Chapter Fifteen
VANNA
Here is what I know now that I didn't know twelve weeks ago: screenshots are forever.
I am not going to pretend the original posts were lies.
They weren't. I did write, on more than one occasion, things that were — direct about the fact that Moore would leave for me.
I wrote it in the way of someone who felt triumphant, and I sent it to people I thought were my friends in closed messages, and I was wrong about the closed part.
I also know now that the way I felt — triumphant, chosen, significant — was built on a man who abandoned his wife in the middle of sex to come hold my hand about a mouse, and when I think about it that way, the triumph curls up and dies of embarrassment.
He came to the apartment.
I want to be clear: I didn't manufacture the mouse.
There was a mouse. But I also know, with the honesty I am currently being forced to develop, that I would have found another reason to call if the mouse hadn't existed, because I liked the way it felt when he came.
I liked being the emergency. I liked being the one who got the urgent version of him while she got — what he thought was the easy version.
What I actually got was a man who would leave his wife mid-act to address a rodent, which tells you everything about his impulse control and exactly nothing that reflects well on me.
When the screenshots went up, I went to my sister's house and stayed there for a week.
My Instagram went from twelve hundred followers to four hundred in forty-eight hours.
I'm not going to pretend that doesn't sting.
I'm also not going to pretend I didn't read every comment, because I did, and some of them were deserved and some of them were disproportionate and all of them were something I had set in motion with my own choices.
The thing that got me, though — the one that I couldn't stop rereading — was a comment from someone with a private profile who just wrote: Imagine thinking you won something. Girl is out here rebuilding her life and you're the cautionary tale in someone else's comeback story.
I put my phone down and I didn't pick it up for four hours.
Moore's lawyer sent a formal letter through HR.
Cooperation with the dissipation claim, cooperation with financial disclosure, or escalated proceedings.
I cooperated. The laptop, the dinners, the work trip with hotel stay — I didn't even remember the hotel until the letter listed it and then I did, and I want to be clear: I didn't ask him to book it.
But I knew when he did and I went, and that's the same thing.
What I am trying to do now is be accountable without performing accountability. It's harder than it sounds. Accountability without audience is just sitting in a room with the version of yourself you'd rather not look at.
I'm sitting in that room.
There is one more thing.
The charity event.
I should not have gone. I know now that I should not have gone.
But at the time I thought — I thought that if I could control the narrative in a room, in person, in real time, it would somehow reset the story.
I thought I could walk into a space and be the version of myself that was professional and polished and could say with a straight face that the whole situation had been mischaracterized.
What I did not account for was Aviance.