I didn’t wait for my coworker to come visit me today. The moment there was a break this morning in our trial, I ran up the stairwell (the elevator takes too long), burst into the courtroom where he’s working, and demanded to see the photo of the mystery x-factor date he insists on taking to our wedding. His eyes went wide as he gasped and said, “Oh, I forgot! Tomorrow, I’ll bring it tomorrow. I’ll put the camera in my car as soon as I get home.”

I gave him a piece of my mind about how not cool a stunt like this is. He swore that there’s no bad blood between me and this woman and that we’d never hung out or had any sort of personal history. He said she only knows me through past contact when she’s come to the courthouse to meet up with him and so I would’ve seen her with him and that’s it. In fact, if I were to see her photo, I wouldn’t recognize her except in the context of seeing her in the courthouse with him. I said I don’t remember his introducing me to any strange women at the courthouse, and he said maybe they saw me in passing and he just pointed me out to her, but she thinks she knows who I am. He told me to trust him, and that this isn’t a big thing, it’s not gonna be some surprise confrontation or something. So I asked for her name again and he again refused. Wtf. He sent me out with more promises to bring his camera in tomorrow to solve the mystery.

I walked away in thought. Something still doesn’t sit right. If she had such limited contact with me in the past, what would possess her to think she would “surprise” me? What would I care? And what’s the big deal with the big name reveal? Also, I have an amazing memory and I do not remember him walking around work with some woman who was just visiting. UNLESS…

Unless he got back together with his ex-girlfriend! I’ve definitely run into him with this woman a few times in the past, but this was years ago. He’d picked up on her at Subway when a bunch of us was out at lunch together. He’d suddenly asked if our coworker wanted a refill on her soda and grabbed her cup and took off to the soda fountain. When he returned he was glowing with a phone number in his hand. They dated and met up regularly for lunch and soon bought a house together and moved in. When their relationship went sour, he still lived with her (albeit sleeping in a different room) because they couldn’t agree on how to dispose of their co-purchased property. Eventually it got bad enough that he just took her lowball offer, let her buy him out, and scraped together barely enough money to overpay for a condo in Long Beach, and couldn’t even afford furniture for a long time. It doesn’t make sense that he’d get back together with her, but the pieces fit. How do you date someone this new and then decide to move her in? Obviously he doesn’t feel that she’s a stranger. And she’s the only person he’s been involved with that I’ve ever met. We even had lunch together (with him of course) a few times so she definitely knows me and hence could want to keep her name (which I’d recognize instantly) a secret to “surprise” me, as in, “Surprise! We got back together!”

But I still have a hard time imagining how he could get back with someone with whom he had such an ugly end… Guess we’ll see tomorrow.