I am doing what I can to be careful. Which brings me to today's update.

I took S to his appointment today alone. W said she had a meeting out of town.

I set up the next appointment. At her request, I texted her the time/date. She texted back "Thank you. I'll be taking him my myself. Will you respect my wishes and stay in town?"

I haven't replied yet.

I spoke to an acquaintance who is neutral that works with W, just to confirm the meeting (since I didn't really believe her, considering that she wasn't in uniform and came back with new sunglasses). He confirmed, it was actually a company picnic. There's a chance it was mandatory for her to be there, but I wasn't told one way or the other.

And then the friend said that he understood that I was only confirming for S's well-being...and then he told me that he knew her slanderous friends well before they met W and I. He said they have been pushing her to leave me for a couple of years now, and W even stopped working with them to try to fix our R. But somehow she decided to go back to being friends with them.

Fast forward to today. The husband of that pair of "friends" is now harassing his cousin (a friend of mine) trying to get her to confess to being "more than friends" with me. He's a police office...so he's trained on how to manipulate people to extract information. She messaged me about it, screenshots of what he was saying...(yeah, my friends don't always listen...but since this wasn't about what W was doing, and it's something that's hurting my friend's family, she needed to vent to me), he was playing the "your friend already told me everything, so we know what happened, we just want your side" card against her.

By the way, this friend has been severely emotionally, mentally, verbally, and physically abused in her life, so she's really having a difficult time with this.

What I believe is that had these two toxic friends of W not ever been involved, this may never have happened. And now I'm seeing from MULTIPLE sources that they have pretty much orchestrated this entire thing.

They're trying to manipulate my friend. They've manipulated W.

In the past, they tried to even buy my friendship with gifts, but I never could get close because something just didn't feel right about them.

Once they saw they couldn't manipulate me...they changed.

I will never know why...but at least I believe that I've identified the main catalyst in this whole thing.