Then one Thursday, near closing time, I walked past the staff kitchen and heard her on the phone. I wasn’t eavesdropping, not really—she was practically shouting. “I told you,” she said.
“No. I’m done talking about it, Abed. You don’t get to rewrite things.”
I froze.
She caught me standing there. For half a second, her eyes flickered with something—maybe embarrassment, maybe regret. Then she hung up and walked past me without a word.
The next morning, she called in sick. A week passed. Then another.
When she finally came back, she’d lost weight. Not drastically, but her cheekbones looked sharper. She wore flats instead of heels.
And she no longer said good morning. One afternoon, she emailed me asking if we could talk. I said yes.
This time, she didn’t sit down. She stood in my office doorway, arms crossed. “You were right,” she said simply.
I didn’t ask what she meant. I think part of me already knew. She told me Abed had been cheating.
That he’d been tracking her phone, reading her messages, even threatening her about “what kind of stories she’d bring into his workplace”—meaning, apparently, me. It had escalated fast, and she’d moved into her sister’s place two nights ago. She didn’t cry.
She didn’t tremble. She just told it straight, like reading a weather report. Then she said something that stayed with me: “I thought I was smarter than you.
I thought you were the dumb one for falling for him. But now I know I was just later.”
I didn’t say anything. I just nodded.
From that point on, things between us shifted. Quietly, respectfully. We weren’t friends, not exactly.
But a kind of truce formed. A recognition. She stayed at the firm.
Worked hard. Even got promoted within the year. But here’s where it gets strange.
One Monday morning, she left a manila envelope on my desk. Inside were photos. Not printed from a phone—real, developed photos.
One of them showed Abed, shirtless, standing in what looked like my old apartment balcony. The timestamp? Seven years ago.
When we were still together. Another showed him with a woman I didn’t recognize—holding hands, same timeline. Two more photos followed, both dated months before our breakup.
Him with her. Paloma. She’d known him longer than I thought.
I called her into my office that afternoon. “I don’t understand,” I said. “Why would you take this job?
Why come here? Why… me?”
She didn’t flinch. “I needed closure,” she said.
“Not just from him. From myself.”
Turns out, Paloma had been the “other woman” back when Abed and I were on the rocks. She hadn’t known at first, but when she found out, she’d stayed anyway.
“He told me you were crazy,” she said. “I believed him. Then I met you.”
The full weight of it hit me like a sack of bricks.
She didn’t come to stir drama. She came to test her own memory. To see who had been telling the truth.
I thought I’d feel betrayed, but all I felt was this strange mix of relief and grief. Like we were both finally waking up from the same bad dream. Over the next few months, we became real friends—not just polite coworkers.
We didn’t talk about Abed anymore. We didn’t need to. That chapter had ended.
But fate, as it turns out, isn’t done until it circles all the way back. One rainy Thursday, our firm got shortlisted for a major civic project—our biggest pitch in five years. The city council was hosting an open vote on the top three bidders.
Guess who chaired the vote? Abed’s new boss. And guess who Abed had just pissed off by trying to jump firms behind his employer’s back?
Paloma had the receipts—emails, messages, timelines. All above board, all legal. She handed them to our legal team with a little smile.
Just doing her job. The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page. Tap READ MORE to discover the rest 🔎👇
