My Online Girlfriend Was Secretly a Toledo Weather Reporter

I met her on a dating app and her name was Renata and she was, without exaggeration, the most beautiful woman who had ever shown interest in me. I am a normal-looking guy. I have a normal chin. When Renata liked my profile I actually said no out loud to my phone, like it was a mistake.

We talked for a month. She was charming, a little formal, which I chalked up to her being originally from abroad, she said, without ever specifying which abroad. She could not video chat because her camera was broken, and then her phone was old, and then the lighting in her apartment was bad for calls, a run of technical misfortune I chose not to examine because I did not want it to be true.

The photos, though. The photos were incredible. And that turned out to be the problem, because incredible photos are photos other people also want to look at.

My sister saw one over my shoulder one night and said, "Wait, why do you have a picture of Sharon Vale?"

Sharon Vale, it turned out, was a weather reporter for a news station in Toledo, Ohio. My sister recognized her because my sister lived in Toledo for three years and watched the six o'clock news every night like a person with a stable life. She pulled up the station's website. There was Renata. Except her name was Sharon, and she was pointing at a cold front moving in from the west, and she had, per her bio, a husband and two kids and a golden retriever named Buster.

My girlfriend of one month was a married meteorologist who did not know I existed.

I did the thing you do. I searched the other photos. Every single one was Sharon Vale -- Sharon at a charity gala, Sharon in a station promo, Sharon holding an umbrella for a bit during a live shot. Someone had simply harvested a local news anchor's entire public image and pointed it at lonely men on the internet.