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I almost don’t recognize her. She had cut her hair and changed the color—blonde instead of blue—and had lost quite a bit of weight. I think for a minute that maybe it was too much weight, then I remind myself that I don’t get to make those kinds of judgments about other people’stoward bodies. I wonder if she is okay. I remember what Alex had said—that they had broken up because she had gotten obsessive—and I wonder if that is what brought her here. Was she here because of him? Because of us? How could she possibly know about something that had happened just barely yesterday?
“Uhh, yeah, sure. Um, do you want something to drink?” I ask Cori.
“You should grab a bottle,” she says with something that isn’t quite a laugh, “and two glasses.”
She turns and starts making her way towards a table in the back. I take her advice, and a swig from the bottle as I make my way over. I am technically off work now, so I’m not breaking my promise not to drink on the clock anymore.
“Sorry to ambush you like this, I had tried to call you and message you, but you must have me blocked on everything.”
“I…didn’t block you on anything,” I reply.
She laughs, “Yeah, that’s kind of what I thought. He’s sneaky like that, you know.”
“No,” I tell her, “I don’t know. Who are you talking about? Alex?”
“Yeah, Alex. He emailed me today. He’s not supposed to,” she says, pausing. “I need to warn you, Ruby.”
It wasn’t at all what I expected. Apparently, it started out with small things. They were kind of things that didn’t seem like such a big deal, because they were in love, and she wanted to share a life with him. So, when he didn’t like her friends, and they didn’t like him either, she distanced herself from them. She convinced herself that they were just jealous.
Then, he needed to know where she was and who she was with all the time. He never believed her. He didn’t trust her. She figured that it was because he had had a rough upbringing, and that he would need some time to separate her from the people who had let him down, and she was willing to give it to him. This part makes sense to me, too, because I have felt it. That’s why when he asked her to send pictures and videos of where she was and who she was with, she decided that it was fair. When her family started to worry and voiced their concerns as well, she distanced herself from them, too.
Then, the things got to be not so small. It was sitting outside of her office. It was calling her boss to check in, which eventually became so frequent that she was reprimanded at work. Lastly, and what got her to the point where she finally couldn’t take it anymore, when she’d ran out of excuses, was the surveillance. That was when she got scared. She found out he had been recording her, and them, inside of her apartment, that night after we had all been here together. And that was it, she was done. But he wouldn’t let it go.
He followed her, threatening her with the photos and videos that he had. He started harassing her friends and family. She felt stupid for being so wrong about him, about everything. She said she had thought of herself as an unbreakable person; she wasn’t like those women that you see in the Lifetime movies. She wasn’t someone who was capable of being fooled and manipulated by someone like him and grappling with the reality that she had been was probably the hardest part. It was all so obvious to her when she really stopped to think about it.
After that, she realized she had to get the police involved. It was too much. It was bigger than she could handle, and she was terrified. That’s where they are now. There were protection orders and cases filed and Alex was out on bail.
I sit back and listen until she’s finished, saying nothing, incredulous. As she finishes, I take a shot straight from the bottle, not even bothering with the glass or maintaining the façade of any kind of decency, realizing that this must be at least the fourth one since she started talking because the entire bar is starting to lean to the right. I don’t know what to say or what to do. I believe women, but this doesn’t sound like the person I know. In fact, it directly contradicts the account he had given me himself.
I realize she’s waiting for me to reply, and I’m not quite sure how to do that. I throw back my glass and set it down on the table. “Wow, Cori. I mean, Jesus. I’m so fucking sorry. I mean, I have known Alex for two years, I had no idea that he was even capable of anything like that.” To be honest, sitting here now, I’m still not entirely sure he is, but I don’t say that.
“He told me that you two were together—that you had been together this whole time. I just thought that you should know, in case—”
“Whoa, wait. No. Cori, we are not together. And we weren’t together when you guys were dating. I wouldn’t do that—to anyone,” I say. Then, I realize that isn’t necessarily true. I would do it to myself and to Jake, apparently.
“Well, you can’t be too sure. Not everything he says is a lie, just most of it.” She pauses and takes a shot herself, and then adds, “Anyway, I just wanted to warn you. His parents say that this isn’t the first time he’s done something like this. He has a long history of—”
“His…parents?” I interrupt.
“Yeah, Ruby. That story about his parents dying in a car crash…it’s made up. They’re estranged, but they’re totally fine. They live in a big house in Sammamish with his two younger sisters. They all have fucking matching Teslas,” she scorns. “As far as I can tell, they’re nice people. I don’t know what happened. I ran into a couple of his friends at a bar one night, and they mentioned his sisters. I was confused, but I didn’t want to let on that I didn’t know about them, and so I decided to try and look them up. They’re all real, Ruby.”
For whatever reason,thisis the part. This is the part that throws me over the edge, the part that makes the room start spinning and makes me want to throw up in my mouth. We had bonded over what we had lost and the trauma we had been through. I’d shared so many details. He had shared so many stories, and apparently, they were all fake, and they were good. I doubt I could have written them. The broken part of me grieved for the broken part of him. My world got a lot less lonely when I met him. He made me believe that I could still be okay. It was based on a lie.
My eyes well up with tears and I throw my head back in an attempt to reabsorb them back into my eyeballs. It doesn’t quite work, and I wipe them away.
“I’m sorry, Ruby,” she tells me.
“It’s okay. It’s fine. I just need to leave now. That’s about all I can take, but thank you.”
I get up, throw some money on the table, and race out the back door. My legs somehow carry me home, but I don’t remember it and I’m not aware of it until I’m turning my new key in the new lock and sinking into my sofa. I wonder if I even remembered to breathe. It doesn’t quite feel like it.
I feel my phone vibrate and dig it out of my pocket. It’s Alex:Text me when you get home. And that’s it. I look at the text, thinking that it doesn’t feel like a text from someone that was madly in love with me and had loved me for years like he had claimed. I didn’t care much about that, but still, it was another lie.
Or maybe, just maybe, Cori wasn’t telling the truth. Maybe it was like Alex had said, and she had flipped the script. Except…I remember something she had said and pick my phone back up off of the couch. I go to my privacy settings, and there’s a number blocked. Is it her number? I’m not sure, but I knew hadn’t blocked anyone. I had never had a reason to block anyone before, so I certainly didn’t do it. Maybe it wasn’t her number, though. It could be a technology fuck up or a drunken mistake.
Then, I check my friends lists on social media. I don’t pay close attention to it, so it’s quite likely I wouldn’t notice if someone had gone missing, and I find that, sure enough, Cori was missing. “Fuck!” I yell out, kicking my coffee table over and throwing my phone hard toward the back wall. It hits a floating shelf with a couple of old wax candles and dusty books I hadn’t bothered with in a while, and everything goes tumbling to the ground.A perfect metaphor for what’s happening to this life I’ve built for myself, I think as I begrudgingly peel myself off the sofa and out of my figurative pit of despair to clean up the literal mess I’ve made.
That’s when I see it. It’s small enough that I never would have noticed it otherwise—a tiny square black box with a lens in the middle. It’s a camera; it must be. I almost grab it, and then I freeze. I leave it and run into the bathroom, shut the door. “FUCK!” I yell out again. Then, I start to get nervous. What if I’m not safe in here either? I take inventory of the small room, and everything seems to be in place. I open the cabinet and find nothing. This room appears to be clear. I turn on the faucet and splash cold water onto my face.Think, Ruby. What the fuck are you going to do now?
