't agree with it at all. Claire then used the relapse as a cover story that also conveniently discredited Emma in case she tried to intervene. She then developed this story as a secondary means of keeping me under pressure and under control. She was just smart enough to scour WebMD until she found a diagnosis that connected the two parallel threads of her lie and shored the whole story up. Probably the most important question of all is, why did Claire even do any of this? Well, back at the beginning of the story, I mentioned that I wasn't really looking for a serious relationship because I didn't know if I'd be in the country for long. And I was transparent about this with Claire. Her response was to tell me that this was okay, and she understood that I wasn't really in a position to commit to something. And then she spent the next three months pretending to be dying. While Claire was in the psych ward, she called me several times. She was desperately trying to find a way to salvage her hoax and to lie her way out of the corner that she was now backed into. I debunked everything that she was telling me, but she would not come clean. She just would not stop lying. Eventually, I decided that enough was enough. I wasn't taking any more of this, and I blocked my numbers that she was calling from. I then focused my attention on Claire's parents. I tried to explain everything that had gone on in as much detail as possible in the hope that they would pass this information on to the doctors who might find it diagnostically useful. I later learned from Ruth that they had, in fact, taken Claire out of hospital as quickly as they could. They were worried that Claire's friends would ostracize her, so they were downplaying the whole incident and also actively trying to discredit me. When I heard this, it was the last straw. I cut all contact, and I never saw Claire or any of her family again. To this day, I have no idea if she got the help that she needed or if anybody else has fallen victim to what I was put through. In the aftermath. I was initially just glad that things didn't go any further. Fortunately, I never came home to find a bunny boiling on the stove, which I was particularly thankful for given that I didn't own a pet rabbit, I thought I had my life back. But then I quickly realized that I had changed. I'd just grown accustomed to living in a state of constant crisis, always dealing with matters of life, death. Through that, I had somehow forgotten how to deal with the mundanity of regular life. I remember going for a walk in Central park on this really beautiful day. Everybody was out enjoying the sunshine, and I just felt like an outsider because participating in a scene like this had just become an alien concept to me. I know it sounds ridiculous, but I had literally forgotten how to enjoy a walk in the park because I just spent three months living in a universe where there was just no space for anything like that. I almost wondered if this was what it was like to get out of prison, for example, where you are confronted with a reality that just no longer makes the kind of intuitive and natural sense that it once did, and you're forced to actually relearn everything from scratch. Claire and I had so many long and emotional conversations about mortality, and I had prayed with all of my might for her to be okay. And I am not religious in the slightest. Towards the end, I was even trying to work out what her funeral might be like. What was I going to say? And how was I going to handle being there with all of these people who'd failed to support her as she'd stared death in the face? I spent a lot of time, time grappling with the notion that my sense of integrity, my unwillingness to abandon someone who really needed my help had been used as a weapon against me. When your virtues become the rope that is used to hang you with, it's so tough because your instinct for self preservation kicks in and it starts telling you that they're not virtues, they're weaknesses. And I wish I could say that I still wouldn't think twice, twice before going to someone's aid. But unfortunately, at least for now, I'm not sure that's actually true. I still don't trust people the same way that I used to. But I'm glad to say that I have made real progress and I have hope that maybe someday I'll get there. I've often wondered if I should have seen through the hoax in spite of Claire's absolutely Oscar worthy performance. There were definitely times when things weren't adding up and I knew in my gut that something wasn't quite right. But I never even came close to suspecting the full extent of what was actually going on. It just never occurred to me that someone in my life could be capable of such a thing because it was so far outside of my own frame of reference on what constitutes reasonable behaviour. So I guess the moral of the story, if there is one, is that even if you wouldn't dream of doing something in a million years, be aware that someone else still might. And they could very well be standing right in front of you.
