Sweet Romance13 min read
My Roommate, Her Lies, and the Man Who Was Mine
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They left my bed like garbage on the balcony.
"I thought you moved out for good," Keira said from my mattress, one leg tucked under her, as if the space belonged to her by right.
"Really?" I said. "Did you take a lease on other people's things too?"
Keira smiled the way a practiced actress smiles. Haylee and Kennedi flanked her like understudies who knew all the lines.
"Emilia, don't be dramatic," Haylee said, rolling her eyes. "If you don't sleep here, why would we keep your bed?"
"I sleep in my apartment now," I said, looking at the twisted comforter, the boxed books, my custom woven mat. "But those are my things. You don't toss other people's stuff."
Kennedi scoffed. "They were just taking up space. You never used them."
"Those are costly," I said, and then I did something I almost never do: I counted.
"You did what?" Haylee laughed.
I tapped my phone, fingers moving like a pianist. "This custom leather mat? Fifteen hundred. The embroidered blackout curtain? Nine hundred. The redwood shelf? Six hundred. Imported books? Five hundred and sixty-eight. Total three thousand five hundred sixty-eight dollars."
There was silence for one long breath. Then insult, then denial.
"You're joking," Kennedi said. "Nobody spends that much on... on bedding."
"You were never there to see where my things came from," I said. "But I'm not asking you to take them. I'm asking to be paid."
Keira's smile thinned.
"I'm not paying for stuff that's been tossed out," she said. "We all tossed things. Split it—AA."
Haylee looked at Kennedi. Kennedi looked at Keira. Both looked at me, like a jury waiting for a verdict.
"Fine," I said. "Split it."
They dug into their pockets like magpies. One of them even produced a folded bill with visible wear and handed it to me with a smirk.
"You're so petty, Emilia," Haylee said. "You're thinking too much."
"Or maybe you're thinking too little," I replied.
Later that night, when the dorm answered to different kinds of light—phone screens, late-night gossip—Keira climbed down from my upper bunk. She looked at me like she was offering a mercy I didn't want.
"Emilia," she said softly. "I just need the lower bunk. I can't sleep on the top."
I looked at her. "You already have my bed."
"It was a mistake," she said. "I'm new. Don't be like this."
I learned, very quickly, that being gentle made me easier to walk on.
So I changed strategy.
"Fine," I told them the next morning, "if you want peace at night, no one will have it without me."
"You're ridiculous," Kennedi muttered.
I smiled and set alarms. Not one, not two. Ten. I placed them in drawers, on top of frames, under pillows. They rang at different intervals, each with a timbre I chose for maximum displeasure—a shrill horn, a mournful trumpet, an old-timey alarm that sounded like a countdown.
They called me petty. They started calling me cruel. The first night three alarms woke them. The second night seven. By the fourth night they walked on eggshells around me and finally offered a truce.
"Okay," Haylee said. "Twelve a.m. no phone calls, no stomping, no weird alarms."
"Deal," Kennedi agreed. "And you stop with the alarms."
We shook on it. I thought I had bought myself a fragile peace.
Then I came back early on a weekend to find a couple in my bed.
"Get off!" I shouted, and the gym-boy—Haylee's boyfriend, Pierce—did not move fast enough. He had no idea what was mine and what was his.
"I thought you were gone," Haylee said, like that excused everything. "You can see how much fun he is."
"Fun? You're using my bed as... as a stage," I said, fury hot and clean.
That night I moved out of the dorm for good. I rented a small apartment near campus, kept my keys in my pocket, and locked my comforter away.
I thought that closing the door would close the problem. I was wrong.
A week later, I went back to the dorm to fetch something and found it taken over again. My shelf—my redwood shelf with my favorite books—my pillowcases—were stacked like trash.
Keira sat on my bed and smiled like a woman holding a secret.
"Is there a problem?" she asked.
"Why is my bed taken?" I said, not bothering to hide the cold in my voice.
Haylee breezed by us like a wind that didn't know the way of kindness. "Emilia, you're always so dramatic. Maybe you should sleep more."
Kennedi added, "Maybe you should have a boyfriend to protect your bed."
"Funny you say that," I said.
They handed me money like a favor. Keira insisted on AA. Haylee elbowed me in the ribs, like hurt could be sent as a joke.
"You know what?" I said. "If I have a boyfriend, I will bring him."
They laughed as if the idea itself was a kind of joke I had to live with.
