“Dr. Harlow told us you were taking some time,” he said. “I figured it wasn’t my business.”
“It wasn’t,” I said. “But thank you for telling me.”
By the time I got home, I had a picture in my head that I couldn’t unsee. Julian had been building a story about me for weeks, piece by piece, to the people I worked with every night. And he had been doing it while I was downstairs, working.
He was in the kitchen when I walked in. I didn’t raise my voice. I asked him if he had told people we were separated.
He looked at me for a long moment and then he said, “Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because I thought we were,” he said. “I thought that’s what was happening.”
“Julian, we never had that conversation.”
“We didn’t have to,” he said. “You were never here. When you were here, you were tired. I thought you wanted out.”
I set my bag down on the counter. “You thought I wanted out, so you told my coworkers I was sick and replaced me with your girlfriend?”
He didn’t answer that. He just stood there with his hands at his sides, and for the first time I saw him not as my husband but as a man who had made a series of choices and was now waiting to see how many of them he could get away with.
“I need you to leave,” I said. “Tonight. Just tonight.”
He started to say something and then stopped. He packed a bag and went out to the car. I stood in the doorway and watched him go.
When the taillights disappeared down the street, I closed the door and locked it.
My phone buzzed on the counter. It was a number I didn’t have saved, but I knew who it was before I opened it. Paige.
“I didn’t know,” the message said. “I swear I didn’t know. We need to talk.”
I read it three times. The reasonable part of me wanted to believe her. The rest of me wanted to know what she knew and when she knew it.
I typed back one word.
“Where?”
Chapter 5 – The Version of Me He Sold Her
Paige picked a diner two exits past the hospital, the kind of place where nobody from work would see us. She was already in a corner booth when I walked in, and she looked worse than I did. Her eyes were red, and she kept folding and unfolding a napkin on the table.
I sat down across from her and didn’t say anything.
“I’m not going to make excuses,” she said. “I just need you to see what he gave me.”
She pulled a folder out of her bag and slid it across the table. It was a copy of the same transfer packet I’d taken from her that night.
“Page four,” she said.
I turned to it. It was a memo, on hospital letterhead, with a line in the middle that said the outgoing supervisor had “voluntarily requested a step-down to accommodate a personal health matter and has signed all consent forms.”
“That’s me,” I said. “That’s supposed to be me.”
“He told me you’d already signed off,” Paige said. “He told me you were relieved. He said you’d been begging him to let you come off nights.”
I set the paper down. “I never said that to him. Not once.”
“I know that now.” She looked at the table. “But I didn’t ask you. That’s on me. I wanted the job and I wanted him, and I didn’t ask the one person who could have told me the truth.”
“No,” I said. “You didn’t.”
She nodded slowly. “Why did you want the job so badly?” I asked.
She was quiet for a moment. “Because he told me it was mine. He said we were going to be together and this was the first step. He said you two were already done, and this was just the paperwork.”
“And you believed him.”
“I believed him because I wanted to.” She looked up at me. “You can hate me for that. I would.”
I thought about it. I didn’t hate her. I hated that she had been standing in a room I built, holding a title I earned, while my husband told her I was too tired to care.
“You still took it,” I said. “You knew my name was on that packet, and you still took it.”
She didn’t argue. She just sat there with her hands flat on the table.
“There’s something else,” she said finally.
“Of course there is.”
She reached into her bag again and pulled out her phone. “The department dinner last month. Julian had a few drinks and he got loud. I recorded him because I didn’t trust what he was saying about you.”
She slid the phone across the table and pressed play. Julian’s voice came out of the speaker, easy and sure, the way he sounded when he thought he was the smartest man in the room.
“Meredith won’t fight it. She doesn’t have the energy.”
Someone else laughed. “You sure about that?”
“I’m sure. She’s been running on empty for a year. She’ll sign whatever I put in front of her.”
The recording stopped. I sat there and listened to the silence after it.
“Why are you giving me this?” I asked.
Paige put her phone back in her bag. “Because he lied to me too,” she said. “And because I’d rather be the person who tells the truth late than the person who never does.”
I folded the memo and put it in my bag with the folder. “I’m not going to thank you,” I said.
“I didn’t expect you to.”
I stood up. “If this goes where I think it’s going,” I said, “you’re going to have to tell people what you just told me.”
Paige looked up at me. “I know,” she said.
I walked out of the diner and stood in the parking lot for a long time. The sun was going down, and the air smelled like rain. I had spent the whole morning thinking of Paige as the other woman. Now I understood that she was one of the things Julian had used, and one of the things he had counted on me not to check. He had lied to her, and she had believed him, and she had still taken my job. Both things were true.
I got in my car and called Dana.
“I have a recording,” I said. “I have the memo. I have the packet.”
“Then you need to go to compliance,” Dana said. “Not HR. Compliance. Ask for Nadia Okafor. She doesn’t work for Julian, and she doesn’t owe him anything.”
“What do I tell her?”
“Everything. Start with the reviews.”
