Guy asks police to find fiancé. She says she slept in car. People say she's lying.
AITA for calling the police on my fiance?
Last night my (35M) Fiance (38F) left in the evening to give a friend's son a ride back to his home. She implied she'd be home before 9. She left at around 7:45.
10:15 rolled around and she still wasn't home. I texted and she apologized to me, saying that her friend's son was actually in the next town over (maybe 30 minutes away) and she was coming home now.
11:45 rolled around and she still hadn't come home, so I called her to no answer. Texted her to no response. I was getting very upset
12.30 rolled around and still no response and no answer to my phone calls. I was extremely angry.
1:30 rolled around and my anger had completely transformed into worry. Not answering my calls and texts not read.
Around 1:45 I called the police. I have always heard that the first 24 hours of someone being missing is the most important, so I didn't want to delay. I asked them to let me know if there had been any traffic accidents involving her car, and the operator told me that they would put out the word and send some cops to check along the route she would travel.
I called all the hospitals in the area to check if she has been checked in and I waited outside watching the road for her car for three hours, partially because I didn't want the kids to hear me on the phone with hospitals, and secondly because I was sick with worry.
At 7:00am she came home. She apologized for being out and said she had no excuse. She was driving home and felt tired like she was falling asleep at the wheel, so she pulled over to the side of the road to sleep. When she did that, she found that her brand new phone had stopped working.
She says she napped anyway because it was the responsible thing to do, and then came home at 7am to bring the kids to school and get to work on time.
I immediately called the police and told them that she had come home safely and gave them the case number and told them to stop searching, which they did.
My fiance brought the kids to school and left for work. I set out to start cleaning (cleaning distresses me sometimes), and I got a call from a policeman asking where she worked. I told him, and asked why, and I was informed that it was their policy to check on the person's wellness after a missing person is found.
I asked them to not go by her work but to give her a call instead. He said he couldn't promise.
My fiance is relatively new to her job. A police officer showed up and asked to speak with her. She is now enraged at me for calling the police and 'sending a cop to her work' and making her look bad.
She is saying I overreacted and that she wasn't missing and that I was punishing her for doing the responsible thing and not driving while drowsy. She is saying that she is never going to leave the house again except for work, because she is afraid I'm going to call the cops on her again.
So did I overreact? Should I have waited two days like she suggests?
Here's what people think:
Kezibythelake says:
NTA...but you know she's lying, right?
Rnevermore OP responded:
I do suspect that the story isn't truthful, but she doesn't really have a history of lying to me, so I've been trying to give her the benefit of the doubt.
Cynthia_Castillo677 says:
Uh no, her whole story is a big fat lie.
She told you she would be home by 9, but somehow was wrong about where the kid lived? Did she not know the town beforehand? Did she just start driving 30 mins and then the kid goes “oh no wait, I actually live in XYZ, not XXX!” That part of the story doesn’t even make any sense.
So she ended up changing the time
Then she “got tired” and pulled over and napped on the side of the road? You do realize that if police were looking for her on roads where she claimed she would be, and she was napping in her car on said road, they would have found her, right?
and then her NEW phone just happened to not be working? Despite the fact that that simply does not happen, and even if it wasn’t working PROPERLY, she still could have called 911
That’s not even mentioning the fact that I don’t know a single woman, myself included, who would pull over on the side of the road and sleep IN HER CAR WITH NO PHONE.
Monster-Death-Truck added:
Especially the timing— who sleeps from midnight to 7 AM in the car on the side of the road?? A woman too? Not a two hour power nap, but all night? And she came back conveniently in time to pick up kids and go to work.
Classroom_Visual hypothesized:
An actual portrayal of that evening -
Somewhere, in a bed around 2 towns over from OP’s house:
12am Him - ‘Babe, don’t go, just stay the night once. Say you fell asleep in the car on a 30 minute drive. Let’s turn off the phone and go to sleep’
Her “Hey why not. But make sure you set your alarm for 6am, so I can get back to take the kids to school.”
Rnevermore OP says:
It seems as if she is standing by her story no matter what. This probably means that if she was up to something else (very likely), then it is bad enough to bury behind a wall of obvious lies.
If I disappeared all night, even for a really good reason, I would expect my partner to call the police and worry. If I had a really crappy, but innocent reason, I would expect her to be angry at me. I certainly wouldn't be on the defensive, or especially on the offensive. I would be on full surrender.