I’ve been wanting to share my story for a while, but I was worried about my boyfriend reading it, working out it was about me, and that I’d used a love spell to get him back. I know you change the names on your website, Joshua, but as you’ll remember there were some aspects to my story that, if Peter read them, would mean he would know it was about me and him. But then something happened that meant I could ask you to post this without any worries.

Before we get to that, I should probably go back to the beginning. Peter and I dated in high school for a couple years. We broke it off for a bit (well I broke it off), then we got back together some years later. The second time around it was much more intense. We were both older, wiser, we were working, and we had money and freedom and all the things that go with being an adult. It was a proper serious relationship.

After another couple years we moved in together. We had already staying at each others’ apartments most nights anyway. During the week we were at his place and weekends at mine. So when I say we moved in together, what I mean is we both gave up our apartments and got a place together. It was both our names on the lease. Felt like a big step, you know?

The Next Step

Everything was great for a long time. When I fell pregnant we decided to move again, and this time rather than rent, we wanted to buy somewhere. Nothing fancy, but a proper little house with a garden that our future son could run around and play in. We’d been saving hard and at that time I was still working, so with our combined wages and a bit of a loan we got a fixer-upper. It needed a lot of work, but we didn’t care about that, we were just thrilled it was ours.

Peter spent every evening working on the new house after work, and all weekends too. It wasn’t quite done when our son was born, but it was good enough that we could live in it.

By the way, you might be wondering why I’m telling you all this history, about our house and son and everything. After all, it sounds like we were living the perfect life. And that’s the point — we were. Everything was perfect, exactly how I hoped my life would turn out.

Until it all went wrong.

Until my world came crashing down.

It Ended

I think the worst thing was that it happened so suddenly. I’ve ready some of the other stories on your site, Joshua, and for a lot of people they saw it coming, or it wasn’t a complete surprise. But for me it was a total shock. I literally woke up one morning and Peter wasn’t there. It was a Sunday, so he wasn’t at work. I thought maybe he’d gone out to get us some breakfast, but when I looked on the “find my friends” thing on the phone, it said he was at home. That turned out to be because he’d left his phone downstairs in the kitchen. It was the first sign something was wrong, because Peter is welded to his phone. Never goes anywhere without it. Ever.

I tried calling his mother to see if he’d gone there, but she said she hadn’t heard from him. His best friend didn’t answer his phone, so when by lunchtime there was still no sign of Peter, I drove round there. His best friend’s girlfriend answered the door, but Peter’s friend wouldn’t come and talk to me. “Has something happened?” the girlfriend asked me? She must have seen how worried I was because to be honest we’ve never got on and normally she would avoid speaking to me.

I explained that I was looking for Peter, that he had left his phone at home and disappeared, and that his mother hadn’t seen him. Reverting back to type, the girlfriend said, “Well I expect he’ll turn up,” shut the door, and left me standing on the porch like an idiot.

Anyway, to keep this from getting too long and boring your readers, I ended up going to the police. They weren’t interested at first, but when Peter still hadn’t shown up after a couple days, they took it more seriously. Then three things happened at once. Peter’s mother called me to say she had heard from him, that he was fine, and that he wasn’t coming home. The police called me to say much the same thing. And Peter’s best friend’s girlfriend also called to tell me the exact same thing, only there was definitely some malice in her voice when she said it.

Confusion

At first I wasn’t upset so much as confused. I couldn’t understand what these people were all telling me. What did they mean he was fine but not coming home? It didn’t make any sense. Trouble was, nobody wanted to tell me anything more. The cops said they’d done their bit. They couldn’t tell me where Peter was because they don’t go around divulging the locations of random members of the public. His best friend refused to speak to me (as did his girlfriend). His mother was only slightly better, and that’s because she obviously wanted to continue to see my son — her grandson — so she couldn’t refuse to talk to me. In the end it was through her that I found out a little more.

“He’s a bit overwhelmed by life at the moment,” she said. “Needs some space.”

“What about me? What about our son?”

“You’ll be fine without him, you’ll manage. I can help out, do a bit of babysitting.”

For some reason I didn’t trust her. I could imagine me handing over our son and then never seeing him again because she’d given him to Peter. So thanks for the offer, but no thanks.

That’s when the depression hit. I thought I’d been sad and depressed before in my life, like when I wasn’t getting the best grades at school, but this was completely different. It was a deep darkness that enveloped me. It was like being in a cave, in a blackness that was strangling the life out of me. I wanted to die, and I am ashamed to admit that at one point I even considered killing myself and my son. I was going to block up the vents and turn on the gas, let us both go in our sleep.

A Shock

Fortunately that darkest of thoughts shocked me enough that it jolted me into action. I thought, I’ve been lucky up to now. Peter and I met very young, met again when we were older and ready for a serious relationship, and everything was easy. We worked hard at our jobs of course, but in terms of our lives together, everything had been easy. At the first sign of trouble, Peter had fled. We didn’t have the experience of dealing with relationship problems that would help us get through this, but I was convinced we could get through it. I was convinced I could get him to come home.

It wasn’t going to be easy because no matter how much I begged and pleaded with his mother to tell him to talk to me, begged his friends to put us in touch, I was met with a wall. In the end they stopped taking my calls, even his mother.

Through desperation, I turned to the police again. I got lucky. A female officer took pity on me when I begged her to tell me where Peter was. She said she couldn’t do that, but she asked if I had considered that he should be paying me child support for our son. She suggested I speak with a lawyer.

So that’s what I did. Not because I wanted his money, but because I needed to know where he was, and that was the easiest way. I say easy, it took months, but in the end I got an address for him, and I took our baby and went to see him.

