7. Fiona
Fiona
Fiona sat at her assigned table, heels pinching slightly beneath the linen-draped chair. She didn’t usually wear them, and every shift in her seat reminded her how unfamiliar they were. The room made her feel dowdy, out of place.
She’d wanted to be here. She really had. This was a big night for him.
She just hadn’t realized she wouldn’t be sitting with him.
Dean was up front with the nominated team, all sharp suits and easy laughter. Fiona’s seat was a few tables back, nestled among more of his colleagues.
“Fiona, right?” a woman said as she settled into her seat. “You’re the schoolteacher?”
“Fifth grade,” Fiona said, smiling automatically.
“Oh, wow. So different from what we do.” The woman’s tone wasn’t unkind, just… dismissive. “Must be nice to be offline all day.”
Fiona laughed, unsure if it was meant as a compliment or a dig. “Well, I spend a lot of time teaching ten-year-olds how to punctuate, so… sort of.”
The woman turned away, not bothering to conceal her disinterest. Fiona tried not to mind.
She looked at Dean instead—so handsome in his suit—and felt a flutter of something solid, something warm. That was hers. He was hers.
The table filled with buzz—campaign names, client budgets, industry gossip.
Fiona tried to follow, but every reference felt like a code she hadn’t been given.
When she offered a light comment about how some ad had nice narration, one of Dean’s coworkers laughed a beat too loud and said, “Spoken like a true teacher.”
Her cheeks flushed. She forced a smile and looked down at her plate.
It was always like this. The conversations had edges, angles. She kept trying to say the right thing and still ended up sounding like someone who wandered in from the service elevator.
She looked at Dean. He was in his element—laughing, gesturing, polished to a shine. Even from across the room, he made her feel tethered. Like she hadn’t wandered into the wrong life after all.
The woman beside her leaned in, “You must have such patience. I could never talk to kids all day. What a bore!”
It was meant to be flattering, maybe. Fiona nodded politely.
What she wanted to say was: I like talking to kids all day.
But instead she said nothing. Just took another sip of her wine.
The start of the ceremony brought a small wave of relief. No more forced laughter. No more polite disinterest.
Fiona only realized that it was Dean’s category when his table erupted. He stood, gracious and smooth, shaking hands, leaning in for photos.
Fiona clapped along with the rest of the room as Dean and his team filed up the steps. Her chest swelled with pride.
Richard stepped up to the microphone first. He launched into the usual corporate gratitude.
But Fiona only had eyes for her husband. He looked handsome up there.
She was still glowing when the creative director’s tone shifted, becoming more conversational, more intimate.
"I have to give special recognition to one of our most... let's call him resourceful team members."
Fiona bit her lip. She hoped he was going to give Dean a shout-out.
"I don't think I'm revealing any insider secrets when I tell you that Fiona—yes, the Fiona—is here with us tonight."
He pointed and attention swung toward their table.
Fiona felt every face in the room turn toward her. Hundreds of eyes. That awful, expectant hush that comes right before a crowd decides whether to laugh or applaud.
She blinked, caught in the spotlight.
Wait. What?
There was a ripple of laughter—good-natured, mostly. Scattered applause. Someone nearby gave a low whoop.
Fiona offered a bewildered smile. She touched her cheek and felt the heat blooming there.
“Why is he pointing at me?” she whispered to the woman beside her. “Why did he say my name?”
The woman—bronzed shoulders, perfect eyeliner—grinned. “Oh my god, you’re the Fiona? From the account? Dean’s account?”
Fiona blinked. “What account?”
“You know,” the woman said, laughing. “His “Fiona” posts. We’re obsessed. Honestly, you’re like our team mascot.”
Fiona pressed her fingers to her cheeks. Her ears were hot. Her heart was doing a weird, floaty skip in her chest.
Dean posts online about me?
She glanced up at the stage again, Dean was looking at her. She gave him a little wave. She could feel the grin stretching across her face.
It was... a little embarrassing.
But it was also kind of sweet.
She kept smiling, cheeks flushed, heart floating just slightly out of her body.
A voice beside her said quietly, “Hey.”
She turned. It was a woman she hadn’t spoken to all evening—soft brown eyes, a wineglass in hand. Fiona vaguely recognized her from the seating chart. June, she thought her name was.
June didn’t smile. “I think you should see this,” she said, and offered her phone.
The screen glowed in the dim light of the banquet hall, the app already open.
@shitfionasays
Fiona blinked.
Fiona's thumb moved automatically. The most recent post was a screenshot of a somewhat redacted text message—her text message.
She spent her grocery money on a kid who "looked sad." This is why teachers stay broke.
At first she didn’t understand what she was seeing. She could see it was her text—sent in a moment of genuine worry about one of her students who was having a rough day—but the unfamiliar context threw her.
Why would this text be on the internet?
And who had added the cruel caption?
