The third would be on Wednesday, April 15th, in my own kitchen.
The second was that Tuesday in August on the studio phone.
I said very clearly, “I have never worked at Marlo and Voss. I have never been to Manhattan in a professional capacity. I have never shared a portfolio with my sister. I have no information about why she would say any of those things.”
The line was quiet for 4 seconds.
“Thank you for being clear with me, Miss Hartwell. I’ll need to follow up internally. I appreciate your time.”
She hung up.
I sat at my desk for 40 minutes. Then I closed the door of my office.
Then I opened my laptop and went into my email and searched for the word Marlo.
The anonymous email from December was the second result. I clicked on it. I opened the PDF. I made the image of Caroline’s badge larger on the screen.
I traced the smudge along the bottom of the badge with the tip of my finger. There was an ink mark there, a thumb print near the corner of the L in Lauren.
I opened a drawer in my desk and pulled out a small archival box I had moved with me from East Nashville to the Gulch and never opened.
Inside that box was the envelope from 2017.
The original offer letter from Marlo and Voss, the recision letter my mother had given me.
I laid both letters side by side. I set my phone on the desk and turned on its flashlight.
I held the offer letter beside the recision letter under the light.
The logo on the recision letter was 4 mm smaller than the logo on the offer. The font of the director’s name on the recision was missing the dot above the lowercase I in Marlo.
The date on the recision used periods between the numbers.
American business letters use slashes.
My mother had typed the recision letter on the same family desktop she had used to print the bulletin for our church.
I sat in my office until the sun went down. I did not call Aaron that night. I did not call my father. I did not call anyone.
I poured myself a single glass of wine and watched the street light outside my window come on.
I did not cry.
I just watched the light.
I did not call Aaron for 5 more days. He was not the first person I needed to find.
If you have ever sat in a quiet room and realized that a story you had been living inside since you were 22 was not your story at all, drop one word in the comments.
Just write witnessed.
I would like to know how many of us there are.
Then come back because the man I needed to find first had been waiting 9 years for me to find him.
I found Theodore Marlo on LinkedIn in the third week of November. He had left Marlo and Voss in 2020. He had founded his own boutique advisory firm in Tribeca called Marlo Advisory.
His profile photograph was a man with gray hair and a careful cardigan. He looked younger in the eyes than he should have.
I sent him a message of three sentences.
“Mr. Marlo, my name is Lauren Hartwell. In June of 2017, an internship offer was extended to me at Marlo and Voss. I am told a woman impersonated me there that summer. I would like 15 minutes of your time in person when you are willing.”
He replied in 19 minutes.
“Miss Hartwell. I have been waiting 9 years for this message. I will make any time on Thursday, December 11th that works for you.”
I read the words I have been waiting three times.
I closed the laptop. I went downstairs to my kitchen and made myself tea and sat on the floor with my back against the cabinet until the kettle had stopped clicking.
Then I bought a flight.
On the 11th of December, I flew Nashville to LaGuardia on the first Delta out of BNA. The plane landed at 8:40 in the morning.
I took a yellow cab through the Midtown Tunnel and down to Tribeca and asked the driver to let me out a block early so I could walk the last block alone.
The lobby of Marlo Advisory was on the 12th floor of a building on Greenwich Street. Oak floors. A small reception desk with a single yellow tulip in a glass jar.
A woman with gray hair stood behind the desk. Her name plate readet. She looked at me for one long second.
“Miss Hartwell.”
She did not phrase it as a question.
“Yes.”
“He’s been waiting for you. Please.”
She walked me back to a corner office.
Theodore Marlo stood up from behind his desk. He was a slim man in a gray cardigan over a white shirt.
He [snorts] looked at my face. And then he looked at a paper file already open on his desk. And then he looked at my face again.
“Do you have your offer letter with you, Miss Hartwell?”
I nodded. I pulled the letter from my bag.
He took it. He laid it next to a page in the file on his desk. He held the two pages under his desk lamp.
He was quiet for perhaps 8 seconds.
Then he sat down.
“You’re the real one.”
He said it to the desk. Not to me.
I sat down. He poured me water from a carffe.
“I had two suspicions in 2017, Miss Hartwell, and I have carried both of them since. The first was that the young woman who arrived under your name on the 12th of June was not the designer I had spoken to on the phone in May. She could not describe the color theory she had supposedly used in the project on page 17. She told me she did not remember her own paragraph in chapter 4. The second was that something had happened to you.
“We tried to call your home number twice in the second week of June. We left two voicemails. We never heard back. The young woman who arrived insisted she was you. She had what looked like your paperwork. She had a portfolio cover that matched the photographs you had sent us. We had no basis to call her a liar. We made the mistake.”
He paused.
“In October, after we had reasons to let her go for plagiarism, I tried to write a private note to the address on your original application. The address was a PO box. The note came back. I told myself I would let it rest. I told myself I had imagined a problem out of an ordinary cohort failure. I lied to myself about it for 9 years.”
He pushed a black binder across the desk to me.
“This is what we kept. The intake form, the badge photograph, the performance reviews, the plagiarism findings, the two phone numbers we tried in June, the text of both voicemails, the internal note from October when I tried to write to you, the signed termination letter. The signature on her termination is not yours. The signature on her original intake is not yours either.”
I touched the binder. I did not open it.