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Death did Kaitlin Palmieri and her late fiancé, Eric, part on the morning of their August 2020 wedding day.
Rather than walking down the aisle toward forever, a mourning Palmieri, then 35, became paralyzed with grief upon learning her dream lover suffered a fatal heart attack at 33, just hours before they were set to say, “I do.”
Despondent, the New Yorker spiraled into a seemingly endless cycle of despair — until she uncovered the sordid secrets of Eric’s double life.
“Last year, on Nov. 20, which was Eric’s birthday, I was on Instagram when I saw a post commemorating someone who had died and who had the same last name and birthday as Eric,” Palmieri penned in a piece to The Guardian.
“The poster said she had been with him on his last birthday.”
Palmieri didn’t think much of the unnamed woman’s tribute post — not initially, at least. Instead, she figured it was just a funky fluke.
“‘What a bizarre coincidence,’ I thought,” said Palmieri, “particularly because the post was from someone who’d heard about my story years before and reached out.
“We’d been in sporadic contact ever since.”
But the would-have-been bride was in for a rude awakening.
“I clicked on her Instagram story, which revealed that her post was actually about Eric,” said Palmieri. “I messaged to ask her to explain. Two hours later, I had my answer — with screenshots.”
The woman was Eric’s mistress.
The hush-hush honeys had quietly become an item shortly after meeting on a dating app in March 2019 — just a few months before Eric popped the question to Palmeri with a “fairytale” proposal in Central Park that December that year.
The woman was Eric’s mistress.
“They started seeing each other and were still talking 15 days before our wedding,” said a crestfallen Palmeri. “Seeing the messages he’d sent her as we’d sat together at home.
“I felt sick.”
Until that moment, Palmieri had believed Eric was heaven-sent to be her second chance at love.
Prior to swiping right on his dating profile in 2018, she’d lost her boyfriend, Mike, following a freak accident in 2015.
“On my 30th birthday, my parents threw me a party at their house,” she recalled. “Everyone was having a great time until I heard my brother scream Mike’s name.”
Her beau had slipped into a body of water near the house and fell unconscious.
“At the hospital, I was told that Mike wouldn’t ever wake up,” said the blond. “No one knows how he got hurt. He broke some bones in his back and had a brain injury, but we don’t know how that happened.”