My Bestie Reported My Fake Degree, But My Real Identity Terrified Her Chapter 12

My Bestie Reported My Fake Degree, But My Real Identity Terrified Her Chapter 12

“Lynn, wait.”

Gemma’s voice chased me from behind in the parking garage, followed by the rapid clicking of her heels against the concrete.

I stopped.

She walked up to me, slightly breathless. Her makeup was still intact, but the bloodshot look in her eyes could not be hidden.

“Can you explain this to me?”

“Explain what?”

“Explain what you signed onstage. Explain who you really are. Explain why you never said a single word to me about any of this for the past three years.”

Her voice was shaking. It was not the kind of performative tremble she was good at. It was something uncontrollable, a vibration rising from deep in her throat.

“What is there even to explain? The project I worked on for eight months was built on your technology? The clients I negotiated with were using your authorization? You sat at the desk next to mine, ate the same takeout lunches, and rode the same packed subway with me every day. Were you just watching me make a fool of myself?”

“Gemma, when you looked into my educational background, did you ever consider one possibility? Maybe the reason you couldn’t find it wasn’t that I had faked anything, but that you weren’t cleared to access it.”

She took half a step back.

As if someone had shoved her.

“I wasn’t cleared? I’m your best friend.”

“A best friend doesn’t spend three months gathering materials to report me. A best friend doesn’t hold an integrity training session in front of the entire company. A best friend doesn’t take over my workstation the same day I get suspended.”

She bit her lip. At some point, she had put one pearl earring back on.

She had only put one back on.

Her other earlobe was bare.

“You think you won, don’t you?”

“I don’t need to beat you.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“It means this was never a competition. You turned it into one, starting with that promotion slot last year. You thought I took your place, so you wanted to rip me out of this company completely. But Gemma, that promotion slot was never a competition between you and me.”

“Then what was it?”

“It was part of my deployment cycle. My three–year embedded assignment had reached its end, and I needed a title change to complete the next phase of the authorization handoff. It had nothing to do with you.”

Her face went completely white.

“Embedded assignment? You call working at this company an embedded assignment?”

“To you, it was a job. To me, it was an embedded assignment.”

A fluorescent light in the parking garage flickered.

Gemma took two steps back and leaned against the hood of a car.

“Then what was I? What was our three–year friendship? You introduced me to clients, taught me how to

write proposals, and helped me revise my slide decks. What was all of that? Was it part of the assignment?”

“No.”

“Then what was it?”

“I thought it was real.”

After I said that, the parking garage stayed quiet for a long time.

Tears slipped down her face.

This time, they were real.

They were not the precisely controlled, perfectly timed tears she usually produced. They came without warning, sliding straight from the corners of her eyes to her chin.

“You thought it was real,” she repeated, her voice hoarse.

“Yes. Until the day you put that accusation letter on the conference room table.”

She raised a hand and wiped her face.

“What if I hadn’t reported you? What if I had gotten that promotion slot last year? Would you have kept pretending?”

“It wasn’t pretending. Everything I did during these three years, and every word I said to you, was real. The only thing that wasn’t real was the university listed on my hiring documents, because my actual background is not allowed to appear in any civilian database.”

“You couldn’t have told me sooner?”

“Classification rules wouldn’t allow it.”

“Classification regulations.” She let out a laugh. “You use classification regulations as a shield for everything.”

“Gemma, you didn’t need to know where my file was kept. You only needed to do one thing: not spend three months trying to destroy someone without evidence.”

She froze.

Then her expression shifted from stunned to something much more complicated.

It was not regret.

It was closer to fear.

“That technical authorization list… It said the licensor can revoke authorization unilaterally.”

“You saw it.”

“Will you revoke it?”

“That depends on what you do next.”