"Like your boyfriend exists," Kennedi said. "Who would date you?"
I felt the same old cold when they started to talk about my boyfriend like he was a fiction. Maybe they tried to make me small so their own emptiness would look fuller. Whatever the reason, I never answered belligerently.
Instead I announced, softly, "Next week he will be here."
Keira hummed. "We will see."
A few days later she posted on her social profile—a carefully staged life of flights, dinners, designer bags—and even some of my friend's photos. Giovanna's photos. She claimed a man in one photo as hers. The man looked familiar.
A friend sent me the image. I stared until the pixels made sense.
"That is Emeric," I said, shouting like a person who has been suddenly given a new sense. "That's Emeric."
"Who's Emeric?" Kennedi asked, flipping the magazine.
"He's my boyfriend," I said. "He's visiting next week. He will be here."
Keira smiled in the smug way of someone who already held a script. "You think he will come?"
"He will come."
They all imagined the scene like a circus: my smallness exposed, my boyfriend mocked, their jokes laughing the loudest. So they prepared their own spectacle.
The night of the dinner, Keira reserved a private table at a fancy restaurant and invited our roommates, plus their partners. She announced, in the middle of coquettish laughter, that her boyfriend would be there.
"I have an arranged table," she said. "He asked me to invite you all."
I came alone. My stomach flipped, but I kept my shoulders even. From the corner of the room I saw a familiar posture: tall, neat, impossible in a way that turned heads. Emeric arrived like a quiet storm, his coat over his arm, a ring of light catching his hair.
"Emilia," he said, and when he walked toward me, some of the air in the room shifted.
"Hello," I replied. "You made it."
Keira's silence fell first into disbelief, then into a thin, furious smile. She had lied about everything. The photos. The boyfriend. The flights. I watched the change on her face like a slow, clear weather front: color draining, smile trembling, pride cracking.
"You—" Keira began, and then she was cut off.
"Excuse me," Emeric said, with a voice that made the joke of the room stop. "Do you want to explain to everyone who you are?"
He didn't raise his voice. It wasn't necessary. He had sat with me at midnight when I counted alarms, saved the quote I loved, bought me a ring when I was too stubborn to accept gifts. He wore the ring at that table, and the room noticed.
Keira's friends tried to cover. "He looks just like the photo!" Kennedi insisted. "I thought—"
"You said he was your boyfriend," Haylee said to Keira, like frost.
Keira's eyes flitted from Emeric to me like a trapped animal searching for a route out.
"I—" she whispered. "We talked."
"By phone?" Emeric asked. "Did you send me a message last week? Did I respond?"
"No," Keira said. Her voice shivered like a leaf. "Maybe—"
"Maybe nothing," Emeric said, calm as a sealed room. "You used my picture. To pretend I was your boyfriend."
A beat of silence. Then the restaurant seemed to inhale and exhale with us. It had seen more than its share of small dramas, but this felt like the real thing: truth and a lie facing off.
"You lied to us," Haylee said, like a person stabbing at the only proof they had.
Keira's face moved through a full theater of emotions—anger, terror, denial, then puppeted back to a brittle smile.
"You always took my word," she said. "Why do you doubt me now?"
"You put my photos on your page," Giovanna said, stepping forward, voice steady. "You stole them from my feed."
Keira's mouth opened. "I—" She looked not maligned but cornered. The room watched the show.
Emeric slid a chair beside me. "It wasn't just your photos," he said. "You took an image of a man—my image—that isn't yours. You used it to gain advantage. You're pretending to be something you are not."
Keira's expression imploded. She looked small. Her mask had been a sculpture that broke in public.
After the dinner, things quieted for two reasons: the immediate spectacle and the slow work of consequences.
Keira had a history. I found out from a woman at the venue—an older guest who had been following the thread of gossip—that Keira had been at other schools. She had been expelled. She had been in trouble: relationships with married men, promises that ended as financial ruin for others.
It didn't stop there. A week later, at a business meeting across town, a scene unfolded that would change everything.
We were talking with a client when a well-dressed woman burst into the lobby, her fingers clutching a bag that looked like it had fought a war and lost. She rushed to Keira and grabbed her by the hair.
"You thief!" she screamed.
The room froze.
"How dare you," the woman said, her words like small stones thrown at a window. "You stole from me. You took my things and gave them to your lover."
"Mrs. Albrecht—" Keira tried to pull away.
