Choose your friends wisely

He walked into the flat and we held each other.

Each told the other that he loved him.

That moment lasted forever. I never wanted to let him go and, by the way he was holding me, it was evident that the feeling was mutual.

I looked down at the big manila envelope in his hand.

"What's that?" I noticed that it was marked with the logo of Hopitaux de Paris.

"It's some x-rays that I had taken at the hospital" he said.

While 'in custody' he'd had some kind of panic/anxiety attack that, at the time, looked like a heart attack. The police had taken him to hospital where he'd been hooked up to monitors, poked, prodded and x-rayed.

All this was happening, yet whenever I called the commissariat they didn't say a word. I can't believe that they would send him to hospital, that he appears to be dying and that they would contact nobody to let them know. Well, I can believe it - it's the police.

Anyway, turns out all was ok, and it was an anxiety attack. Goodness knows the situation was stressful enough to enduce one.

Having finally let go of each other, we lie down on the bed and he tells me what has happened.

Two girls that he knows - good friends with whom we've spent many a great evening - have, it seems, been running a scam on their banks. They've been using each others credit cards overseas and then claiming the cards to be stolen.

It's a good scam - after all, if I'm using my debit card in Paris, how can I also be using my credit card in Montréal at the same time? That's the line they used with the banks.

Seems the banks are wise to this though, and refused to refund the purchases. Faced with a huge bill, the girls implicated the person who had been - innocently - on one of the shopping trips with them....my lovely FP. He'd paid for one of the girls to go to Montréal with him in the summer and this was how she was repaying him.

They told the police that he'd stolen their cards, that he'd been shopping with their credit and that he'd refused to repay them when they confronted him.

Luckily, much like the banks, the police aren't stupid. They see this kind of thing everyday.

As le FP was released, he'd seen the two girls being led into the commissariat. They've been charged and they're awaiting trial is all the police will tell us.

I hope that's the end of it for me and le FP. It certainly isn't the end for the two evil, nasty, hateful women behind the scam.

I look forward to hearing that they are behind bars, fined up to their eyeballs and left to live ruined lives with criminal records that haunt them forever. Really. I do.

Forgiveness isn't coming easy at the moment.