Civil. He called my devastation a civil matter. Twenty thousand, five hundred and eighty dollars gone. My grandmother’s jewelry. My sense of safety. My belief that I knew how to pick a partner. Civil.
I sat in that hard plastic chair for another twenty minutes answering questions I already knew wouldn’t go anywhere. No, I didn’t have proof he forged anything. Yes, both our names were on the lease. No, I never signed anything giving him power of attorney. Yes, I was sure I wanted to file the report anyway. Detective Hargrove handed me a card with a case number on it. I threw it in the passenger seat of my car and screamed until my throat hurt.
Tamika let me stay on her couch for three weeks without complaining once. Three weeks of me taking up her living room, her bathroom counter, her emotional bandwidth. She brought me food I didn’t ask for. She sat beside me when I cried at 3:00 a.m. She is the reason I didn’t completely unravel.
But I came close.
I stopped showering for four days. I let client emails pile up unanswered. I sat in the dark stalking Shawn’s Instagram, which he hadn’t even bothered to deactivate. Three days after emptying my accounts, he posted a picture from Miami. Smiling. New outfit. Someone else’s arm around his waist, cropped just at the edge of the frame. The caption was a single palm tree emoji.
“Kezia, close that app right now. You are not allowed to torture yourself with that man’s highlight reel.”
Tamika said it at 2:00 a.m., physically removing my phone from my hand. She didn’t ask. She just took it. Put it in her pocket. Sat on the floor next to the couch where I was pretending to be asleep and said, “I’m not giving this back until you eat something with nutritional value.”
She was right. But the damage was done. I had seen the arm. I had seen the smile. He wasn’t broken. He wasn’t guilty. He wasn’t sitting in some studio apartment feeling bad about what he’d done. He had planned this, probably for months, and he was in Miami spending my money on someone else’s vacation.
My business manager, a sharp no-nonsense woman named Rochelle Hayes, called on day five.
“Kezia, I don’t know what’s happening on your end personally, but three clients are threatening to walk if they don’t hear from you by Friday.”
That call dragged me back to Earth. Not fully. But enough. Rochelle didn’t do sympathy. She did solutions. And her voice on that voicemail—brisk, direct, unconcerned with my broken heart—reminded me that I had built something before Shawn and I could build something after Shawn.
I washed my face. I opened my laptop. And with hands that wouldn’t stop shaking, I started answering emails.
Survival, it turns out, looks a lot less dramatic than the movies make it seem. There’s no swelling music. No montage of me throwing out his things while wearing sunglasses. There’s just a woman at a kitchen table at 9:00 p.m., typing replies to clients she’d ignored for nearly a week, trying not to cry into her cold coffee.
