Mia continued to take notes on everything said in the meeting for the next hour, until finally everyone stood up to leave. She was packing up her laptop when she realized that none other than Alexander Will himself was standing right in front of her.
“Are you Jayden’s new secretary? I haven’t seen you here before,” Alexander said.
“Yes, my name is.. Sarah Shaw,” Mia replied, momentarily forgetting her alias. Alexander may have been a womanizer, but he was still one of the most attractive men she’d ever met. “It’s nice to officially meet you, Mr. Will.”
“Call me Xander. I’m sure we’ll have a great time working together,” he replied. Mia held out her hand for a handshake, but instead Xander raised it to his lips and kissed it. He then winked at her and walked out the door.
What a sleazeball, Mia thought. He’s known me for all of sixty seconds and he’s already flirting with me. If she hadn’t felt bad for Lillian before, she most certainly did now.
***
Chapter 3
With a little ingenuity, Mia was able to gather all of the evidence she needed to prove that Xander was, in fact, guilty of cheating on Lillian. She chatted with the other secretaries about him, using the microphone on her cell phone to record everything they said. They told her salacious stories of all the women he was supposedly seeing behind Lillian’s back, about his history of cheating on his girlfriends, and about his love of alcohol and drunken hookups. Armed with this evidence, Mia decided to sneak into Xander’s office when he was on his lunch, and see what information she could get off of his computer.
Mia had done a computer science minor in college, and she had enough knowledge to be able to hack into Xander’s computer as long as he didn’t have an encrypted password. Luckily, Xander didn’t have much in the way of security on his personal laptop, which he was silly enough to leave in an unlocked desk drawer. She quickly found flirty emails and instant messages with girls that clearly weren’t Lillian, which she forwarded to herself, so she could print them out later. In one of the messages, he had discussed getting drinks at a bar across the town tonight with one of the girls. Mia decided to tail him so she could get some pictures, figuring it would be the final nail in the coffin of Xander and Lillian’s relationship.
The next morning, she summoned Lillian to the Hudson Diner again, so she could show her the evidence she had compiled. She had the photos and emails printed out and organized in a file, and she also had an MP3 of the secretaries gossiping on a flash drive. Mia sat drinking coffee for twenty minutes, the file sitting on the table in front of her, before Lillian showed up. She looked disheveled, like she’d been crying for hours, and she was wearing a big sweater and leggings instead of the chic designer clothing she’d worn for their last meeting.
“Is everything okay?” Mia asked as Lillian sat down. “I don’t mean to pry, but you seem really upset.”
“Xander dumped me last night. Turns out I didn’t even need all this evidence you got for me. He doesn’t even feel guilty. He wants to ‘play the field’, apparently. His words, not mine,” Lillian said with a sob.
“I’m incredibly sorry to hear that,” Mia said. “Let me buy you some breakfast. I’m sure you could use some hot coffee and a big stack of pancakes. You can just cry if you need to.” Mia was used to jilted girlfriends crying to her after she’d discovered less than savory things about their boyfriends or husbands, and she was an expert in making them feel better. “And of course, this file is yours to keep. You never know when you may need this information.”
“Thank you so much, Mia,” said Lillian. “I knew he wasn’t the best boyfriend or anything, but I never thought he would actually dump me. We’ve been together for four years, you know. Our families are friends now, and we share a lot of the same friends… I just don’t know what I’ll do without him. We were always kind of a power couple, you know, because we’re both quite social, and invested in our careers. How am I going to face everything by myself?”
“I know it seems dire now, Lillian, but you’re a very strong woman,” Mia said. “You really don’t need him to be happy, or successful. And anyway, he treated you horribly. He doesn’t deserve you at all.”
“I actually was thinking about that,” Lillian said. “I want him to feel, just once, how much this hurts, how I feel right now. And I have a request for you.”
“What is it?” Mia asked.
“This is going to sound crazy,” Lillian said with an angry glint in her eye. “But what if you seduced him? And then broke his heart? It would be easy enough. You’re already working there, and he has a thing for secretaries. Especially pretty blonde ones. He’d never see it coming. And then maybe after this he would know better than to mess with me, or any of his girlfriends.”