She said eleven women came forward in the eight days after that email. Not about 2019 — about her, and about the man above her, and about a system she’d been part of for six years. She said the sentence I sent was accurate and that she’d deserved to lose the job and that none of that was what she wanted to say to me. What she wanted to say, sitting in a Panera at four in the afternoon, was that she’d been the one who reported the rest of it in June, and that she could only do it once she had nothing left to protect.
She told me what 2019 had actually been. There was a man two levels up. She’d been told to make the complaint go away and she had, and she’d been given a promotion four months later, and she has spent six years understanding exactly what she traded. She said the four of us agreeing to keep our mouths shut at that same table had felt at the time like mercy toward a woman in a bad position, and had actually been the thing that let it run another six years.
She didn’t ask me to forgive her and she didn’t apologize to me, which I found strange until I realized she’d apologized to the right people already and I wasn’t one of them. She asked one thing: that if I’m ever asked to give a statement, I don’t soften it. She said people always soften it.
I’m back at work since October, with a note in my file and a training module I’ve now done twice. My daughter’s two words in April were oh Mom and I have not been able to decide, in eleven months, whether they were horror or relief. There are three people gone above Dana now. And I still don’t trust the little arrows — my daughter set my email up so Reply All asks me twice, and I let her, and I check anyway.
