We'd been together two and a half years. I moved from Indianapolis to Denver for her, which I want to be clear about, because that's part of why the discovery of the lying hit the way it did. You don't uproot your life for someone who's fabricating half of her Tuesdays. Riley is a veterinary technician at an animal hospital in the Highland neighborhood, and for the first two years of us, she came home from work most nights by seven. Then, in late January, she started texting me on Tuesdays saying she was going to a book club one of the senior vets had invited her to — an eight-person thing, wine and a novel, first Tuesday of the month. Which was fine. Great. I encouraged her. Except by March it wasn't just the first Tuesday. It was every Tuesday. And by April, the "book club" ran until nearly midnight. And by May, I realized Riley hadn't mentioned a single book. So I started paying attention. That's when the little things started to not fit.