It dials once. Twice. Three times.
Then the click as we connect.
“Tess, darling?” comes Bea’s smooth, alto voice. “Tess, are you there?”
I’m flooded with emotion at hearing the clear note of concern in her tone. “Yes—Bea, it’s me. I’m here.”
“Oh, Tess,” she cries. “You’ve had us all scared half to death. Your apartment looked like it was ransacked. I was ready to call the police until Troy said he finally heard from your lawyer that you were alright.”
“Bea, I’m so sorry—”
“Where are you, darling? Let me come to you. Wherever you are, it’s not home. Let me bring you home,” she pleads.
I shake my head, knowing she can’t see it. “I can’t,” I say. “I have no home there anymore.”
“That’s nonsense. Tess, you listen to me now. All of this has been blown so completely out of proportion. I simply cannot believe that Dale chose to handle this situation as he did. I swear to you, when they told me about that god-awful HR meeting, I saw red.”
I blink back my tears. “So, you didn’t know? You didn’t approve them putting me on administrative leave?”
“Are you kidding me?” she cries. “What is this, a Nathaniel Hawthorne novel? We don’t punish our best and brightest junior partners for dancing at a wedding, Tess. It’s ridiculous.”
I breathe a sigh of relief, even as my gut churns. All this means is that Troy lied. Again. He lied to everyone, convincing us all that Bea was the mastermind, wielding the company’s morality clause like a cudgel to break and silence me.
“You know who should be put on administrative leave is Dale,” she adds with an irritated huff. “I simply can’t believe that after ten years with this company, he thought this was the best way to handle what was so clearly a private family matter.”
I go still, heart racing as I put together the pieces. “Bea, wait…who do you think is responsible for putting me on administrative leave?”
“Dale,” she cries. “I swear, that man is a menace. I’d fire him if I could get the other partners to all agree.”
Everything stops.
I close my eyes, taking a deep breath. “Bea, this was Troy.”
“Of course, Troy is upset,” she says quickly. “He’s been beside himself wondering where you are. He said he walked you out of the office mid-day on Monday and hadn’t heard from you since. We had to have the fire department let us into your apartment, and we found it in such a state. We were sure you’d been taken in the night—”
I can’t do this. I can’t listen to her spew back his lies.
“—and then there’s all this nonsense about the divorce papers. Troy was blindsided, Tess. Devastated. This was never in the plan—”
“Bea, enough,” I shout. “It’s my turn to talk now, okay?”
“Tess—”
“No, I need to talk, and I need you to just listen for a minute, okay? I have to get this out. I feel like I’ll die if I don’t get this out,” I say, putting every ounce of feeling I have into the words.
“What do you need to say, honey?”
Where to even start?
“Look, I know you don’t want to hear this, but Troy is lying to you. He’s lying to everyone. He didn’t ‘walk me out’ of the office last week,” I say, miming air quotes. “He kicked me out. He threatened to have security escort me out if I didn’t go quietly—”
“No,” Bea says, and I can practically see her in my mind, shaking her head, the little pearl drops she loves so well dangling from her ears. “Troy would never.”
“Troy is the one who arranged everything with that bullshit HR meeting,” I go on. “He’s the one who assembled the partners without you. He called in Dale and gave them all the photos of Ryan and me dancing at Rachel’s wedding. He shoved this stupid morality clause down my throat—which, by the way, if anyone in this family is guilty of breaking the company’s morality code, it would be your precious son. Did you forget all the women he fucked on company time, in company offices? Because I sure as hell didn’t.”
“Tess, you’re rehashing old history now,” she says with a tired sigh. “I’m fully aware that my son has made many mistakes. He apologized. He tried to make it right with you. He went to counseling—”
“He was fucking his secretary the whole time,” I cry. “I caught Candace on our security footage stumbling through the bushes in my backyard when I was in the goddamn house!”