The conversation happened in his office at 2:14 PM on a Thursday. I remember the exact time because I had been watching the clock for forty minutes, rehearsing what I was going to say. My boss Anthony had called me in at 1:30 under the pretense of reviewing a client deck. He had not reviewed the deck. He had stood up from behind his desk when I came in, closed the door behind me — which he almost never did, and which I had been told by three different women on my team was how it always started — and then he sat back down and asked me if I was "okay." I said I was fine.
He said I had seemed "distant" the last few weeks. He said he was worried about me. He said if there was anything he had done, any way he had "misunderstood the energy between us," he needed to know. And that was when I handed him the folder. Seventy-eight pages of documented incidents. Dates, times, verbatim quotes, three separate witness names. He opened the folder. He read the first three pages. He started crying.