Any fresh graduate can do your job better.
That’s how he said it—like he was asking someone to pass the salt. Simple. Casual. A fact that had apparently been sitting there on the table all along and he was just now pointing it out for the slower people in the room.
Thirty-one people sat around that conference table. I counted them later, in my car, because my brain needed something to do that wasn’t screaming. At the time, all I noticed were shapes: shoulders hunched, hands wrapped around coffee cups, eyes skittering away as if what he’d said was too bright to look at directly.
“You’re just an overpaid housewife playing marketer.”
He smiled when he said it. Not a big smile, not the broad kind of grin that suggests humor or even cruelty. Just a small, firm curve of his mouth, like a man who’s been carrying a sentence around for months and has finally found a place to put it. A smile of relief.
“Go home. The kitchen’s waiting.”
Somebody near the back pulled in a sharp breath, the kind you hear in hospitals and funerals, when people are still trying to be polite about their shock. Deja, two chairs to my left, went very, very still. I didn’t look at her directly, but I could feel the stillness coming off her, the way heat comes off pavement in August. Walt stared down at the conference table like it owed him an apology. I saw the pulse in his neck jump.
And me? I smiled back.
To this day I don’t fully understand where that smile came from. I didn’t summon it. I didn’t grit my teeth and think, Okay, we’re going to be dignified about this. There was no internal pep talk. It just rose up on its own, settling onto my face as lightly and firmly as a mask, and decided it was going to stay there.
I stood up. I picked up my planner. I did not look at the slides he was still pretending to talk through. I did not look at the cluster of new hires near the back wall who were suddenly fascinated by their own shoes. I did not look at the administrator near the door who kept glancing at me and then away, like eye contact might make her complicit.
I walked out of my own meeting without saying a single word.
But that’s the end of the moment, not the beginning. It took more than one sentence and more than one bad man to get me there.
So let me start where this really began: at my kitchen sink, on a Tuesday morning that looked so ordinary I almost trusted it.
Six weeks before that meeting, I was standing at the window over my sink with a chipped LSU mug in my hand, watching the pecan tree in my backyard do absolutely nothing.
That tree is my favorite thing on the property and, simultaneously, the laziest living creature I’ve ever met. In late September, it specializes in being still. The air had just the first hint of October in it—cooler where it slid through the cracked window, still warm everywhere else. The house smelled like coffee and the leftover red beans from the night before.
My mortgage was mostly caught up. There was food in the pantry—maybe not the fancy kind, but more than enough to get through the week. My mother’s call came at 7:15 on the dot.
“Baby, you eat yet?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I lied.
She hummed. My mother has a whole dictionary of hums. This one translated roughly to, That is a lie but I am choosing peace this morning. “You take care of yourself, you hear? God gave you one body. Don’t act like He keeps extras in the back.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
We talked about my sister, about the weather, about a woman from church whose son had finally moved out of her house and into his own place at the age of thirty-six, praise the Lord and about time. When we hung up, I took another sip of coffee, which still wasn’t breakfast, and looked back out at the pecan tree.
“This,” I remember thinking, “is a good morning. I’m going to have a good day.”
And the wild thing is—I meant it. I believed it all the way down.
That kitchen had been my little launching pad for eleven years. I’d bought the house on my own money, my own credit score, my own name on the deed. No co-signer. No husband. No one standing next to me at the closing table. I’d walked out of that office with a sheaf of papers, a set of keys, and a feeling like my bones had turned into sunlight. Every ordinary morning since then—coffee, cracked window, pecan tree—felt like the quiet proof that I had done something fundamental and no one could take it away.
That was what I thought, anyway.
By eight-thirty, I was at Crestline Medical Group, moving through the lobby on autopilot. The receptionist waved; I waved back. I tapped my badge against the reader at the office door, dropped my bag on the chair in my office, and woke up my monitor with the side of my hand before I even sat down.
Log-in. Password. Dashboard.
Numbers came up on the screen and my shoulders dropped a fraction. Campaign performance, patient acquisition, digital conversions, click-through rates—this was the language I spoke when I was tired, sad, restless, or fine. It was the language I spoke better than anyone at Crestline, and deep down, I think Preston knew that. Maybe that’s why he’d been waiting so long to say what he said.
