Caleb at the Dinner Table

Caleb at the Dinner Table

Caleb remembers the way she said it the way other people mention traffic.

Fork halfway to her mouth. A shrug. A smile that didn’t reach her eyes.

“Yeah. I helped get rid of a body once.”

The room didn’t react. That was the strange part. Plates clinked. Someone laughed nervously. Caleb waited for the punchline, the reveal, the just kidding. It never came.

She noticed his silence and leaned back, pleased.

“Relax. I didn’t work at a morgue.”

That was the threat. Not explicit. Not dramatic. Just a fact laid on the table like a knife turned sideways—enough to cut if you leaned wrong.

Later, she talked about gangs. Vaguely. Like someone recalling a bad neighborhood instead of a life where consequences had teeth. Caleb connected the dots in the quiet hours, when his mind finally caught up to his instincts.

Years passed before the real weight of it landed.

She had done something irreversible. Something that destroys most people from the inside out. And she hadn’t cracked. No therapy. No medication. No nightmares she’d ever admitted to. She slept like a child, smiling into the dark.

That’s when Caleb understood: it wasn’t the violence that shaped her.

It was what came after.

The lying.

Police questions. Family questions. Faces full of grief she had to mirror back convincingly. Tears deployed on command. Shock rehearsed. Confusion perfected. Each lie a rung on a ladder out of hell.

She learned something most people never do.

Reality bends for those who lie well enough and long enough.

Truth, Caleb realized, had never been her value system. Survival was. And lying wasn’t a flaw—it was a skill that had saved her life. You don’t discard a tool like that. You refine it. You hide it. You protect it.

Especially from people who still believe words mean things.

When she lied to him—about money, about conversations, about things he could prove with timestamps—he kept assuming confusion. Trauma. Stupidity. Anything but intent.

That was his mistake.

Because intent explained everything.

The way logic collapsed only around him.

The way she could sob flawlessly, then stop cold the moment it didn’t work.

The way entire rooms bent toward her version of events while he stood there feeling insane.

She wasn’t unaware. She was performing.

Caleb started watching interrogation footage late at night. Women crying without tears. Stories changing by inches. Calm voices describing impossible coincidences. The same vacant certainty.

He felt a chill of recognition.

She hadn’t killed him.

But she had practiced on worse stakes.

There would be no redemption arc. No breakthrough conversation. No magic sentence that would make her stop.

People don’t give up superpowers that saved their lives.

Caleb finally understood his role wasn’t to fix her, save her, or wait for her to become human in the ways he needed.

It was simpler.

To speak.

To document.

To refuse to play along.

Because silence was the only thing she actually depended on.

And for the first time, Caleb pushed his chair back from the table.

----------------------------

Behind the scenes- inspiration journal entry:

"She would brag openly in the living room at dinner time how she had once disposed of a dead body. The real world experience anecdote serving as the evidence for why I should be afraid as she was threatening me.

She also would talk about how she ran with gangs back in the day. She didn't specify, but I figured maybe those 2 factoids were related.

It didn't hit me until years later. She can dispose of a human beings body, for some criminal related activity, she wasn't working at a fucking morgue-- she can do that and be completely fine. She didn't go to therapy for it. She didn't get PTSD from it. She didn't need to take psychiatric drugs for it.

She sleeps at night with a big old smile, every night, with no issues at all.

As the gang 'slut,' she might not have had a part in the killing of the individual. But she knew who he was. She likely got questioned by police. By the victims families.

Imagine how many times she had to fake cry. How many times she had to feign concern.

Imagine how many people she had to trick, to avoid jail time. Her life on the line.

Imagine how much practice she had-- and from her point of view, it was master that skill, or her life was over.

And what if she wasn't just the corpse disposed? What if she pulled the trigger? Stabbed the knife? However the guy died. Imagine how much MORE she'd have to lie.

There's probably an open police case right now.

I said gang activity, did you assume it was a gang member who was killed?

What if it was a random pregnant woman?

We don't know all that. But we DO know, she illegally disposed of a dead human body, and felt no remorse whatsoever for it. And she now literally brags about it during dinner threats. To her boyfriend. Because she got mad for some dumb reason.

Even at her most innocent-- she brags about illegally disposing of a body.

Now... After that refresher of who this person is...

Is it STILL that shocking that she's lied to you a million times Given that reminder of that particular dinner anecdote- doesn't that put into context how she can so easily lie today?

Nobody knows what to do with her. It's like she's in her own little world. She seems unswayed by reality, or the words of others, no matter what. She's even fooled all of you.

But it's an act.

Think about it. This is a person who brags about getting away with murder. No matter what you fucking tell her, she is NEVER going to stop lying. She's not giving up the super power

Think about it.

This is a person who brags about getting away with murder. No matter what you fucking tell her, she is NEVER going to stop lying. She's not giving up the super power that SAVED her life.

And she will never be convinced by a bunch of people who've never been in a similar situation- life or death- where the power of lying, doing evil and getting away with it, ultimately saved them- got them exactly what they wanted.

She LEARNED-- it's embedded in her nervous system forever-- she LEARNED that she can manipulate reality just by lying and pretending to believe her own lies. She LEARNED that PEOPLE WILL AGREE WITH HER, no matter how utterly insane, illogical or her words are.

She learned that she apparently has a great, unrecognized power. All she has to do is keep it secret for it to continue to work.

All she has to do is pretend to be so stupid that she just can't see things any other way. She just has to PRETEND to believe the foolish shit she says, and people often times believe her!

She's not going to betray that methodology. Not without a huge amount of negative reinforcement from reality, to re-train her. And she might be too old to learn new tricks.

It all makes sense now. All the lies. The total lack of logic and emotional stability, only when dealing with me.

I couldn't believe someone would be so awful on purpose. She had to be stupid. Misunderstood.

Reminding myself just a little bit of what she's done in her past. It reminds me.

It reminds me. She's just like those chicks who kill their boyfriends, but sit there and lie their ass off on those interrogation shows I just started watching.

I guess maybe I should've watched those growing up, it could have prepared me for what kind of crazies there are out there, especially female ones. I was totally unprepared for that. I do blame my dad partially for that, the cuck.

But anyways. Yeah. Like, the way they lie, they can cry on a dot, have the most cold hearted lies, right there in front of everyone, in front of the one they victimized--- my guy, YOU are living that, right now, but she hasn't killed you.

Not yet.

So. Stop thinking there's a Darth Vader redemption arc for her, she's fucked for life. She'll never change.

She especially won't change if good people like yourself don't speak up about the truth of the horrible shit she's done.

She has no problems literally making up lies about you, in a court of law.

The contrast is insane. Speak up."

-Goku