My Husband Told Me His “Work Wife” Was An Upgrade. Then I Found Out He Was Paying Her Rent While Telling Me To Budget. How Should I Handle This Dinner Invite?
Jessica’s Panic
He looked up at me then with something like desperation in his eyes, but I walked out and closed the door behind me without waiting for a response.
Back at Laya’s apartment I unpacked my boxes into the guest room she’d cleared out for me, hanging clothes in the small closet and stacking books on the nightstand. My phone rang while I was organizing my things and I didn’t recognize the number so I let it go to voicemail.
When I checked the message later, Jessica’s voice came through the speaker shaky and tearful, begging me to call her back. I deleted it without listening to the whole thing and went back to unpacking. She called again an hour later from the same blocked number and this time I answered on the third ring.
Her words came out in a rush, crying and saying she couldn’t afford to lose her job, that she had student loans and rent and couldn’t survive on unemployment. I felt a quick flash of sympathy before remembering how excited she’d looked at dinner when she thought marrying Craig meant financial security without consequences.
I told her she should have thought about employment issues before building her entire life around financial support from a married man who was senior to her at work. She started to argue, saying it wasn’t like that, but I hung up before she could finish her sentence.
Accountability
Laya came home from the school while I was sitting on the guest bed staring at my phone and she took one look at my face and asked what happened. I told her about Craig’s anger and Jessica’s desperate phone call and she sat down next to me on the bed while I talked through everything.
She listened without interrupting until I was done, then asked if I thought I was being too harsh by not withdrawing the HR complaint. I thought about it for a minute, really considered the question instead of just reacting, then told her that both Craig and Jessica made choices knowing they were crossing boundaries.
Craig chose to cosign Jessica’s lease and drive her to work every day and cover her lunches while telling me we needed to budget more carefully. Jessica chose to accept all that help and call herself his work wife and share details about his marriage that should have stayed private.
Laya nodded and pointed out that I wasn’t responsible for protecting them from consequences they created through their own actions. She reminded me that company policies exist for exactly this kind of situation, to prevent senior employees from creating inappropriate relationships with junior staff that could lead to favoritism or worse.
We talked for another hour about whether consequences were the same as revenge and whether I was doing this for justice or just to hurt them back. I admitted I didn’t know anymore, that part of me wanted them to understand how their choices affected other people but another part of me just wanted them to hurt the way I’d been hurting for months. Laya said both things could be true at the same time, that I could want accountability and also want them to suffer and that didn’t make me a bad person.