Our patient acquisition push was exceeding goals: click-through rates up fourteen percent from last quarter; calls from the new billboard on Bert Kouns performing better than projected. That billboard had been a whole thing. I’d argued for that placement through two budgeting cycles and three rounds of “Are you sure we need this?” emails. Watching the numbers confirm what I’d known in my gut was a quiet, satisfying kind of victory—the best kind, really. Not the kind you post on LinkedIn with a string of trophy emojis. The kind you savor alone in your office with lukewarm coffee.
My department was four people. Four people I’d fought for.
Deja Fontineau, my coordinator, sharper than half the directors in the building. When she first interviewed with me, she came armed with color-coded spreadsheets, a printout of our last three campaign cycles, and exactly one question: “What will success in this role look like a year from now?” I’d left that interview secretly terrified she’d turn us down. For two years I’d been pushing for her promotion, and for two years the answer from upstairs had been some variation of, “Not in this budget cycle.”
Walt Tran, our junior designer, commuted forty minutes each way from Bossier City, never complained. When he first started, his designs were fine. Serviceable. By the time the story I’m telling you really kicked into gear, they were good. Sometimes they were so good I’d tilt my head at the screen and think, Did I actually approve this or did the universe just drop it in our shared drive like a little gift?
We had a part-time analytics contractor named Greg who dialed into our Monday meetings from what was clearly a series of coffee shops with the same playlist. I had never seen Greg in person, but he was as punctual and precise as a metronome. Every report on time, every number explained, every question answered with a link to a spreadsheet so detailed it could’ve doubled as a novel.
I kept details about them the way other people keep recipes. I knew Deja’s daughter, Simone, had started kindergarten and was already reading chapter books and issuing strongly worded opinions about snacks. I knew Walt was saving for a ring and had once asked me, half-embarrassed, what I thought about lab-grown diamonds. (“I think your girlfriend cares more about the proposal than the crystal structure,” I’d told him.) Greg, I knew, had a dog named Barley who sometimes barked in the background when the mailman came. These things weren’t useful for my job; they were just important. I made a point of knowing them anyway.
Twelve years I’d been there. I didn’t think about it much because thinking about it made the number feel too big. Twelve years of campaigns, crises, press releases pushed out at nine p.m., budgets stretched and restretched until they squeaked. Twelve years of meetings where Preston stood at the front of a room and talked about “our marketing success” with his name on the slide and my work behind it, humming along like an engine under the hood.
When I started, we’d had a marketing budget of forty grand a year. By that September, we were at three hundred eighty thousand. We had three Healthcare Marketing Association awards. Every major campaign Crestline had pulled off in the last decade had passed through my hands first—shaped, argued for, defended, and executed until it turned into results.
I knew what I’d built. That was the problem. I was the only one who knew it in full.
At lunch that day, Michelle came by my office with smothered chicken in a Tupperware, like she owned the place. Michelle has been my best friend since high school, and her primary love language is showing up in your office with food and opinions you didn’t ask for.
She sat down, pried the lid off, and let the smell of onion and pepper fill the room.
“How many actual human beings do you think eat the cafeteria’s meatloaf and survive?” she asked.
“This is a hospital,” I said. “They probably have numbers.”
“That,” she said, pointing with her fork, “is not the comforting answer you think it is.”
We ate at my desk, like we always did when she visited. She works twenty minutes away at a bank and somehow always manages to “just happen” to be in my neighborhood around lunchtime when she suspects my mood is fragile.
They put those awards on Preston’s wall, not yours,” she said eventually, like she was mentioning the weather.
“It’s more complicated than that,” I told her. It was the reflex answer, the one I’d said so many times it lived in my mouth permanently. “He’s the CEO—interim CEO,” I corrected myself. “The organization benefits, I’m part of the organization. I know what I built. That’s the important part.”
Michelle looked at me with her chin tilted slightly down and her eyes doing that thing, patient and skeptical at the same time. It’s a look that says, I love you, but I am not buying what you’re selling.
“You hear yourself?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“Okay,” she said. And that was all. One of the things I love most about her is that she knows when to put a topic down and leave it sitting there like a misplaced shoe. She knows you’ll trip over it eventually.
