The Stories We Told

The Dance of a Codependent and a Compulsive Liar

The Stories We Told is the memoir of a clinical psychologist who knew the signs and stayed anyway.

Dr. Niki Serravalle had built a life she was proud of, a practice, three daughters, a hard-won steadiness, when she fell for Ed. He was charm and chaos, fire and ice, a man who could make an ordinary table feel like the center of the world. On their second date she asked him to draw where he saw his life in five years. He sketched a small house on the back of a receipt. She kept it.

What followed was nine years of loving a compulsive liar, and of slowly learning how much of herself she would abandon to keep the story going. This is not a book about a villain. It is a book about the dance. Two people who learned early that love came with conditions, finding a familiar charge in each other. The pull that felt like home. The cost of staying. And the long, unglamorous work of coming back to herself.

Written with the intimacy of memoir and the eye of a psychologist who could not think her way out of it, this is for every woman who has loved someone confusing, stayed longer than she should have, and wondered why. It is her story. Somehow, it is also yours.

An excerpt

Our second date stays vivid in my memory. We both dressed up a little more than the occasion required, because we wanted to impress. We were caught up in candlelight, the slow burn of chemistry thick in the air.

He leaned in across the table, playful and curious. So, he said with a grin, you're going to be a psychologist? Does that mean you can read minds? Or tell the future or something?

I smiled and said, Of course I can. Then I added, Actually, let me show you. Draw me a picture of where you think your life will be in five years.

He laughed, surprised, but his eyes lit up. He dug around, pulled an old receipt from his pocket, and even ran out to his truck to find a pen. Right there on the back of that crumpled slip, he sketched a small house. Simple. Nestled in the woods.

When he handed it back to me, something stirred inside me. This tells me everything I need to know about you, Ed, I told him softly.

He raised an eyebrow, grinning. Really? You got all that from a little picture?

I laughed. It's the story of you, I said.

Most of all, I saw that he wanted home. Comfort. To belong. A place to have a family.

In that moment, I believed we wanted the same thing.

The Stories We Told

The Stories We Told is coming.

While you wait, there is the writing