Page 24 of Something Like Shelter

I’d always been quietly efficient at work. I wasn’t like some of my coworkers who liked to get together and boast about some deal they made or client they’d schmoozed. So it was likely that no one at the office would realize how much slack they’d have to pick up and how much they would miss me until I was gone for a while.

Despite very much earning my place in the company and making a nice living for myself, there was a surge of panic and insecurity when I saw my boss’s name on my screen.

He spent the first two minutes pretending to care about how I was doing and how the baby was. My responses were just as hollow. I gushed. I claimed I’d never been happier. That my daughter was an angel who slept well and hardly cried.

In my personal life, I preferred to tell the truth.

In my professional life, I learned a long time ago to protect myself from my employer and coworkers. I never had anything stressing me out. My family life was fantastic. I didn’t have a concern in the world.

And when I had to finally break the news of my pregnancy to my boss, I kept up the ruse. I couldn’t claim to be married. My ringless finger would give me right away. But I pretended I was in a very happy relationship, that the two of us were so excited to start our family—even if we were doing things a little out of order.

Did it feel good to lie? No. But it felt just as awful to be talked about and judged by coworkers. And nothing would get their tongues wagging more than knowing I was dumped when my birth control failed and I ended up pregnant. I also worried that my boss might hear the term ‘single mom’ and hear ‘liability,’ since I didn’t have a spouse to take care of the kid on days off from school or when they were sick, over the summer—the list went on and on.

So long as I didn’t ‘get married,’ I didn’t have to actually put anything on paper and risk getting caught.

Fibbing was for protection. Because I’d heard coworkers and bosses in the company call women a ‘liability’ because we might get pregnant at any time.

“Remember Melanie? That kid of hers was sick more than he was well. She lost us three clients.”

It wasn’t true, of course. We lost the clients because of restructuring that the clients saw as instability. But they created a villain out of Melanie. Then our boss went out of his way to write her up for any small infraction until he had enough reasons (that had nothing to do with her child) to fire her.

I couldn’t let that be my fate. Melanie had a high-earning partner to fall back on. I only had myself. I needed stability for my daughter.

So I would continue to lie.

And I wasn’t going to let myself feel bad about it.

It wasn’t just about protecting my job, either. It was about protecting the version of myself I’d spent years building in that office: Reliable. Ambitious. Available.

The kind of woman who answered emails at ten at night and never complained when a client wanted something done yesterday. The kind who came back from vacation with her inbox already cleared because she knew no one else would do it right. I had worked very hard to become the person they never had to worry about.

And now I had a baby.

A baby who would inevitably get sick. Who would have doctor’s appointments and daycare closures and bad nights and fevers and a thousand other perfectly normal things that could make me less convenient.

I hated that I was already calculating how inconvenient motherhood might make me seem.

But I’d seen what happened to women who didn’t. And without a partner’s income to fall back on, I couldn’t take any chances with my job.

“Dave Campo refuses to discuss his portfolio with anyone but you,” my boss said, a hint of a whine in his voice. That made me think he’d tried himself to talk to Dave, who let us control over eight million dollars of his assets.

I adored Dave.

He was this bubbly, pleasant, surprisingly down-to-earth multi-millionaire who started a blue-collar company that went huge over the next twenty years. He was also surprisingly good at reading people. He knew from a two-minute conversation that he didn’t trust my boss. And he despised “the Chrises” in the office. All three of them.

“Is there a problem with his portfolio?”

My boss grumbled. “He was an early investor in AI, if you recall.” Of course, I recalled. I’d been the one to handle that. “And now he says he’s done a lot of research into how bad AI is for the environment, workforce, and the minds of people and wants out.” His words were dripping with distaste. Despite the fact that, according to what I was seeing, Dave was absolutely right to hop out of AI before the bubble burst.

“And he won’t let you handle that?”

“He will not. He threatened to leave us completely if he can’t deal with you.”

I sucked in a deep breath, debating my options. On the one hand, I didn’t want my boss to take this as me coming off maternity leave early. On the other, I could see him somehow using it against me if Dave left.

“You realize I’m on maternity leave for several more weeks.”

That got a sigh.