The Betrayal

Brown fell from grace exactly 10 days before our one-year anniversary.

One night, he came home completely defeated, with his head in his hands, too upset to eat. He wouldn't tell me what was wrong.

The next morning, I asked if he felt better. The answer was no.

I held him for what seemed like an eternity. If I nagged him, he'd keep silent. So I held my tongue and rubbed his back and massaged his temples and tuned into him intuitively.

In a flash, I knew what was bothering him.

"Is it one of the kids?"

That simple question unlocked the door to everything Brown had been hiding from me.

It was his three-year-old son, the one I'd never met.

More specifically, it was Brown's Baby's Mama – a baby's mama I was completely unaware of because Brown had always claimed his youngest son was by his ex-wife.

He described her as his "worst f*cking nightmare" and painted an unflattering picture of a 33-year-old woman who still lived with her mom, faked disability claims, drove a red BMW, was mean to his two older kids, snooped through his things, blew up his pager and pressured him to buy a house.

They'd dated for 18 months and lived together for six months.

When they were still an item, she'd warned one of Brown's best friends that if he didn't do her right, she would take him to the cleaners.

Brown hadn't done her right.

He'd missed the birth of the baby – her first-born – because he chose to be with his dying father. "I made the choice: my dad, who was on his way out, or my son, who I'd always have with me." And, without going into details, he admitted that when they broke up, he'd put her out of his apartment with the baby in tow.

Now, she was making good on her promise.

She went to court lying and crying that he'd never paid a dime in child support, although he'd given her cash from day one. Now the government was garnisheeing his check. He handed me his pay stub: $327 was all he had to show for a week's worth of backbreaking, box-lifting labor.

And the pain wasn't just financial. He barely got to see his son. If she knew Brown was on his way over, she'd pack the baby up and leave the house. She didn't let Brown take the baby home, which meant Brown's older kids couldn't develop a relationship with their baby brother. And now she was threatening to take Brown back to court to get sole custody, which meant Brown would pay even more in child support and would have even less contact with his son.

In short, she was using her three-year-old boy as both paycheck and payback.

Brown was in agony.

And now I was, too. Because the man I loved had lied to me, over and over, for an entire year.

(Brown Diaries Part 12 of 18: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 | Lessons Learned 1-3: 1 2 3)

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