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A man with a horizon, as opposed to the dead end she was in.
“Thinking back on it, I realize now…” She shrugged. “Well, it doesn’t matter. He ended up on the wrong floor, and stopped by my desk to ask me for directions. I took him to my boss, who’s head of HR, and on the way, he told me he was in law school at SUNY Caldwell. Starting his third year. Looking at the paralegal thing like a paid internship. I didn’t expect to see him again, but after he was finished with the interview, he came back and told me he thought he’d nailed it.
“A week or two later, we ran into each other on the elevator. He told me he’d gotten the job and asked me out for coffee. That’s how it all started.” She pushed her bowl away. “The women in the secretarial pool kept telling me I was so lucky, and I did wonder why me. There were better options, you know what I mean? But he wanted me.”
The man across from her murmured something. But when she glanced up, he shook his head like he wanted her to move along with the story.
“I think my cheering section was part of the problem.” She wiped her mouth with a paper napkin and sat back in her chair. “I guess sometimes when you think nothing is ever going to change… you take what comes your way, especially if it’s backed up by a bunch of people telling you to go for it because of how good it is.”
“When did things start to go wrong?”
Anne frowned and tried to find the right words. “I ended up in a labyrinth of deception. And the punch line was that the lies were the best part of the relationship.” She glanced across her table. “It was all bullsh—crap. He was married, for one thing. He has two kids, for another. He wasn’t in law school, wasn’t even trying to get into law school. And his coping mechanism for dealing with the stress of living a fake, made-up life was a pathological need for order and discipline. I was part of that. Or I was supposed to be. I wasn’t as good at taking orders as he thought I’d be.”
“If he loved you, he should have—”
“It wasn’t love. For either one of us.” She cleared her throat. “The whole thing came out because his wages this month were garnished for failure to pay child support. Like I said, I’m in charge of payroll for the firm, and I couldn’t believe it when I saw the decree from the court. After stewing about what to do, I went to one of our attorneys for advice, and he got a private investigator to look into Bruce. Within twenty-four hours, there was a whole dossier on him.” She shook her head. “I read it through twice, and then had to excuse myself to go throw up in the bathroom. Good thing it was after hours.”
Pausing, she went to rub the ache behind her eye and bumped into that bandage for the hundredth time. With a wince, she put her hand in her lap. “After I left the building last night, I went over there to let him know I wasn’t going to see him anymore—but I wasn’t going to bring anything else up. The relationship wasn’t working for me even apart from everything I’d learned and I’m pretty sure he was aware of it. What I didn’t know was that the dossier had also been shared with HR. The attorney I’d gone to had taken the investigator’s report to my boss and they’d fired Bruce for lying about his credentials at the end of the workday. I had no clue I was walking into… a storm.”
“What exactly happened?”
Anne closed her eyes. “He blamed me for everything—because he’d guessed that the garnishment of the wages had tipped me off and I’d reported it. But his ranting was so much more than that. He railed against the law firm, and talked about some new opportunity that was going to transform him. And then he just snapped. He grabbed me around the throat.” Her hand crept up to her collarbones. “He was red in the face and vacant in the eyes, so furious that I didn’t think he was even seeing me. And what he was saying… I was terrified. He started out yelling at me, but then it all morphed… he was screaming about how he was going to have power, too. He was going to be bigger and stronger than everybody. Like he was a villain in a superhero comic book. It was a total break with reality, but given all his lying? The delusion was totally him.”
The man across from her frowned, one of his hands curling up in a fist. “How did you get away?”
