Money and Friendship

There's a friend I've had for two and a half years.  We talked every night.  We played video games together.  We watched shows and movies that my husband didn't want to watch (husband never wanted to watch anything with me).  We were even selling the gold off our game accounts and splitting it using a shared Paypal account.  We talked about everything.

When my husband hit me for the final time in April of 2017, this friend was livid.  I moved out in July of 2017.  My friend and I were still talking most nights.  I started trying to do things out in the community, so instead of 7 nights a week, it was maybe 4 or 5 nights a week that we were talking.  But we were still sharing everything.

Now, I've been betrayed by people I've trusted,  friends who have lied to me about things too often.  So when he asked for a loan of some of the money in September of 2017 I figured it was a good "test" of his friendship.  I figured, it came from in-game gold which I never would have sold without him selling it.  It's money that never really existed for me, and it wouldn't really affect me if I never saw the money again.  I never dreamed that I wouldn't see the money again.  I was confident he'd pass this "test" with flying colors.

Our contact started to become less frequent.  Not as much as it was before.  He said he had stuff going on in RL, studies were picking up, more work at work came in, his father died, he lost his phone, he'd had a hard workout at the gym and was too tired to stay up... there was always something.  By December we were talking once a month.

At the end of March 2018 he sold my accounts (with consent).  The thing he didn't do was have the money paid to our joint paypal account, he had it paid to him directly.

You already know where this is going, don't you?

He disappeared right after the sale.  It's been a month now.  I've not heard a word from him.  Mutual friends haven't heard from him either.  I see him log into Skype every day.  I see him opening the messaging app we use every day.  I know he isn't dead.  Yet not a word from him.  Looking at it objectively, it's hard not to draw the obvious conclusion.

The thing is, I don't really care about the money.  The friendship was far more valuable to me than any money.  The emotional support I had come to rely on was gone.  I was betrayed and I never saw it coming.  A month later, and I'm still wondering how much of our friendship was real, and how much of it was him setting me up?  No one we mutually knows believes he'd do something like this.  He had us all fooled.  Our friendship was only worth a few hundred dollars.

With my divorce coming up, another move, and this betrayal, it's hard getting up in the morning.  My marriage failing isn't my fault, but I feel like a failure.  Having been scammed by my best friend just adds to that sense of failure.

I keep hoping I am wrong and that there is some reason for the ghosting.

I should know better by now.