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She'd get it back as soon as he came, of course. When doubt started to creep into her mind, she would look at his pictures or read his messages. Still, almost in spite of herself, she wondered. Little things seemed odd. Sometimes, out of the blue, he'd fire off a series of rapid-fire instant messages—"oh baby i love you" and so forth. It felt almost like she was talking to someone else. Another time, she asked what he had for dinner and was surprised to hear his answer—stir-fried chicken.

But I thought you hated chicken.

He laughed. "Oh, Amy. You know me better than that."

"Send me a selfie, right now," she commanded him one night. To her relief, she got a photo moments later. There he was, sitting on a bench in the sun on the other side of the world.

Psychologists call this "confirmation bias" — if you love someone, you look for reasons they are telling the truth, not reasons they are lying. We tend to find what we are looking for. And Amy was looking, desperately, for reasons to trust Dwayne, because the money was really adding up.

"How do I know you're not a Nigerian scammer?" she once asked, playfully.

He laughed. "Oh, Amy. You know me better than that."

Besides, he'd be there on February 28. She planned to make dinner for him that first night. She bought all his favorite foods — fresh salmon, sourdough bread, a nice Merlot. The trip would take more than a day: He had to fly to Beijing, then Chicago, and finally connect to Virginia. He'd call her as soon as he got to Chicago. His last message was a brief text that he said he sent from the airport in Kuala Lumpur.

I'll be home soon my love.

The truth behind the lies

Then, when the day finally came, Amy's phone remained silent, despite her efforts to get in touch. Something must have gone wrong. Why hadn't he called or texted her back? He always called. Always.

She tried to tamp down the pinpricks of panic. When she collapsed into bed that night, she thought about how this had been the first day in almost three months that they hadn't spoken.

There wasn't a single thunderclap of realization. But that week, it all came apart.

Dwayne finally contacted Amy three days later. He sent a single text. Something about being held up by immigration at the airport in Kuala Lumpur and needing money to bribe the officials. This was the third time that Dwayne had failed to show, the third last-minute catastrophe. Still, she wired him the money.

Amy's sister-in-law was the first to figure it out. "You need to see this," she told Amy, sending her a link to a recent episode of the Dr. Phil show, in which the TV therapist confronted two women who claimed to be engaged to men they'd met online. Amy watched in growing horror.

A few days later, Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 disappeared. This was the same Beijing-bound route Dwayne had planned to be on earlier. As the story of the vanished airliner filled the airwaves, Amy couldn't help but worry that Dwayne had been aboard — maybe he'd managed to take a later flight? Finally, he called her. But the call went to her home landline, not the mobile phone she'd been using. They spoke for only a few moments before it broke up. She was relieved but also disturbed — and curious. Something was different.

The daily siege of calls and emails and messages had ended. Suddenly, she wasn't tied up for hours every day. Alone with her thoughts for the first time in months, everything about their relationship seemed to blur.

How much do I really know this guy?

One by one, she started feeding the photos Dwayne had sent her into Google's image search, trying to trace where else they might have come from. Eventually, up popped the LinkedIn page of a man with a name she'd never heard. Whoever Dwayne was, this wasn't him.

She Googled "romance scam" and started reading. Even as she discovered the truth, part of her held out hope that her case was somehow different — that she was the lucky one. But the spell had broken. It was like waking up from a deep sleep — those strange moments when the dream dissolves and the real world comes rushing back.