The laughter in the banquet hall seemed to echo in her ears. Knowing laughter. The kind that said everyone was in on something except her.
"Oh my god, she’s actually real!” someone at a nearby table called out, loud enough for half the room to hear.
Fiona's smile was frozen on her face. The applause felt mocking now, like people clapping at a circus act.
She scrolled down. Another post. A caption with her thoughts, twisted to make her a joke.
Babe heard our neighbor arguing with his girlfriend through the wall and left homemade cookies outside their door with a note that said 'hope your day gets better.
' She genuinely thinks baked goods solve everything.
It's like being married to a Disney princess who never learned how the real world works. #peak_naivety
It didn’t make sense. It had to be a mistake.
Maybe someone had hacked him. Or copied his tone. Or—God—maybe one of his friends had made the account as a joke. A cruel, awful joke.
It couldn’t be Dean.
Fiona's mouth went dry. The lights seemed too bright suddenly, the faces around her blurring into a sea of expectant grins.
Her private moments. Her silly thoughts. Her earnest confessions.
And another:
My wife just spent 3 hours deciding whether 10-year-olds deserve full credit for spelling "elephant" phonetically. Meanwhile, I closed a six-figure deal in 30 minutes.
The nausea hit like a wave—sharp, humiliating, impossible to stop. For a second she thought she might throw up right there, into her lap.
These weren’t jokes.
These comments were hurtful.
Someone had turned her into content.
Someone who thought she was silly. Soft. Stupid.
Her breath caught. The room wobbled, like someone had tilted it.
She didn’t want to look at him. Because if she looked at him, and he was still smiling… if he was still proud of this?—
Her stomach twisted.
No. No, he loved her. He told her he loved her. He kissed her forehead in the morning. He made her tea at night. He held her like she mattered.
The room kept moving around her—laughter, conversation, the clink of glasses—but she felt suspended outside of it, watching herself from a distance as her world collapsed in real time.
He wouldn’t do this. He couldn’t.
The air in the room suddenly felt thick, syrupy, like she was drowning in it. Her vision narrowed—the faces staring at her, the phone screen glowing with her humiliation, Dean on the stage still looking at her.
A sound escaped her throat—not quite a gasp, not quite a sob. Something raw and animal that she'd never heard herself make before.
The woman beside her was saying something, but Fiona couldn't hear over the roaring in her ears. The sound was deafening, like standing next to a waterfall, drowning out everything except the steady thrum of her pulse and the sick twist of realization in her gut.
Her private moments. Her earnest confessions. Her vulnerable thoughts.
Everyone had been laughing.
At her.
For months.
Years.
Her eyes burned. She wanted to throw the phone across the table.
But she couldn’t look away.
“She sounds exhausting tbh.”
“This is why you don’t marry small-town girls ”
“You sure she’s not twelve?”
The room didn’t seem to care that her life as she knew it was over. Around her, the table was still buzzing with post-award energy. Someone was ordering another round. Someone else was laughing about the speech. The woman who'd called her their "team mascot" was taking selfies.
Fiona's knuckles were white. She felt like her skin was too tight.
The room felt too bright. Too loud. Like she was trapped inside a fishbowl.
Her body didn’t know what to do. Her vision blurred—not with tears, not yet—but from something stranger. Like her brain was refusing to fully process what she was seeing. Her hands went clammy. Her face burned. She couldn’t tell if she was sweating or freezing.
The woman’s hand covered hers. "I'm sorry," she said quietly. "I thought... I thought you should know.”
Fiona couldn't speak. Couldn't breathe.
Everything made sense.
The way Roxanne had known about the president story. The way Dean's friends always seemed to be laughing at some inside joke. The way they looked at her—with that particular kind of amused condescension people reserved for pets or small children.
She really was as much of a fool as he thought she was.
Her pulse pounded behind her eyes. Her limbs tingled, distant and unreal, like she was floating an inch outside of her own body.
She was the joke.
And Dean—Dean, who she trusted with everything, who she thought saw her and loved her and cherished her—Dean was the one telling it.
He’d held her like she was precious. Whispered that he loved her. Kissed her like she was important.
And all the while, he thought this about her.
"Fiona?" June’s voice seemed to come from very far away. "Are you okay?"
No. No, she was not okay.
She had thought he was kind. Supportive. That he respected her.
Dean wasn't any of those things.
Dean was just... good at pretending to be.
Fiona handed the phone back to her with hands that felt disconnected from her body.
"Thank you," she whispered. "For showing me."
Then she stood up, smoothed her dress, and walked toward the bathroom with her head held high.
Every step felt wrong, like her legs weren’t quite working—like her heels were too tall or the floor was slanted or gravity itself had turned against her.
She felt like a zoo animal that had wandered into the wrong enclosure, surrounded by predators wearing evening wear.
Behind her, someone raised a toast. Laughter echoed. The camera flashes kept going.