"Don't call me that," the woman said. "My name is Julia Albrecht. And I want you out of my life."
The lobby filled in an instant with the sharp chorus of onlookers: chairs pushed back, phones raised, whispers like the rustle of dry leaves.
"She took my husband's things. She took my jewels," Julia said. "She used his position to worm into the corporate board. She pretended to be his lover. And she used other people's photos to make herself pretty."
Keira's face contorted, a cartoon drawn badly. "That's not true," she said. "I—"
"You smiled with my jewels," Julia continued, holding a small pendant up. "You smiled with what was taken from me. You sat at my table. I have pictures. I have receipts. I have witnesses. I called the police."
Keira's voice rose into bargaining. "If you don't—if we don't—I'll give it back! I'll return—"
"What will you give back?" Julia spat. "Your lies? You want to keep pretending you're a stranger? You're not a stranger to the damage you've done."
People in the lobby murmured. Some took video. Someone asked, loudly, "Is she famous?"
"Is she a model?"
"Is she from anywhere legitimate?"
I watched Keira as the net closed. She went through a sequence I'd seen before on other people's faces: arrogance, surprise, indignation, panic, collapse.
"You're making a scene," Keira hissed, and she tried to shove back.
Security held her, but not hard. The quicker you cooperate, the easier your fall.
"You're a liar," Julia said, voice cold. "And now you will answer to consequences."
One of Julia's friends pushed a pile of photographs across the reception desk—each one a small, damning thing: Keira's profile picture, Giovanna's photos, the pendant in Keira's hands, a receipt from a jewelry repair shop.
"We have video," Julia said. "He has been using the company's resources to help her. She's been fraudulently presenting herself as the boss's daughter and using him to get people hired."
I felt something like pity as Keira's expression moved from denial to a frantic attempt at performance. "You don't know the facts—"
"Oh, I know the facts," Julia said. "You call your criminality 'social climbing.' You call your theft 'luck.' You call it style. But the bank statements are very clear."
Security called the police. Keira wept and screamed and tried to bargain—"I'll return the money," she wailed—then she tried to charm, "I only wanted to be loved"—then she tried to blame, "They made me do it."
But the pictures were real and the receipts were real and the men she had used—Arnaldo Garza, a director—felt the heat under his collar as the scandal grew. The company had to act.
The way people turn their backs is a mild cruelty compared to what public exposure feels like. They filmed the event, uploaded it, and the video collected a crowd like a magnet. Phones recorded the fall, and the fall itself was zeitgeist material.
Two different punishments took shape.
First, a public unmasking at the company—a meeting where the board removed Arnaldo from the position he had purchased with promises and affairs. He was the lever. Without Arnaldo, Keira's story lost its teeth. They announced his removal. The press smelled blood. People filed statements. The human resources department sent Keira and her two friends packing with a termination letter in their hands and a list of items they had to return.
Second, the social punishment. The lobby altercation with Julia became the image on social media: the woman with the expensive bag holding Keira by the hair, the necklace on the desk, Keira's tear-streaked face. The video had five million views by midnight.
Keira tried to explain. "It's complicated," she said into the floodlight of online commentary.
"It isn't complicated," Julia said. "You stole from me. You lied to me. You lied to them. You lied to yourself."
When the police came, she asked for help, for bail, for leniency. The camera lights made her look smaller than she imagined. People who used to praise her followed with sharp comments. Some called for restitution. Others demanded prosecution.
"How could she?" someone whispered in the comments. "How could any of them be so cruel?"
The story did not end at the lobby.
There was the trial. There was the courtroom scene that I had to watch once more as part of the messy civic ritual.
The courtroom was packed the day the verdict came. Friends who had been loyal to their illusions sat with their heads down. The public sat on both sides, phones hidden, the air damp with curiosity.
"You have been found guilty of fraud and theft," the judge said. "You will be sentenced to three years."
Keira's face folded. She had been loud, then coy, then defiant. Now she was quiet, then loud, then pleading. "Please," she pleaded. "I didn't mean—"
Outside, after the hearing, Julia—who had once been the woman kept awake by thoughts of betrayal—stood with the press and said what she needed to say in that single voice the public expects of wronged persons: "The law is the law. No one is above it. I don't want vengeance. I want truth."
Keira's expression moved in real time: arrogance to shock to denial to collapse to bargain. Her friends, Haylee and Kennedi, had different fates. They were fired. Their names no longer opened doors. They tried to call me for help. I didn't pick up.
