He Proposed at the Restaurant Where I Waited Tables in 2011, and My Manager Walked Out With the Ring

Part 3: The Girls in the Group Text

We didn’t go home right away.

We sat in the car in the Marren’s parking lot for a long time. Daniel had the heat on. He’d draped his jacket over my shoulders when we got outside and I was still wearing it, the sleeves swallowing my hands.

“Peter,” I said.

“The waiter?”

“He said *more of us*.”

Daniel was quiet.

“I didn’t tell anyone at the time,” I said. “Not really. There were girls I worked with. We all knew about him. We all knew. But nobody said the actual words. You just, you traded shifts to not be alone with him, and you didn’t take the walk-in runs by yourself, and you told each other things like *be careful with Tony tonight, he’s in a mood*, and that was, that was how we talked about it.”

“Do you still know any of them?”

“Facebook. One or two. Not close.”

He nodded. He didn’t push.

I sat with it. Peter’s voice. *There’s more of us.* Not there were. There are.

“Dan.”

“Yeah.”

“Take me home. I want to do something.”

At home our daughter was at a sleepover, which was why Daniel had picked tonight in the first place. The house was quiet. I sat at the kitchen island with my laptop and I opened Facebook and I found her.

Jenna Robicheaux. She’d been the head server at Marren’s in 2011. Twenty-six at the time, five years older than me, the one who’d said *be careful with Tony* the most. She was in Columbus now. Married. Two kids. Ran a bakery.

I wrote her a message. Deleted it. Wrote it again.

*Jenna, this is going to sound completely out of the blue. It’s Kate Merrill, I worked at Marren’s with you in 2011. I know it’s been forever. Something happened tonight and I need to ask you a question and I’m sorry to just show up in your inbox after fourteen years.*

I sent it before I could stop.

Daniel brought me tea. He didn’t ask. He just set it next to my elbow and kissed the top of my head and went to sit on the couch and give me space.

Jenna answered in eleven minutes.

*Oh my god. Kate. Yes. Ask.*

We messaged for two hours.

She was still in touch with four of them. Four girls from Marren’s, spread across three states now, all in their thirties, all with lives that had nothing to do with that restaurant anymore. She’d started a group text with them years ago because, she said, *because sometimes you need to talk to people who were there.*

Anthony had bought the restaurant in 2018. She knew. They all knew. When the news went around, Jenna had thrown up in her office bathroom.

*He didn’t try anything on me*, she wrote. *He was smart about who. He picked the youngest ones. He picked the ones who needed the job. I was already engaged and I had a car and he could tell I’d make noise. He picked you and he picked Sara and he picked Marisol and he picked at least two after us that I know of, and probably more.*

I read that message three times.

*Sara*, I typed. *Marisol. Are they,*

*In the group text. Yes.*

I sat there. Daniel came in and refilled my tea and left again without a word.

*Jenna*, I wrote. *Can I ask you something insane.*

*Yes.*

*What if we said something. Out loud. On paper. All of us.*

The three dots appeared and disappeared and appeared again.

*I have thought about this for six years*, she wrote. *I never thought anyone else would.*

She added me to the group text.

Their names lit up on my phone one by one. Sara. Marisol. Britt. Jenna. And me. Five names in a little blue chain, five women who had walked home from Marren’s at different times with the same feeling in their chests.

I told them what had happened at dinner. The re-proposal. The ring. Anthony walking out of the kitchen with the champagne. Peter the waiter with his shaking tray, saying *there’s more of us*.

Sara wrote: *Peter is my little brother.*

I stared at the screen.

*He’s been working there four months*, she wrote. *He took the job because I told him what happened to me and he wanted to see what kind of place it was. He’s been telling me. About the girls Anthony is around now. About the hostess, the blonde one. Her name is Chelsea. She’s nineteen.*

Marisol wrote: *We have to do something.*

Britt wrote: *I’ve been saying that for years.*

Jenna wrote: *We didn’t have anything before. We were alone. We’re not alone now.*

I looked up. Daniel was standing in the doorway of the kitchen with his arms crossed, not listening, just being nearby. He’d taken off his tie. His hair was messy from where he’d been running his hand through it on the couch.

The ring box was on the coffee table behind him. Closed.

*I’m in*, I typed.

I hit send.

Then I put the phone down and I went and I sat next to my husband on the couch and I put my head against his shoulder and I cried for about twenty minutes. He didn’t say anything. He just held me and let me leak into his good shirt.

When I could talk again I said, “This is going to take a while.”

“Okay.”

“It might get ugly. He might have lawyers. He might come after us. It might be in the paper.”

“Okay.”

“I might not want to talk about the ring for a while.”

He was quiet for a second. Then he said, “The ring can wait.”

“You sure.”

“Kate. The ring can wait. I’ve been married to you for fourteen years. I’m not in a hurry.”

I laughed. It came out damp.

“Also,” he said, “I’m going to need you to know something. I feel sick about tonight. I’m going to feel sick about it for a while. I picked that place. I let him book it. I called him buddy.”

“You didn’t know.”

“I still picked it.”

“Daniel,”

“Let me feel bad about it,” he said. “For a minute. I’m not asking you to fix it. I just need to feel bad about it for a minute.”

I nodded against his shoulder.

On the coffee table my phone lit up. Jenna. *Meeting Saturday. Zoom. All five of us. We start writing it down.*

I picked up the phone. I looked at my husband. He looked back at me and there was something new in his face, not the smiling-not-smiling from the restaurant, something quieter. Like a man rearranging his idea of the last decade.

*I’ll be there*, I typed.

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