On the drive back from lunch, I turned the radio up. Old R&B, the station I always go to when my brain is too loud. For a few minutes, I let Anita Baker drown out Michelle’s voice in my head.
They put those awards on Preston’s wall. Not yours.
I turned the volume up one more notch, as if that could change anything.
Two days later, I almost skipped the Thursday staff meeting. The agenda said “general updates,” which any sane person knows is code for thirty minutes of people reading bullet points you could’ve skimmed in an email while brushing your teeth. I had a campaign brief due Friday, a budget revision half finished, and a design review that needed my eyes.
But I went. Because for twelve years, I had always gone.
Preston stood at the front of the room with his reading glasses perched halfway up his forehead, shuffling papers he didn’t need. He’d been interim CEO for eight months and had recently developed a new way of standing in front of people—as if he’d read somewhere that real leaders take up space, then misinterpreted that to mean “stand very squarely and blink less.”
He ran through the usual: patient volume, payer mix, regulatory updates. His voice moved in that dry, efficient rhythm I’d come to associate with impending boredom.
Then, almost as an afterthought, he said, “The board has been exploring ways to evolve the marketing function and prioritize digital-native expertise as we move into Q4 and beyond.”
He said it smoothly, like he’d been practicing in a mirror. No stumbles, no hesitations. A sentence carved into shape ahead of time.
He did not look at me when he said it.
I noticed that.
I also noticed that Jace Thibodeaux—our brand-new digital marketing specialist—was sitting in the second row, directly inside Preston’s normal line of sight. Jace had been at Crestline for three weeks. I’d been the one to show him around on his first day, the one who’d introduced him to Deja and Walt, explained our campaign calendar, pointed him toward the shared drive.
At that meeting, he was staring down at the table with the intense concentration of somebody who’d been told, Just act normal and is trying very hard to figure out what “normal” looks like.
I watched the angle of Preston’s body, the way his feet were pointed, the way his sentences draped themselves toward Jace and away from me. I felt a little prickle high on the back of my neck.
Afterwards, in my office, I told myself a story.
He’s just excited about new talent, I thought. He values fresh perspectives. He wants us to lean into digital. You’ve said you want that too, remember? This is good. This is…good.
I repeated it often enough that I almost believed it.
On Friday evening, I logged into the shared drive from home to grab a file from the Women’s Health Initiative folder—a campaign I’d nurtured like a garden for six months straight. Strategy documents, creative briefs, vendor contracts, compliance notes; all of it lived in that folder.
Insufficient permissions, the screen told me.
I frowned. Tried again.
Insufficient permissions.
I took a screenshot, attached it to a friendly email to Kyle in IT.
Hey! Hope you’re good. Looks like my access to the Women’s Health Initiative folder changed—probably just a glitch, but wanted to flag it. Thanks!
I kept my tone light, added a smiley face at the end, because women are trained to wrap even our most basic professional requests in emotional bubble wrap, just in case.
“Hi, Tamson,” he wrote back Monday morning. “I was told those permissions were updated per leadership direction. Let me check on this for you.”
He never did.
That week got busy. They always did. There was always a campaign half launched, a vendor calling with a revised rate, a compliance officer asking if we could please remove the word “miracle” from anything involving clinical outcomes. I told myself Kyle was overwhelmed. IT departments always are.
I let it sit.
I am very good at letting things sit when pulling the thread feels more dangerous than leaving the sweater as is.
I let it sit for six weeks.
The morning of the all-staff, I put on my burgundy blazer.
It’s not a casual blazer. It’s structured, with good fabric and that weight that makes you straighten your spine when you put it on. I’d bought it the year we won our first HMA award. Wore it to the ceremony. Hung it up carefully when I got home like it was something fragile. I didn’t wear it often; I saved it for days that felt like punctuation marks.
The meeting was labeled “Q4 Strategy Presentation,” and I didn’t know whose strategy we were presenting, but I knew the numbers were mine. I wanted to walk into that room looking exactly like what I was: the woman who had built those numbers from the ground up.
