“She said she’d be back at three,” he told me one afternoon, dropping into the chair across from my desk. “Mind if I wait?”
“Of course not,” I said, because what else do you say to your boss’s husband?
Mark asked about my weekend, my apartment, and whether I liked going out on dates.
I answered in short, polite sentences and kept typing, hoping he’d take the hint.
He didn’t. Instead, he leaned back and studied me as if I were a painting.
I laughed the way you laugh when you don’t know what else to do, and I made an excuse about a deadline. He left 10 minutes later, but I felt uncomfortable for the rest of the afternoon.
Then one evening, I was scrolling through my phone on the couch when a notification came in.
It was from Facebook: a new friend request.
Mark.
A message sat right underneath it, already waiting.
“Hope you don’t mind my adding you.”
I stared at the screen until it went dark. Then I locked my phone, set it facedown on the cushion, and told myself I was overthinking. He was just being friendly. He was Lisa’s husband, for God’s sake.
I picked the phone back up.
I ignored the friend request and the message. I told myself he’d get the hint and move on.
He didn’t.
The second message landed on a Tuesday morning, just as I was pouring coffee.
First came the compliment: “You have a beautiful smile.”
I stared at my phone as if it had bitten me. I locked the screen, shoved it in my drawer, and pretended I hadn’t seen it.
Two days later, another one.
“So is there a lucky guy in the picture, or is Lisa keeping you too busy for a love life?”
My stomach twisted. I closed the app without opening the thread.
Then came the one that made my hands go cold.
“Don’t tell Lisa I messaged you. She’d get the wrong idea.”
I read it three times. That single sentence told me everything I’d been avoiding.
I called my older sister, Rachel, that night from my car, still in the parking garage.
“Your boss’s husband is asking about your dating life?” she said. “Cindy, screenshot every single message as evidence.”
“I don’t want to make it a thing.”
“It already is a thing! You just haven’t decided what kind yet, and the last thing you want is a he-said-she-said situation where YOU lose your job.”
I saved the screenshots in a folder I labeled “Receipts” and then buried it three folders deep so I wouldn’t have to look at it. I still didn’t reply to Mark. I hoped, in the stupid way you hope when you’re young, that silence would bore him into leaving me alone.
It did the opposite.
