Ex-Proof

I've been a bartender at the Rusty Tap for eleven years. I'm forty-three. I can pour a Guinness with a perfect head and I can spot a lying man from across the room. What I can't usually do is stalk my ex's new girlfriend.

But here I was, Tuesday night, standing in the lobby of Gray & Associates with a bottle of Pinot Grigio and a smile I'd practiced in my rearview mirror.

The plan was simple. Darrin cheated on me six months ago with some woman from his office. Then, after we split, he started dating Adrienne, an accountant at his firm. So I was going to get close to her. Be her friend. Then, when the moment was right, tell her what a lying jerk he was. Break them up. Petty? Sure. But I'd had two years of my life wasted. Petty was earned.

I'd found her on the firm's website. There was a whole staff page. Adrienne, senior accountant, and a headshot where she looked like she was trying not to laugh at the photographer. I'd emailed her, pretending I was doing a "small business spotlight" thing. Fake newsletter. I even made a logo. It took me an entire Sunday.

She'd written back within an hour. Friendly. Warm. Said she'd stay late Tuesday if I wanted to swing by after five.

So I swung by.

The lobby was all glass and gray carpet. Quiet in that way offices get at night, like the building itself went home. I pressed the buzzer and waited, rehearsing my opening line in my head. Something breezy. Professional. Totally not the opening move of a revenge plot.

The door buzzed and clicked.

"Sorry, we're mostly closed, but if you're the newsletter lady, come on up," said a voice on the intercom. "End of the hall. Follow the light."

I followed the light.

She was at a desk near the windows, surrounded by cubicles, one desk lamp on and the city glowing behind her. Floor-to-ceiling windows. I could see my own bar's street from up here, sort of, a smear of neon in the distance.

And okay. Here's where I have to admit something.

The plan got complicated the second I saw her.

Adrienne was thirty-six, and she was striking. Tall. Dark hair pulled back in a clip that was failing, strands everywhere. She had on a white blouse with the sleeves rolled up and these gray slacks, and she was sitting with one foot tucked under her, like sitting properly was for other people. Reading glasses pushed up on her head. She looked like someone who was very good at her job and mildly annoyed about it.

"Debby?" She stood and stuck out her hand. "I'm Adrienne. Can I get you anything? Water? I think there's a soda machine that still works."

"I brought wine, actually." I held up the bottle. Then I heard myself and winced. "Which sounds weird. Bringing wine to an interview. I promise I'm not a weirdo."

She laughed. A real one, not a polite one. "You brought wine to a tax firm after hours. Honestly? Best offer I've had all week. There are cups in the break room. Not wine glasses, but I've drank out of worse."

So we sat in the break room at a little plastic table, drinking Pinot Grigio out of mugs. One mug had a cartoon cat on it. The other said WORLD'S OKAYEST GOLFER. I got the golfer.

"So the newsletter thing," she said, turning her mug in a slow circle. "Tell me about it. Small business spotlight."

I launched into the pitch. Local businesses, community stories, profiles, that whole song and dance. I'd practiced it. I got maybe ninety seconds in before I noticed she was watching me. Not bored-watching. Studying me. Like she was running numbers.

"And how long have you been doing this newsletter?" she asked. "Because I looked. I couldn't find a single issue online."

The room went very quiet. The fridge hummed.

"Debby," she said, and she wasn't smiling anymore, but she wasn't angry either. "The photo on your email. I ran it through a reverse image search. It's from a public profile. Your name came up. Debby, right? Debby who dated Darrin for two years?"

My stomach dropped through the floor. "You googled me."

"You googled me first. Or, well, you faked a newsletter at me. Which is arguably worse."

We sat there. I took a long sip of mug wine. Somewhere down the hall, a vent kicked on.

"Okay," I said finally. "Yep. Busted. I made up a newsletter. I spent three and a half hours on a logo. It's a really good logo, for what it's worth."

"What's it look like?"

"A magnifying glass over a handshake."

"That's terrible."

"It's not my best work."

She laughed again, and this time I laughed too, and something in the room shifted. The fake friendliness drained out of both of us like someone pulled a plug.

"I'm sorry," I said. "That was a crazy thing to do. I had this whole plan. Befriend you, tell you about Darrin, watch it blow up. I've been planning it for a few days. I don't even fully like plans."

"I know who you are," she said quietly. "I dated him too. After you. For two months."

"I know. That's the whole point of the newsletter."

"Debby." She set down the mug. "He was cheating on me too."

I stared at her. "What?"

"Overlap. He had someone else on the side the whole time we were together. I found out three weeks ago. I already broke up with him." She rubbed her eyes, smearing her mascara a little. "He told me you two broke up because you were, and I quote, emotionally unstable and obsessed with him. He said you'd probably show up at some point."

"I'm not obsessed with him," I said. "I'm petty. There's a difference. Obsessed means I care. Petty means I want him to be sad."

"That is a difference."

"And I'm not unstable. I'm a bartender. I have excellent emotional regulation. I regulate it into tequila."

She laughed so hard she had to put the mug down. Then she wiped her eyes, and I realized she might've been crying a little before the laughing, or maybe both at once. Being lied to by Darrin did that to a person. It had done it to me six months ago, on a Tuesday, over lasagna.

