The next morning, his face is strained when I walk into his office. He looks like he’s barely slept.
“How was last night?” I ask.
He rubs the back of his neck. “It was fine. Just a little difference of opinion.”
I raise a brow, meaning, “tell me what happened.”
He raises one back, meaning, “you know I can’t do that.”
I come around to his side of the desk. The door is open so I can’t touch him, but I’m drawn toward him like a magnet anyway. “I was thinking,” I venture tentatively, “that if we’re going away together for a real vacation, then we probably need to go to HR.”
I expect him to be pleased—he was the first one to mention it, after all—but a shadow comes over his face, a wariness flickering in his eyes.
“Sure,” he says, sounding anything but. “Let’s just wait until the Lawson case is done.”
It would take us ten minutes at most to go to HR and get the paperwork signed. Two days ago, he was talking about a week away in Fiji, and now it’s like he doesn’t even want to be in the same room with me.
I’d like to be the version of me that no longer jumps to conclusions, who doesn’t assume the worst, but I’m struggling right now. It feels like whatever was discussed with Fields has changed everything.
I take a deep breath. “Is something wrong?” I hate how weak, how vulnerable, it makes me feel, needing to ask.
His teeth sink into his lower lip before he shakes his head. “Just tired. Between this case and the class-action, I’m beat.”
We work late and return to my apartment. He falls asleep while I’m brushing my teeth, but when I wake in the middle of the night, he’s pulling me close, and there’s a tension in his grip that suggests he’s been up for a while.
“Are you okay?” I whisper, rolling to face him.
“Sorry,” he says. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”
I pull him on top of me. I know if I ask, he’ll tell me he’s fine, though he’s clearly not, and all I can do for him now is this.
He moves inside me, slowly and silently, coming with a single sharp gasp, his mouth buried in my neck, and for a moment it feels like we’re okay again.
He collapses beside me—his head on my pillow, his palm curving over my hip.
“Are you sure you don’t want to talk?” I whisper. “I can tell something’s bothering you.”
He moves to his own pillow and rolls onto his back, staring at the ceiling.
“What happened at Stadler?” he finally asks.
I stiffen. I’d expected him to ask about Stadler again, but not like this. And not like he already knows. “Who told you about that?”
“Fields said something last night. That you stalked someone there.”
My stomach drops. It hurts so much to hear him bring this up to me, to know that same fucking story is still circulating. I sit up with the sheet held to my chest. “And you believed him?”
He rolls toward me. “Of course not. That’s why I’m asking you what happened.”
“If that was true,” I reply, throwing the covers off and swinging my legs to the floor, “you wouldn’t even have to ask.”
He grabs my hand. “Don’t fucking run off, and don’t act like you’re mad just so you don’t have to tell me the truth. I know you didn’t stalk anyone. I just need the real story.”
I want to refuse because I shouldn’t have to defend myself to anyone. But he isn’t wrong—part of my desire to run off and hide behind my anger is just that…because I want to hide. What happened wasn’t all my fault, but it doesn’t make me look great either.
“I was dating a partner there in law school,” I begin. “Kyle. He was based out of the New York office. He told me he was getting divorced—he’d even shown me the separation agreement—and it was all a fucking lie. I didn’t have a clue he was still with her until I found out she was pregnant. I’m not sure he was ever even planning to leave.”
“So what happened?” he asks, his voice neutral, emotionless, giving nothing away. It’s the voice I use with clients I don’t entirely believe.
“They turned the whole thing around on me to protect him. They marched me out of the building like a fucking criminal, and everyone watched. All these goddamn male partners, protecting their own when every one of them knew it was bullshit.”
“Jesus,” Ben whispers, pulling me down beside him and wrapping his arms around me. “No wonder you’re so obsessed with making partner.”
“If I was a man, you wouldn’t call me obsessed,” I reply. “You’d just call me ambitious.”
“Craig’s been there as long as you,” he says. “And I don’t worry he’ll set the building on fire if he doesn’t get what he wants.”
“Exactly,” I reply, digging my nails into my palms. “Because Craig has no ambition whatsoever. That’s why he shouldn’t make partner.”
He presses his lips to the top of my head. “I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry that happened to you.”
I say nothing. It’s no longer just the male partners at Stadler, protecting their own. It’s the men at my own goddamn firm, discussing this behind my back. Mischaracterizing me and spreading lies whenever it suits them.
I can’t believe that after all this time, I’m still the one paying the price for what Kyle did.
43
When I confronted Kyle about his wife, he continued to lie.
I listened to him spin new stories like the master he was, but I listened from a distance, as if I was watching this take place between two other people. He told me he’d slipped one night, after they split. “I don’t even know that the kid is mine,” he said. “Either way, I’m leaving once the baby comes.”
He told me he’d only found out recently, that he was as horrified by the situation as I was. I didn’t bother asking him about the gender reveal party they’d held months before, or the trip to Florida, or all his stories about her drinking. I already knew exactly who he was: someone who could lie easily, without a shred of guilt.
He’d been building a castle out of a deck of cards, one he had to know would collapse on me eventually. But he just kept building.
“I don’t believe a word out of your mouth,” I said, my voice flattened by shock.
“If you tell anyone,” he replied, “I’ll fucking ruin you.”
They were the last words we ever exchanged.
I spent that night reeling. Torn between shock and rage, torn between fearing the damage he might do to my career and feeling like his wife deserved to know who he was. It was because of my mom that I did the right thing. She’d given up so many years of her life to a man who didn’t deserve her. I couldn’t give her those years back, but maybe I could prevent it happening to someone else.
I messaged Josie from the fake profile I’d created and told her the truth—not that we’d chosen a ring and had been looking at houses, because it seemed like too much—but simply the bare facts, with enough detail that it would be hard to doubt me.