And you know what, Joshua? He stonewalled me. Told me to my face it was over. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, could not accept it. Literally it did not compute in my brain. I was stood on the step of this house, miles away from where we had been living, a TV playing in the background, and Peter standing in front of me, unshaven and scruffy, but still Peter. My heart almost burst when he had opened the door. I’d persuaded myself that when he saw me everything would be fine. I was convinced it had all been a big misunderstanding, that his mother had been wrong. How could he not want me?

And yet…he stood there and told me himself that he did not want me. “I’ll send money for the kid,” he said. “So you can call off your attack dog lawyer. But don’t ever contact me again.” And he closed the door in my face.

Back To The Darkness

The depression returned. Of course it did. My life was over. If Peter wasn’t in my life, if the one true love of my life didn’t want me, then there had to be something terribly, terribly wrong with me. If he couldn’t love me, nobody else ever would. Even my own son would one day turn against me. I know that probably doesn’t make sense, Joshua, but that’s how I was thinking.

I never really had many friends, not close friends. I think that’s because Peter and I had got together so young at school, and our relationship kind of blocked out other people. So I had nobody to turn to, nobody who could see my downward spiral into depression.

Sheila

And then a miracle happened.

It had to be a miracle, because there’s just no other way to explain it.

I was going through the motions of life on autopilot — waking up, changing and feeding the baby, then sitting and staring into space until the baby needed changing again. I barely ate, and slept as much as the kid allowed me to. Then one day there was a knock at the door. I couldn’t remember the last time anyone had come to the door, to the house, so my first thought was it must be Peter! I ran to answer it, surprised at how weak my own legs had become through lack of nutrition and exercise.

It wasn’t Peter.

It was a cop. The female officer who had recommended I find a lawyer. She said she was in the area, not on duty, and thought she would stop by to see how I was doing. To this day I am stunned by the kindness of strangers (yourself included). If it hadn’t been for the cop (her name was Sheila), I think I’d be dead by now. My son, too.

Sheila saw what a state I was in and was aghast. Much later she told me she almost called in the child protection services because she was so concerned for the welfare of my son. But after talking to me for an hour, she had seen how much I loved him and that he was in no immediate danger.

With Sheila’s help and encouragement, I lifted myself just enough to become a somewhat normally functioning human being. She was my guardian angel, she saved me. And then you saved me, Joshua.

Joshua

It was Sheila who introduced me to you. She had become a real friend, and one day she stood in my kitchen and said, “Helena, I know this is going to sound a bit…out there…but have you thought about using magic to get back with Peter?”

That actually made me laugh, which felt good because I couldn’t remember the last time I had laughed.

“I’m serious. I know it sounds kind of crazy, but when I went through a rough patch with Tom, I used this spell caster and he got us back on track. I know you said there will never be anyone else for you, and I believe you. But you deserve to be happy and I think it could be worth a shot. And — please don’t take this the wrong way — but what have you got to lose by trying?”

I said didn’t want to waste money on hocus pocus mumbo jumbo, but she said the spell she had gotten was free. Then I said I didn’t want to go getting my hopes up only for them to be dashed. But she said, “Fine, go into this with the expectation it won’t work, and then you can’t be disappointed.”

I didn’t agree right away. I thought about it for a week. I could see Sheila’s reasoning, but at the same time I was terrified. Of what? Of it not working. And that’s why I realized I had to try. Because if I was that scared of it not working, it meant I had already got my hopes up.

Sheila showed me your website, we read through some of the stories, and then she sat with me while I filled out the request for a spell. My heart was pounding when I clicked the last button, and then it was done — out of my hands.

The Spell

And of course you know everything that happened next, Joshua. You kindly accepted my case, and you cast the spell on Peter, for which I am eternally grateful.

The hardest thing was the waiting. You told me it would take a little time for the spell to take effect, that the love would have to build inside him, but that it would eventually bubble over and he would feel compelled to be with me. That’s exactly how it happened. And though I had to wait about four weeks, when it happened, it happened fast and out of the blue.

There was a knock at the door. I was changing a diaper at the time, and as I assumed it would be Sheila (she came to the house most days) I called out, “It’s open, come in.” I heard the door open and close, footsteps behind me. With a full diaper in my hands, I turned round and said, “Be with you in a sec—”

It was Peter.

We both stood there, just looking at each other. I forgot all about my son’s output in my hand, or the fact he was lying half-naked on a changing table behind me. I forgot about everything. It was like in those old movies where the hero and the heroine meet and the background fades to black and it’s just the two of them standing there. It was just us, and I knew. I knew he was back for me. I knew he still loved me. I knew everything would be okay. It was like someone took a straight jacket off me, like they lifted two ten ton weights from my shoulders. I simply smiled at him, he smiled at me, and I turned back and finished changing our son. He came up behind me, wrapped his arms around me, and hugged me tight as I finished.

There are a million things I’d love to say to you, Joshua. About how we talked and talked once he was back, about how great our lives are now, about how Sheila has become our closest friend, about how we’re talking about having another baby. But the biggest thing I want to say to you again is thank you. Thank you for giving me back my life.

Oh, and the reason I can ask you to share my story on your website now? Sheila. She let slip about the love spell over dinner one night. At first she tried to cover up her slip up and say she was talking about the spell you had done for her, but Peter understood what she’d really meant. Later, after she’d gone home, he asked me, and I told him the truth — that you had cast a spell on him. And he was not just fine about it, he said it was a good thing because now he was in a happy place too. So we both thank you, Joshua!