Chapter Three
VANNA
Okay, so.
I want to be clear: I don't feel guilty.
I know I'm supposed to — I know that's the role I'm meant to be playing right now, some sort of contrite supporting character in Aviance Cox's sad story — but I genuinely, sitting here in my apartment the morning after with my second coffee and my feet up on the coffee table, cannot locate anything resembling guilt.
What I feel is annoyed. Mildly threatened. Mostly annoyed.
Because Moore volunteered. I want that to be understood. Every single time he came here, every single time he left whatever he was doing and rushed over, he chose to. I never made him. I called, he came. That's not my fault. That's just gravity.
Here's the thing no one wants to say about men like Moore Cox: they want to be needed.
They come preloaded with this rescue impulse that they have absolutely no idea what to do with, and all you have to do — all you genuinely have to do — is present yourself as a problem worth solving.
You don't have to lie. You don't have to manufacture crises wholesale.
You just have to make sure you're the one calling.
Aviance never called.
That's not a character attack, it's just an observation.
In the six months I've worked for Moore, I have never once heard him get a distressed call from his wife.
She's competent, she's independent, she works at some design firm, she handles things.
I'm sure she's a lovely person. I'm sure they had something nice for a while.
But nice doesn't hold a person's attention forever. And attention is the resource I was interested in.
Did I post some things I shouldn't have?
Probably. The subtweet from four days ago was, in retrospect, a little much.
Petra Callahan — who I know is Aviance's friend, who I know has been watching my accounts, who I stupidly underestimated — got a screenshot before I locked things down.
Fine. That's fine. Social media drama dies in a week.
Moore will smooth things over. Aviance will be upset for a while and then she'll—
My phone rings.
Moore's name on the screen.
I smile and pick up. "Good morning," I say, in the voice I use when I want him to feel like calling me was the right choice.
"I need you to come to the office early." His voice is flat. Not the careful, attentive tone I'm used to. Something stripped of warmth. "Eight o'clock. Don't be late."
I pull the phone away from my ear and look at it, as if I can read his expression through the device.
"Is everything okay?" I ask.
"Eight o'clock, Vanna." He hangs up.
I lower my phone slowly. I have not, in six months, heard Moore Cox hang up on me. I have been the one to end calls.
Something is off.
I get dressed with slightly more care than usual and I drive to Cox Financial's downtown Nashville office in Midtown and I take the elevator to the fifth floor and I find Moore standing at the window of his office with his back to the door.
He's wearing the same clothes he had on yesterday.
His hair is unwashed. The desk between us is covered in papers — printed papers, which Moore never uses, he is pathologically paperless — and when he turns around, his face is the face of someone who has been awake all night doing something painful.
"Close the door," he says.
I close it.
"Sit down."
I sit.
He picks up a page from the desk and turns it to face me.
It's a screenshot of my Instagram story. The one from Moore's wife's birthday dinner, October fourteenth. My caption about leaving his wife's birthday dinner to fix my laptop.
"That's mine," I say.
"Yes." He picks up another one. November 2nd. The ER post. "And this one." Another. Valentine's Day TikTok. "And this."
He sets them down in a line across the desk like a timeline, like evidence, like exactly what they are.
"Aviance left," he says. "Last night. She left her rings, she left a note, and she left forty-seven of these.
" He gestures at the line of papers. "Organized by date.
With a letter at the bottom saying she's filing for divorce and seeking financial accountability for everything I gave you during our marriage. "
The temperature in the room shifts.
"Everything you — Moore, the laptop was a work expense—"
"Was it?" He leans forward on the desk. "Was the laptop I bought you in February a work expense? Because I ran it on our joint account and didn't tell Aviance what it was for, which her attorney is going to find very interesting."
"You ran it on the joint account," I say carefully. "That was your decision."
"A lot of things were my decisions," he says, and his voice is doing something I have not heard it do before — something quiet and precise, like a seam being cut.
"I made a lot of bad decisions. I own that.
But I want you to look me in the eye and tell me that these posts—" he taps the papers "—were not deliberate.
That you were not deliberately announcing to the internet every time you called me away from my wife. "
I hold his gaze for a long moment.
I could lie. I am very good at it.
But something about the papers on the desk, the exact, dated precision of them, the fact that Aviance has already filed — something about the architecture of this moment suggests that lying will cost me more than it saves.
"I liked that you came," I say. The honesty surprises even me. "Every time you showed up, I felt — I don't know. Like I mattered. Like I was worth the interruption."
Moore's jaw tightens.
"You were using my marriage as a measuring stick," he says.
"You were the one who kept showing up," I say, and I mean for it to sound defiant but it comes out smaller than I intended.
"I know." He straightens. He picks up the papers and he squares them into a pile and he sets them on the far edge of the desk, away from both of us.
"And I am going to be a long time forgiving myself for that.
But you — Vanna, you need to understand what you did.
You sat in this building, in this office, for six months, and every time I chose you over her you went home and posted about it.
You kept score. You made it a performance. "
"I never asked you to choose—"
"You called me," he says, "every time you knew I was with her.
I didn't understand that pattern until I was reading her list at two in the morning, but I see it now.
October fourteenth was a Saturday — her birthday.
You called at seven-thirty in the evening on a Saturday, and I have exactly zero work-related reasons for why you had my personal cell number. "
I don't say anything.
"You're going to cooperate with my attorney," Moore says. "You're going to account for everything I spent on you from marital funds. And then you're going to resign."
The word falls into the room like a stone into still water.
"Moore—"
"Effective end of the week." He pulls his chair out. He sits down. He opens his laptop. "That's all."
I stand. I pick up my bag. I walk to the door and I put my hand on the handle and I say, because I cannot help myself: "For what it's worth, I never thought she'd actually leave."
Moore doesn't look up.
"Neither did I," he says. "That's the whole problem."