I got there early, because I always did. Claimed my usual seat near the window. People filtered in, one by one. A couple of nurses still in scrubs, a few administrators in shirtsleeves holding coffee, department heads with their notebooks out, already half checked-out in their heads.
Jace sat in the second row, that same new laptop bag in front of him, still stiff from the store. He held himself too carefully, like someone who’d been practicing their posture.
I opened my planner, pen uncapped, ready.
Preston started with Q4 numbers. They glowed on the screen: increases in new patient appointments, strong returns from billboards and digital campaigns, upward trends that made an attractive line on a graph and a very nice bullet point on a CEO’s performance review.
As he read them out, I felt something loosen in my chest. They were good numbers. They were familiar. I knew precisely which late nights had turned into which upticks. I knew where I’d pushed back against finance, where I’d negotiated with vendors, where I’d stood my ground with compliance until they let us keep the language that would actually move people.
He read the numbers without attribution. That wasn’t new. I was long past expecting, “And of course, Tamson’s team did amazing work here.” We both knew who’d done it. Not all credit has to be public.
Then he pivoted.
“I want to talk about a strategic restructuring of our marketing function,” he said.
The phrase sat in the air like perfume—artificial, sweet, covering something underneath.
“The board and I have been aligned for some time on the need to invest in digital-native expertise as we move into the next phase of Crestline’s growth.”
Aligned. Invest. Next phase. I could almost see the PowerPoint template he’d plagiarized those phrases from.
He introduced Jace as the incoming marketing director. Effective immediately.
Silence settled over the room. Not the polite, listening kind. The heavy kind. The kind that drops like a curtain.
In those first few seconds, I didn’t understand. Not really. You’d think you would. You’d think the words “incoming marketing director” would crash right through any illusions you had and start tearing things down.
But that’s not how it works in real life.
In real life, there is a lag. Your brain slams into the version of reality it thought it was living in—one where you are the marketing director, where this is your department, your strategy, your numbers—and rebounds. It circles. It tries to find an alternate explanation.
Maybe he’s over marketing. Maybe it’s digital only. Maybe my title is changing. Maybe I missed an email. Maybe—
I raised my hand.
It was almost automatic. I didn’t do it dramatically. I wasn’t going to launch into a speech about misogyny or loyalty or twelve years of institutional knowledge. I genuinely wanted to ask a practical question, the sort I would’ve asked anyway, even if this had all been above board.
“Will there be a transition plan in place for current campaigns?” I meant to say. “Will we have a handoff? A timeline? A continuity strategy so our work doesn’t get dropped?”
Professional questions. Procedural questions. Questions any competent executive would consider reasonable.
Preston finally looked at me.
The room narrowed to that line of sight.
What he said next came out too smoothly to be spontaneous. I knew that rhythm. It was the cadence of something he’d rehearsed—not out loud, maybe, but privately, in the space behind his eyes where all his best self-justifications lived.
“Any fresh graduate can do your job better,” he said. “You’re just an overpaid housewife playing marketer.”
There was a little pause then, not quite enough time for anyone to react, just enough for the words to sink all the way into the floor.
“Go home. The kitchen’s waiting.”
I heard the breath pull in somewhere behind me. There was a sensation at my side, like a light going off or a door shutting—I realized later it was Deja going still. And Walt, dear Walt, was staring so hard at the table I thought he might burn a hole through it with his eyes.
I smiled.
I still don’t know exactly how that happened. Maybe it was self-preservation. Maybe it was stubbornness. Maybe it was the last working piece of some internal machinery that had been grinding for twelve years.
What I know is this: in that moment, some part of me decided Preston had already taken enough from me. He was not going to get my public collapse as a bonus prize.
He did not get to see my face break.
He got the smile.
I stood. I picked up my planner. I walked out.
Eight minutes. That’s how long it took to pack twelve years of my working life into a Crestline-branded tote bag.
The framed photo of me and Michelle at Jazz Fest—her laughing, my head thrown back, both of us sunburned and happy and younger. My LSU mug, handle broken since 2019, still refusing to be thrown away. The little succulent in the cracked terra-cotta pot that Deja gave me on my birthday with a card that said, “Low-maintenance, like you wish you were.” The stack of notebooks I’d been filling since 2015 with meeting notes, half-formed ideas, budgets scribbled in margins.
