by V.P. Preston
This is a true story.
The events in this book happened. I've changed some names and identifying details to protect privacy, my own included, but the core facts happened exactly as I've written them: the register at the Chanel boutique on 57th Street, the LinkedIn photograph from a conference in Paris, the email that landed on a Tuesday, the wedding ring on his left hand.
For a long time I didn't have a name for what happened to me. I didn't know that this particular kind of deception — a man constructing a fabricated life in order to obtain intimacy and emotional investment from a woman who never would have agreed to any of it had she known the truth — is recognized in law as Rape by Fraud.
If you're reading this and any of it sounds familiar — the double life, the declarations of love that always seemed to peak right when you were about to walk away, the other woman who was somehow always framed as the unstable one — this book is for you. You weren't naive. You were up against someone who had been rehearsing this particular deception long enough to be extremely good at it. And what he did to you has a name.
— V.P. Preston, New York, 2026
The email arrived on a Tuesday. Two sentences were all it took. We are married and have a child. Steve says you're extorting us. Leave us alone. I read it three times. Then I set the phone face-down on the desk and sat there for a long time without moving.
I'd spent three years loving a man who had, for the entire three years, belonged to somebody else. He stood in my apartment on Christmas Eve, handed me a gift wrapped in ribbon, looked me directly in the eye, and told me — three separate times, with real deliberateness — that I was the only one.
This book is about a man named Steve Smith — what he did, how he managed to do it for so long, and why it worked as well as it did. But it's also about something bigger than one man. Steve isn't an aberration. He's charming, well-educated, good company across a dinner table. He's the kind of man other people introduce to their friends with something like pride. And he is capable of lying to your face, with complete conviction, for years at a stretch.
December was doing its usual routine on the Upper East Side — lights strung across storefronts, sidewalks thick with people moving at the particular urgency the season always brought out in them. Victoria walked with her mind still half in the meeting she'd just left, barely registering the cold against her face.
Near the entrance, a tall man stood smoking, phone pressed to his ear. He had the kind of stillness that draws a second look without asking for one. She caught herself glancing twice, which she didn't usually do.
Their eyes met. It held for a beat longer than it should have.
The Double Life of Mr. Smith is a memoir about deception, coercive control, and a three-year relationship with a man who belonged to someone else the entire time — and the slow process of understanding what had actually happened.
V.P. Preston writes from direct personal experience, with names and identifying details changed to protect privacy, in an account that names what happened with legal and psychological precision rather than treating it as simply a bad relationship.
Readers who've experienced deception or coercive control in a relationship and want language for it, and anyone interested in how skilled, sustained deception actually operates in plain sight.
