She thought her dog was safe at home – until a vet’s call about her pup at clinic exposed her boyfriend’s darkest secret
Life can change in an instant, especially when it involves someone you trust. For one woman, a normal day quickly turned into a nightmare she never could have anticipated. A story shared on Reddit in 2016 by u/explodeybrain drew sharp reactions online. What began as a routine trip and a normal workday turned into a moment no pet owner ever wanted to face. The full shock came only after she followed a trail of messages and images. While the owner had assumed her then 11-year-old pet canine was safe at home with her partner, it soon turned into a heartbreaking discovery that shattered her trust.
She shared that her boyfriend, Jay, had left for a trip up the coast to help family on a Friday morning. While she was at work that day, one of her ex‑flatmates from university, Bob, phoned with a troubling message. Bob thought he had her dog with him, and he said someone had dropped the dog off at the vet surgery where he worked to be put to sleep. Bob sent pictures, and she recognised the dog at once, Sticksy. She said, “I'd recognise him anywhere, I grew up with him and he was so close to me when I left home to study, there were no questions about it, Sticksy stayed with me.” She left work as soon as she could and drove straight to pick him up.
At the clinic, Bob showed her a phone recording of the vet’s security camera. The footage showed a man dropping the dog off. There was no doubt in her mind who it was. The man in the video was Jay, wearing the same clothes he had left home in that morning. The image made everything suddenly clear and horrifying. She described watching the clip and feeling stunned.
Jay texted her a few times that day, and she admitted she did not know how to confront him. Part of her wanted a furious, immediate confrontation. "I'm actually scared I will utterly lose it at him. I'm running everything through my head on why he'd do this." She wrote about imagining dramatic responses, unable to comprehend what her boyfriend had done, let alone reason with it and even said that she wanted to "dump everything he owns out on the front lawn and set fire to it.” At the same time, she felt frozen. She shared how she was “half numb and half stunned beyond rational thought.” She tried to work through possible reasons for his actions and found herself searching for explanations she did not really believe. "We talked sometimes about moving north to be near his family, or overseas within a few years. I can't believe I'm trying to find reasons for him to do what he did or reasons for me."
In the end, she held back from contacting him directly in anger. She described replying to his normal‑sounding text that morning, even though she felt anything but normal. “He texted me this morning like he normally does when he's away. I replied like normal, though we're not big text talkers anyway. He asked me a couple of times if I was OK. Everything in the texts I'm trying to read into what the hell he thinks he's hiding,” she wrote.