Chapter Eleven
VANNA
I'm not going to pretend the last month has been easy.
The Twitter thing was worse than I expected.
Not the account that posted the original thread — that was documentation, that was a case being made — but the secondary wave.
The quote-tweets and the subtweets and the girls in my direct messages calling me things I don't particularly want to transcribe.
I locked my accounts. I started over with a new one, low profile, no identifying information, and I have been, for the first time in my adult life, genuinely quiet on the internet.
It's strange. I didn't realize how much of my self-concept was built on being witnessed. On having an audience for my life, even a small one. On being able to post something and have it confirmed by twenty, forty, two hundred people.
Now I have a new job on the east side of the city — admin position, standard hours, a boss who is a fifty-year-old woman who has no personal cell phone to call and no rescue impulse to activate. It's fine. It pays. I go in, I do the work, I come home.
I have been thinking about the moment in Moore's office when he laid out those screenshots.
The line of them across his desk, dated and annotated.
I have been thinking about what it looked like from outside — from Aviance's perspective, from the perspective of the people who read that thread — and I have been, gradually, reluctantly, doing the uncomfortable work of examining whether the story I told myself is the story that was actually happening.
I told myself: he chose this. I didn't make him.
And that's true. He did choose it.
But I also — I called his cell phone on a Saturday at seven-thirty.
I called at ten-forty-five during what I can only have guessed, given the half-dressed state he arrived in, was a private moment.
I called on Valentine's Day. I called during couples therapy, which I knew about, because I handled Moore's calendar.
I knew about couples therapy and I called anyway.
I look at that fact for a long time and I don't like what it looks like.
Did I tell myself it wasn't intentional? Yes. Was it? I honestly don't know anymore. That's the thing about examining your own motivations in a clear-eyed way — you find things you'd rather not have found, and you can't unfind them.
I don't think I set out to destroy a marriage.
I don't think I sat down at the beginning of October and thought: I will systematically dismantle this woman's relationship.
I think I wanted attention from a specific person and I found a method that worked and I kept using it without examining the cost because the cost wasn't mine.
The cost was Aviance's.
She paid it for six months and then she got up and she left and she took her evidence with her and she filed for divorce and she got her money and her apartment and her life, and the internet canonized her as a figure of quiet, documented dignity, and me as — well.
I am working on not reading the comments.
I am working on a lot of things.
I hear through a friend-of-a-friend, one week after I resign from Cox Financial, that there is a charity event on the first Saturday of June at the Nashville Farmers Market.
Some kind of design and craft fair with a charity auction attached — it's a Nashville staple, the kind of event that draws a mixed crowd of creative professionals and social-media-savvy locals who treat it as a content opportunity as much as a charitable occasion.
I don't know if Aviance will be there.
I tell myself I'll go anyway. That I can show up to public spaces. That I am not required to hide.