Podcast Episode: Adi – Deception Has a Name

Pip: Ask Brett is where the personal gets published — and brett does not flinch.

Mara: Today we're in the World Traveller series, deep in the territory of relationships, deception, and what gets left behind when trust is broken beyond repair.

Pip: Heavy territory. Let's start with the story of Adi.

Adi – Deception Has a Name

Mara: This segment is about a relationship that was never what it appeared to be — three years of emotional investment in someone who, it turns out, was engineering every moment of it.

Pip: The post doesn't bury the conclusion. It opens with this: "The truth, I would later understand, is that he was playing me the entire time. His affections were a performance — designed to keep me on a string in the hope I would deliver him back to Melbourne."

Mara: That's the shape of the whole story in two sentences. What follows is the detail of how that performance was sustained — across borders, a pandemic, and years of silence.

Pip: It starts with a Sunday afternoon hookup that ends the moment Adi gets what he came for. Then a long silence, then a call from an Uber window, then three years of an internet relationship conducted from India while Australia's borders were closed.

Mara: And during those three years, real things happened. His family contracted Covid. His sister outed him to his parents. And then there were, as the post puts it, "the months — plural — when he simply and unapologetically vanished without a single word of communication."

Pip: Months. Plural. And yet every favour was called in, every political contact leveraged, until a visa was arranged. That is a staggering amount of effort directed at someone who was running a performance.

Mara: The arrival lands on New Year's Day, following three cancelled return dates — none of them communicated in advance. Within ten days, brett was in The Alfred ICU: collapsed kidneys, advanced pneumonia, a heart under the weight of accumulated stress. Five days with no memory. Full dialysis.

Pip: And while that was happening, Adi left. He never returned.

Mara: The post is precise about what followed: "He stole from me. He lied to me. He abandoned me when I needed someone most. He treated me as though I were rubbish to be discarded."

Pip: That sentence doesn't reach for poetry. It doesn't need to.

Mara: What it leaves behind is documented just as plainly — trust issues described as running deep, and a decision, quiet but firm, not to pursue another relationship. The post frames it as a lesson the universe intended. Sad, perhaps, but true.

Pip: Deception at that scale doesn't just end a relationship — it rewrites how you read every one that came before it.

Mara: The World Traveller series keeps going. There's more of this story still to tell.