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I kept my $17,500 monthly salary a secret from my fiancé. To him, I was just a girl living simply with a baby. I wanted to see how he treats a poor single mom, so I pretended to be broke and naive. He invited me to the family dinner, but as soon as I walked through the door…
Three months after that, he married a waitress named Courtney. He posted the wedding photos all over social media. Caption: Finally found a woman who lets me be a man.
I saw those photos at 2:00 in the morning, alone in my apartment, eating ice cream straight from the container like a walking cliché, and something inside me just broke.
For a year after Bradley left, I was a ghost. I went to work, came home, cried, slept, repeat. I stopped going out, stopped answering calls. Most of my friends eventually gave up trying. I don’t blame them. I wasn’t exactly great company.
The only person who stuck around was Tiffany Russo.
Tiffany and I had known each other since childhood, but we were never close friends. She was the party girl. I was the study-all-weekend girl. We had nothing in common. But when I was drowning, Tiffany was the one who showed up at my door with cheap wine and terrible advice.
She dragged me out of bed, forced me to eat something besides cereal, reminded me that the world existed outside my apartment walls.
So when Tiffany got pregnant unexpectedly last year and had baby Rosie, I wanted to return the favor. And when Tiffany realized pretty quickly that motherhood wasn’t exactly her calling, I stepped in more and more.
First, it was a few days a week. Then most days. Then somehow essentially full-time.
I pay Tiffany $800 a month. Now she calls it reverse babysitting. She gets money and freedom to keep bartending and living her life. I get Rosie.
And somewhere in that arrangement, an idea started forming. A crazy, possibly unhealthy, definitely manipulative idea.
What if I used Rosie to test my next relationship?
What if I presented myself as a struggling single mom—broke, overwhelmed, nothing to offer financially—and watched how a man treated me? If he could love me when I appeared to have nothing, then maybe, just maybe, he deserved to know the real me.
If he couldn’t, well, better to find out before I got my heart shattered again.
I perfected the look.
Yoga pants with a mysterious stain I never bothered investigating. Sweaters that had seen better days—specifically the days of 2018. No makeup, hair in a permanent ponytail, and the bone-deep exhaustion that comes from actually caring for a ten-month-old baby.
I called it exhausted chic. Very convincing.
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