"He told you I was unstable," I said. "What did he tell me about you? That you were clingy. That you were already talking about marriage at week six."

"Oh my god!" She put her hand over her mouth. "He told you that? He told me you were the one talking about marriage."

"We didn't even get to the talking-about-marriage phase! I was gonna break up with him first! I had a whole speech."

"I have a speech too."

We looked at each other. And then we both cracked up, the real kind, the kind that hurts a little, sitting in a tax firm break room at six forty on a Tuesday with a cat mug and a golfer mug between us.

"He's such a lying jerk," I said.

"The biggest lying jerk."

"Did he do the thing where he tells the same story to both of you? Word for word? Because he told me about the time he saved a guy from drowning at Lake Lanier. Hero story. Very detailed."

"He told ME that story," Adrienne said, pointing at me with the cat mug. "Word for word. The guy, the current, the lifeguard training he never had. Word. For. Word."

"I think it might not even be true."

"I looked it up. There's no news report. I checked the whole county."

"He wasn't even a lifeguard. He can't swim. He does that weird bobbing thing in pools."

She snorted wine back up her nose, which she handled with more dignity than I would have.

Then it got quiet again, but a different quiet. A comfortable one. She pushed her glasses back down onto her nose out of habit, then took them off again, like she remembered there was nothing to read.

"Your logo really took four hours?"

"Three and a half. And a YouTube tutorial on graphic design."

"You could've just told me the truth, you know. I would've listened. Probably."

"I didn't know you'd already figured him out."

"Three weeks ago." She turned her mug again. "You know what's funny? When you emailed, I looked at your name and I thought, oh no, here it comes, the ex. And then I read the email and it was so polite and professional, and I thought, well, this is either a scam or a very determined person."

"Determined. That's fair."

"You drove all the way out here with wine."

"I did."

"And the plan was to what, exactly? Seduce me away from him?" She said it lightly, joking, but her eyes stayed on mine a beat longer than a joke needs.

The city hummed outside the windows. My face went hot, and I took a sip of wine to hide it.

"I hadn't gotten that far in the planning," I said. "Step one was friendship. Step two was telling you he's garbage. Step three was, uh. Unclear."

"Unclear," she repeated.

"There were gaps. I'm not a professional plan maker. I make drinks."

She smiled at me over the rim of the cat mug. Slow. Like she was deciding something.

"Well," she said. "The newsletter's fake. The wine's real. And we've got a whole bottle left and a city view. So what do you say we skip steps one and two?"

I looked at her. She looked at me.

"Yeah," I said. "Okay. Skipping." And then, because the wine was real and so was the way she was looking at me: "Actually, step three wasn't unclear. Step three existed. I just didn't say it out loud to anyone, ever, including myself."

"Oh, I want to hear this."

I turned the WORLD'S OKAYEST GOLFER mug in a slow circle on the table. There was a coffee ring on the plastic, old and brown, and I traced it while I talked. If I was gonna confess to a whole scheme, I was gonna do it looking at a coffee ring.

"Okay. Step three. I befriend you. We get close. Real close. Girlfriends-close. And then somewhere in there I just... ease in. Charm you. I'm a decent flirt when I want to be, ask literally anyone at the Rusty Tap. And you fall for me a little, and then I tell you what Darrin really is, and you leave him, and you're already half in love with me, so he loses you to me specifically. Me. His ex. That's the part that was gonna hurt him the most. Not just losing you. Losing you to me."

The break room went very quiet. Somewhere down the hall a printer beeped and gave up.

"Debby."

"I know."

"You were gonna seduce me."

"I was gonna *try* to seduce you. There's no evidence it would've worked. You're an accountant. You people can smell a fake newsletter from a mile away, apparently."

Adrienne put her wine down. She pressed both palms flat on the table like she was about to do a magic trick, or a tax form.

"I had the same plan," she said.

"You did not."

"I absolutely did. Word for word. Befriend the ex, find out what he told her, warn her off, and then, and this is the part I also never said out loud, maybe she's so grateful and so pretty and so funny that she takes me out for drinks and one thing leads to another and Darrin finds out his ex and his ex are together and he has to live with that."

We stared at each other.

"Step four was a revenge photo," I said weakly. "Like. A joint one. Posted where he'd see it."

"I was gonna send him a fruit basket," Adrienne said. "With a card that said NOTHING EXPLAINED. Just to mess with his head."

"That's insane."

"Yours is insane too."

"Mine's worse. Mine has a fake newsletter in it. I made a *logo*, Adrienne. I spent a Sunday on a logo for a crime."

She lost it again. She laughed with her whole body this time, tilting back in the chair, and I laughed too, and I want to tell you that laugh did something to the room. Broke the room open. It went from a confession to a conversation between two people who'd been caught red-handed at the same crime scene, holding the same weapon.

She picked her mug back up.

"Okay. To the plans that didn't matter," she said. "Because we both figured him out before either of us could do anything about it."

"To wasted Sundays on logos," I said.

"To fake newsletters."

"To Darrin being sad all by himself, forever, with nobody to lie to."

We clinked mugs. A cat and a golfer, clinking. It was the dumbest toast I've ever been