The Rivals - Dylan Allen Page 0,25

not happy with. But, I can’t imagine pretending not to know someone you’ve been intimate with.

“What next?” I ask, intrigued beyond belief.

“I get back to work and find out the girl he was with is the daughter of our firm’s managing partner. Overnight, my job became a different kind of hell. It wasn’t just long hours and hard work. It was impossibly long hours, being assigned to cases in practice areas like white collar crime—places where I had no expertise and no interest. They gave me all these extremely technical questions to answer for super valuable clients. Then they’d tell me they needed the answer back in a matter of hours. These questions required a full day’s worth of work in less time than I was given to complete the job. So of course, I made mistakes. I fucked up assignments. I took too long to return phone calls. Whatever you can think of, I did it. I was constantly being called to task,” she rants. “They started saying things like, maybe I couldn’t do the work because I didn’t go to Harvard or Cornell like everyone else. For nearly an entire month after the incident at the store, they did everything they could to get me to quit.

“I knew what they were doing. I tried to stay strong. I was finally taking care of my mother the way she deserved. So, I hung on because I liked the money too much, and I thought I could outlast them. I’d never lost a fight in my life. And I have fought some really big demons,” she says, and her voice is clogged with heavy emotions.

“Wow,” is all I say, despite the dozens of questions I want to ask. Her honesty is so refreshing. I want more of it.

“But one day, the fuck up was too big. And a partner threw an entire three-ringed binder at me from across a conference room,” she says.

I was stunned at that.

“I know,” she says as if she can hear the shock in my silence. “No one did anything. In fact, they asked me to clean up the papers that had fallen out when it slammed into the wall next to my head.

“I started to think about quitting. I decided that there was no amount of money worth all of this. And if, at the age of twenty-eight, I was making nearly 200k a year, it meant I could find something like that again, right?” she posits.

“Right,” I agree.

“Wrong,” she deadpans. “When I leave here, I’m moving back home to Arkansas because I can’t afford my rent in DC anymore. This trip was my last hurrah. But now, I’m going to die.” Her chest rises and falls rapidly as she tries to catch her breath after that diatribe.

I ask her the question that’s been on the tip of my tongue.

“How could you not know that your boyfriend had someone else in his life?” I hear a voice in my head say, Not now, she’s in the middle of what she believes could be her deathbed confession. But, the woman I’m looking down at, that I’m listening to—that woman is smart and damn perceptive.

So, I double down when she doesn’t respond right away. “Really. How could you not have known?”

“I ask myself that every day,” she responds miserably.

“You seem like an astute person,” I muse.

“Then you’re clearly not,” she says with disdain.

“Thanks, that’s nice,” I say dryly.

“Haven’t you been listening to my story? Don’t you see the parallels?”

“Parallels?”

“Yes. He fucked me on the down low, but basically said I was too low class for him to be seen with in public. You wouldn’t even fuck me. And you made it very clear that even if you could lower yourself to being with me, I was too cheap to do more with than that,” she says without any recrimination at all in her voice. “I must be the world’s biggest kind of fool. I keep meeting and liking the same kind of guy,” she says.

“Hey, I am not the same kind of guy as that asshole,” I say.

“What says you’re not? Certainly not the way you spoke to me. I mean, you being out here on this ledge is nice. But considering how it’s your fault and all, you leaving me alone out here would make you a pretty evil son of a bitch, so … I’m not sure that I can see any real difference between you and my boyfriend of five years except he kept