She wasn’t my rival.
She was the next me.
She just didn’t know it yet.
I sat with the financials on Karla for a long time before I went to see her, and what I kept coming back to was how identical the machinery was.
He had run the exact same play on both of us, adjusted only for what each of us wanted.
I had wanted stability, a family, someone steady and older who made me feel chosen; so he had been steady and chosen me.
Karla, I would learn, had wanted rescue, a bigger life, a man who believed in her dream; so he had been her angel investor and believed in her dream.
He read what a woman was hungry for and he became precisely that, and underneath the two completely different performances the mechanism was the same one, the way the same con works dressed in two different suits.
Realizing that drained the last of the jealousy out of me.
You cannot really hate the woman standing in the identical trap, wearing the identical bruises, put there by the identical hands.
She and I were not opposites.
We were two data points describing the same man.
Chapter 23 — Two Women Who Were Supposed to Hate Each Other
I went to her salon after closing, and she opened the door with her jaw set for a fight, braced for the wronged wife to come screaming.