“I was just protecting him,” my best friend said, not even blinking as she admitted to destroying my new relationship. She said it calmly, like she was explaining why she’d watered my plants.
After my husband left me, she was my rock. She was the one who pushed me, practically forced me, to start dating again. So when I finally met a kind, wonderful man, I thought she’d be happy for me.
Instead, he ended it. He told me he’d heard “disturbing things” about my emotional instability from a source he trusted completely.
Now she sits there in our favorite coffee shop, thinking she’s my gatekeeper, my protector. What she doesn’t know is my “wonderful man” is actually my cousin, an actor I hired for this exact performance, and our entire coffee shop confession is being recorded for her fiancé to hear.
The Architect of Ruin: What Friends Are For
The silence in my house is a physical thing. Six months after Mark packed his last box, the quiet still has weight, pressing down on my shoulders, filling the space where his booming laugh used to be. My son, Leo, is with him this weekend. The silence is heavier when he’s gone.
It’s a Friday night. I’m sitting on my sofa, the one Chloe helped me pick out, staring at a half-eaten container of lo mein. My phone buzzes on the cushion next to me. It’s her.
You up? Got wine.
Before I can type a reply, there’s a brisk knock on the door. Chloe doesn’t wait for answers. She’s a woman of action, my rock, the person who single-handedly scraped me off the floor when my fifteen-year marriage imploded.
I open the door and she breezes past me, a bottle of cheap Pinot Grigio in one hand and a bag of tortilla chips in the other. “I refuse to let you wallow,” she announces, already pulling two glasses from my cabinet. “We are going to drink this entire bottle and find you a rebound.”
I manage a weak smile. “Chloe, I’m not ready.”
“Nonsense.” She pours a generous glass and shoves it into my hand. Her energy is exhausting and, if I’m honest, essential. She’s the one who told me to change the locks. She’s the one who screened Mark’s pathetic, pleading texts. “You’re a project manager, Sarah,” she says, tapping my forehead. “Your life is a project that has gone off the rails. We just need a new timeline, new deliverables. First deliverable: get you laid.”
I laugh, a real laugh this time. It feels rusty. “You’re ridiculous.”
“I’m right,” she says, her expression turning serious. She sits beside me, her knee touching mine. “Look, I know it was bad. What Mark did… it was a betrayal of the highest order. But you can’t let him win by turning you into a hermit. You are a brilliant, beautiful woman who deserves to be happy.”
Her words are a balm. I lean my head on her shoulder, the way I have a thousand times since this all started. She is my anchor. But as I close my eyes, a strange, unwelcome memory surfaces. It’s a flicker of a different time, a different failure. A conference room, three years ago. The smell of stale coffee and the sting of professional humiliation. A project I was born to lead. A project I lost.
And Chloe was right there, “helping.”
The Ghost of Promotions Past
The next day, driven by a nagging unease I can’t name, I decide to tackle the home office. It’s the last room that still feels like his, filled with shared files and old ambitions. I need to purge it, to reclaim the space.
Under a stack of outdated software manuals, I find it: the binder for the “Veridian Initiative.” It was the biggest pitch of my career. A multi-million-dollar project that would have catapulted me into the senior ranks. I wanted it so badly I could taste it.
Chloe had been my head cheerleader. She spent hours helping me prep. “You’re too confident,” she’d advised, looking over my presentation notes. “These corporate guys, they get spooked by aggressive women. You need to seem more… collaborative. More humble.”
I remember her coaching me to pepper my speech with phrases like, “This is just one potential approach, of course,” and, “I’d love to hear the team’s thoughts on this.” She even helped me pick out my outfit, a drab beige pantsuit. “It says you’re serious, but not threatening,” she’d insisted.
Flipping through the binder now, my own confident, aggressive notes are crossed out. In their place, in Chloe’s loopy handwriting, are the weaker, hesitant phrases she suggested. I remember the feedback from my boss afterward. “They felt you weren’t fully committed to your own vision, Sarah. That you lacked conviction.”
At the time, I was devastated. I blamed myself. I thought I’d choked.
Now, sitting on the floor of my office with this ghost from my past, a cold dread snakes up my spine. I think of the photography class I wanted to take last year. Chloe had talked me out of it. “It’s so expensive, Sarah. Are you sure you’ll even stick with it?” I think of the guy from the gym who asked me out a few months before Mark and I split. Chloe had met him briefly. “He seems a little dim, don’t you think? You need someone who can keep up with you.”
Every memory is a small, neat pinprick. But now, seeing them all at once, I see the pattern. It’s a web, and I’m at the center of it. She isn’t my anchor. She’s my anchor and my chain. She keeps me safe, but she also keeps me here, in this quiet, lonely house, needing her.
The rage that begins to kindle in my gut is nothing like the hot, messy anger I felt toward Mark. This is different. It’s cold and terrifyingly clear.
An Actor’s Services
My hands are shaking, but my voice is steady. I’m standing in my kitchen, staring out at the darkening backyard, my phone pressed hard against my ear.
“Alex? It’s your cousin, Sarah.”
“Sarah! Hey! How are you holding up? I was so sorry to hear about you and Mark.”
Alex is a good kid. He’s twenty-eight, a struggling actor in the city, bartending to pay his rent. He’s all heart, and right now, I need his talent more than his sympathy.
“I’m okay,” I lie. “Listen, this is going to sound completely insane, but I need to hire you.”
There’s a pause. “For… an acting job?”
“Yes. I need you to play a part. The part of my new boyfriend.” I take a breath and the words spill out, a torrent of suspicion and hurt I haven’t voiced to anyone. I tell him about the lost promotion, the photography class, the gym guy. I tell him about Chloe.
“I think… I think she’s been sabotaging me for years,” I say, the words tasting like poison. “She builds me up just enough to make me trust her, then cuts the legs out from under me so I fall back down. So I’ll always need her. It sounds crazy, I know.”
“It sounds,” Alex says, his voice low and serious, “like a classic case of narcissistic codependency. I dated a director like that once. She loved my potential as long as I never booked a bigger gig than her.”
The validation is so powerful it almost brings me to my knees. “So you’ll do it?”
“What’s the script?”
I start pacing, the project manager in my brain firing up, turning my pain into a plan. “I need you to be the perfect man. Kind, stable, successful. Everything Chloe thinks I don’t deserve. We’ll create a dating profile. We’ll match. We’ll go on a few dates, get some pictures. I’ll make sure she knows every detail. And then… we wait for her to make her move. We wait for her to try and destroy it.”
“And when she does?” he asks.
“I want proof, Alex. I want to catch her in the act. I need to know, for my own sanity, that I’m not imagining this.”
“This is some next-level, psychological thriller stuff, Sarah. I love it,” he says, a hint of theatrical glee in his voice. “But what about the end game? What do you do once you have this proof?”
I look at my reflection in the dark kitchen window. My face is pale, my eyes hard. “I have no idea,” I say, and it’s the truest thing I’ve said all week. “But I know I can’t move forward until I do this. I’ll pay you for your time, of course. Your standard day rate.”
“Cousin, please,” he says, and I can hear him smiling. “Watching a master manipulator get her comeuppance? That’s payment enough. Let’s build this guy. What’s his name?”
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