"You don't owe us anything," I told a mutual friend. "They made choices."
Haylee and Kennedi's punishment was quieter. Their lives became small pieces of gossip at campus bars. They were denied internships, shunned on message boards, and had to tell family members the stories they had previously told as jokes. The humiliation was professional and comprehensive: they had to return money, attend restitution sessions, publicly apologize in a school assembly. They recorded a filmed statement, hands shaking, and then they stepped away from the lights.
"Why would you do this?" I asked Haylee one cold afternoon, when she came to the company entrance, head bowed.
"Because she said she'd help," Haylee said, voice paper-thin. "She said her dad would get us jobs. She said everything would be easier."
"You helped pull people along the wrong rope," I said. "You let yourself be led."
As for Arnaldo Garza, he lost his seat. He tried to explain his weakness, his loneliness, the ways he had thought himself entitled to a private life outside marriage. Publicly he apologized. Privately he sued and was sued. His name, once enough to open doors, became the kind of thing people said with a mixture of pity and admonition.
Keira was led away by uniformed officers the day of her arrest. The crowd pressed closer, phones held like witness stamps.
"You won't win," she cried at me. "You made me do this. You ruined me."
"I didn't make you do anything," I answered. "You were choosing your direction long before I ever spoke."
She looked at me then, with a face that had no mask left. For a moment, there was raw, naked regret. Then she lowered her head and went.
Afterward, life resumed its quieter rhythms.
"How are you?" Emeric asked one evening, as we walked through a park that felt like the inside of a breath.
"I'm okay," I said. "Angry. Sore. Tired."
He took my hand. "You did the right thing."
"Did I?" I said. "I made them lose jobs. I made people angry. I exposed lies."
"You exposed the truth," he said. "And that's not a bad thing."
Weeks later, the company adjusted. Broderick Barton, my father, made decisions that were fair and firm. He had people removed. He installed new policies about hiring. He also—quietly—donated a building to the campus. He told me to attend the donation ceremony in his place.
At the ceremony, as I stood with a ribbon in hand, people I didn't recognize looked at me as if I were a different person—no longer small, but measured and exact. Haylee and Kennedi watched from the back row. They looked older than their years.
"Do you regret it?" Haylee asked me once, in private, months after everything fell apart.
"No," I said. "Not regret. I regret the cost."
"You still haven't told them who you are," she said.
"That's the point," I said. "Some things are not props. My identity is not a scarecrow to be set on fire. I work. I keep my dignity."
Emeric and I went abroad later. He opened a new market for his family's company. I studied. It was like two people learning the same song at a distance. We sent letters. We saved enough afternoons for each other.
Years later, I would sometimes find myself smiling at the sound of an alarm: a tiny, distant echo of the prison of beeps I once set out of anger. The memory of Keira falling, of Julia's furious justice, of Haylee and Kennedi's small apologies—these were not trophies. They were severances.
At a small gathering after my father's donation event—an intimate thing, not a headline—I found Keira's account of a life before her lies: the empty apartment, the borrowed clothes, the long nights pretending at other people's dinners. She had been lonely in a way that required covering.
"You could have asked for help," I said to her over coffee, years later, when we were both older and the public's appetite had moved on.
She looked at her hands. "No," she said. "I didn't think anyone would answer."
"Some people will," I said. "But the ones you used... they had to pay."
Her eyes glistened in a way that was no longer about performance.
"I'm sorry," she said, simply.
"I'm not the person to forgive you," I said. "But you can forgive yourself."
She nodded.
The alarms I set that semester became like a small story I told myself: sometimes you have to make noise to wake people up. Sometimes the noise gets loud and you regret the echo.
I kept my redwood shelf. I repaired the small scratch on the corner of the leather bag Keira once flaunted, because someone had to keep the furniture of memory in good order. I kept a tiny alarm clock on my bedside table—the first alarm I ever bought, silent now. When I wind it once in a while, the second hand moves and time goes on.
"Do you ever want to go back?" Emeric asked me that night, when we had been married long enough that our hands sometimes spoke for us.
"Back to when?" I asked.
"To the dorm? To being younger? To simpler fights?"
I put my hand on his.
"No," I said. "I liked the person I was becoming, even if she had to make noise to be heard."
He pulled me close. "Good," he murmured.
"Besides," I said, smiling, "if you let me keep one truth, let it be this: set your alarms, but keep your bed."
The End
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