He always said them as if they were just part of his humor, but they weren’t funny.
Not to me.
Not when every word chipped away at something inside me.
But I learned to smile through it while shrinking inside.
I would grin and count my breaths until I could excuse myself to the bathroom. There I stared into the mirror, wondering how much more of this I could take.
If you know, you know.
Then came the night everything shifted.
Rick invited his boss, David, over for dinner — just him, no other seniors.
It was the big one. The night that, in Rick’s words, would “seal the deal” for the promotion he’d been chasing for more than a year.
I wasn’t consulted, of course, just told.
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