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I had what I needed.
I confronted her on a Thursday. Girls at my mother’s for the night, on purpose, so this conversation wouldn’t happen anywhere near them.
She didn’t deny it.
“I never wanted to hurt you,” she said, hands wrapped around a coffee mug she wasn’t drinking from. “I love those girls, Denise. Like they’re my own grandbabies.”
“You told four men I had a restraining order, Patrice. That I was dangerous with money. That I was hiding a custody battle.” My voice cracked once, and I hated that it did. “That’s not love. That’s sabotage.”
Her face folded in on itself.
“My daughter hasn’t spoken to me in nine years. Not since her divorce got ugly and she took her father’s side. I’ve got two grandbabies in Charlotte I’ve met maybe four times in their whole lives. Aubrey and Skylar — they’re the only ones who still run to the door when I pull up. I watched myself get pushed out of my own daughter’s family once her stepfather showed up. Slow, then all at once. I couldn’t let that happen again. So every time it looked like a man might actually stick, I made sure he didn’t.”
I understood her pain.
I could not excuse what she’d done with it.
I let her go that week. Not just from the job. From all of it.
Aubrey took it the way Aubrey takes everything — quiet first, then furious, then a string of sharp, fair questions that didn’t have easy answers. “So she’s been lying to every single guy? For two years? Why didn’t you notice?”
“I’m asking myself that too,” I told her, honestly. It was the only answer I had.
Skylar cried harder, longer, and asked a different kind of question. “Does this mean she never really loved us? Or did she love us and still do something this messed up?”
“Both can be true,” I said. “That’s the part that’s going to be hard to sit with.”
I talked to a lawyer about the restraining order lie specifically — a false, repeated statement, damaging enough to meet the bar for defamation under Georgia law. I chose not to sue. Patrice had nothing worth chasing, and I decided my energy belonged to my daughters, not a courtroom. I put one thing in writing, though: if she ever listed us as a reference for future childcare work, I’d tell the truth about exactly why she no longer worked for us.
Malik and I never became anything more than what we’d always been. Almost, once, on my porch weeks later, in a quiet moment neither of us name-checked out loud. We left it exactly where it belonged — a friendship too good to gamble on something neither of us had asked for.
Six months later, I’m dating someone new. Slowly. Carefully. The way I always have. His name is Isaiah. He’s met the twins twice.
Nobody’s pulling him into the kitchen anymore.
If he stays, it’ll be because he wanted to. If he goes, at least this time, I’ll know the real reason.
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