The screen lit up with screenshots of Brandon’s Slack messages.
Not flirtatious ones either.
Messages where he’d been telling coworkers for almost a year that I had cancer.
I actually laughed at first because it sounded so insane.
But then another slide came up. A fundraiser page his department organized after Brandon supposedly took “extended leave” to care for his sick wife. There were photos of me pulled from my Facebook account beside captions about chemotherapy appointments and “financial hardship.”
His coworkers had donated almost thirty thousand dollars.
That’s why nobody spoke to us when we walked in.
They weren’t jealous of his promotion. They thought they were looking at a woman dying of cancer while her husband spent the evening pretending everything was normal.
I just sat there staring at Brandon waiting for him to explain.
He kept muttering that it “got out of hand.” Apparently it started after he missed work constantly gambling on sports apps. He told his manager I was sick because it sounded more sympathetic than admitting he was disappearing during work hours to sit in casinos.
Then coworkers started organizing meal trains and donations on their own.
Instead of stopping it, he kept lying.
The projector kept cycling through screenshots while HR sat across from us silently. One message from Brandon said I’d “lost weight from treatment.” Another thanked people for “praying for my wife.”
Meanwhile I’d been perfectly healthy the entire time.
Then one HR woman slid a folder toward me and quietly said they needed to know whether I had any involvement because several employees were threatening legal action.
I said absolutely not.
Brandon started crying harder after that because apparently he already signed paperwork agreeing to repay everything or face criminal fraud charges.
But the worst part came when I opened the folder.
Mixed into the screenshots was a private Teams message from Brandon’s female coworker sent three weeks earlier.
It said: “Your wife commented on your vacation photos this morning. Are you finally going to tell her she’s supposed to be dead?”