Chapter 15 - The Story She Preferred
Lavinia tried to slip out through the kitchen.
An investigator stopped her at the doors to preserve her company laptop and phone under the board’s litigation hold.
She turned back to me, and her eyes had gone suddenly wet.
“He told me you were nobody,” she said.
“That was the story you preferred,” I said.
Not cruelly.
It was simply true, and she knew it was true, and after a moment she looked away.
I felt something almost like pity for Lavinia in that moment, though not enough to soften what was coming for her.
Because she had been used, too, in her way — Lucan had lied to her as fluently as he’d lied to me, had told her I was nobody, had let her believe she was trading up when she was really just the next person he would eventually discard.
But I could not extend her too much sympathy, because she had made her own choices with her eyes open.
She had chosen to wear my earrings.
She had chosen to route corporate fraud through her own brother’s shell company.
She had chosen to believe a married man’s account of his wife because that account gave her permission to take what she wanted. He told me you were nobody was not really an apology or even an explanation.
It was a plea to be seen as a victim of the same man who had victimized me, and while there was a sliver of truth in it, it conveniently skipped past the nineteen invoices with her brother’s name on them.
She had wanted the version of the story where I was nobody, because in that version she was not stealing another woman’s husband and defrauding eight hundred people — she was simply a more deserving woman claiming her rightful place.
May you like
People believe the story that lets them keep their self-image intact.
Lavinia had believed hers right up until an investigator stopped her at the kitchen doors, and now the story was over, and she was left holding what she had actually done.
