No one else saw it. No one but me. No one else saw it, because they couldn’t. Love can create blinders to the truth, but I never got the chance to feel love toward him. My 20/20 vision wouldn’t let me. So while they had their blinders on, I put my wall up because I had to. I had to protect myself.

I could see it early on. The torrid liar who would do anything to get his way. The defiant child who turned a deaf ear to correction and direction. The narcissistic manipulator who twisted everything simply because the truth would never win the argument.

I saw it at its fledgling stage and said nothing hoping that was all it was – a stage. He’s just a kid, I told myself. Kids are immature and play selfish games all the time. They tell lies and cry to get their way. That is the essence of being a little kid. He’ll grow out of it as all kids do. As time went on though, and the little kid grew in size, so did the behavior growing ever more intense in the relentless pursuit of what? I am sure he still does not ultimately know. He only knows the power of conviction in argument, any argument, to bend the will of others-the very others that clothed and fed him for years and provide shelter for him still, even if under duress.

And so after years and years of abuse (yes, that is what repeated lies and manipulation are), the stepparent realizes, long before the parent, that this is not just a passing phase. It’s the character, the being, the actual self. It is who he is, ugly and toxic.

There will be no inner growth, no change, no sudden epiphany or eureka moment, only a constant, aching, torment of a cycle that never ends. He doesn’t want to find an end because then what? Life? Little kids don’t worry about life. So torture is his goal from the beginning to the end of each day while his victims go to work, pay the bills and attempt to live their lives in a Groundhog’s Day approach to normalcy and the accomplishment of something.