I looked at the HMA plaques on the wall. Three of them, matted and framed, with the company’s name big at the top and Preston’s signature at the bottom. My work in the middle, invisible.
I left them hanging.
If they didn’t have my name on them, they weren’t mine to take.
I walked past Preston’s open office door without glancing in. The security guard at the front gave me a hesitant nod and shifted to the side, as if his body could make space for whatever was happening. No one had told him what protocol was for a woman walking out of the building with a tote bag full of her career. He made the safest choice: he did nothing.
In the parking lot, I sat in my car and counted the people in that room. Thirty-one.
I had to give my brain something quantifiable to hold on to, or I was afraid it would come apart.
At the light at Youree Drive, the tears came.
Not the neat, cinematic kind that slide down your face like they’re in a music video. The ugly kind. The kind that punch their way out from somewhere under your ribs. The kind you only let happen when you’re alone at a red light with your hands on the steering wheel and no audience but the empty passenger seat.
When the light turned green, I drove home.
I hung the burgundy blazer back in my closet. I shut the closet door. I sat on the edge of my bed in my work pants, staring at a water stain on the baseboard for twenty minutes, thinking nothing at all.
Then I got in my car and drove to my mother’s house.
My mother’s recliner is older than some of her neighbors’ children. Brown, a little sagging in the middle, with duct tape holding one arm together underneath the fabric where no one can see. It sits in the corner of her living room, angled just so she can see both the TV and the front door.
When I came in, she was already in it, hands folded in her lap, chin tilted a little, eyes aimed just past my left shoulder.
That is the Bechum family position for “I’m ready. Tell me.”
I sat on the couch and told her everything.
Preston’s face. His words. Deja’s stillness. Walt’s eyes. The tote bag. The red light. The water stain. I didn’t leave anything out, and I kept my voice steady, even when my throat tried to give out. The tears I’d cried at the intersection had emptied something out, but there was still pressure under my skin, like the air before a storm.
When I finished, my mother was quiet for a long moment.
“Do you want me to pray now,” she asked, “or later?”
“Later,” I said.
I went to the bathroom and sat on the cold tile with my back against the tub and cried until my nose hurt and my eyes felt scraped. Not because I was broken, not exactly; more because I’d spent the whole day holding myself in the shape of a person who was fine, and my body needed someplace safe to stop performing.
When I came out, my face was clean but my nose was still red. Mama had warmed jambalaya and set it on the kitchen table. The TV in the other room was on low—just sound, no words.
We ate without mentioning my eyes.
Outside the window, November had come in early and abrupt, dark pressed up against glass. The house felt smaller than it had when I was a kid, but I knew that was just me. I’d grown. The rooms hadn’t.
The next morning, I filed for unemployment.
I’d looked up the Louisiana maximum benefit the night before because I needed numbers. Numbers I could stack against my mortgage, my grocery bill, my gas. One thousand eight hundred forty-seven a week. My mortgage was twenty-one hundred a month. It wasn’t catastrophic, just tight. Tight in the way that turns every trip to the grocery store into a math problem.
I was digging through my email for a PDF when I saw the folder.
“Work Backup – Just in Case.”
Eight hundred forty-seven emails.
The oldest one was from 2018.
I sat there with my hand on the trackpad, staring at that little line of text like it was a snake coiled in the corner of a room I hadn’t cleaned in a while.
I remembered, vaguely, how it had started. In 2019, we’d done a server migration that went about as well as a joke about arthritis at a retirement home. An entire month of campaign files evaporated into the digital ether. IT insisted they were backed up. They were not. I learned, in that month, exactly how much could depend on a single, fragile folder.
After that, whenever I finished a big document—strategy brief, budget request, performance report—I’d forward a copy to my personal Gmail “just in case.” It had become habit, like locking the front door or leaving the porch light on. I’d done it for years. Apparently, I’d kept doing it long after I stopped consciously thinking about why.
I closed the laptop. I wasn’t ready for whatever was in there.
Not yet.
Michelle—who, if you asked my family, is technically named Michelle but has been “’Chelle” or “Relle” in our household for years—started showing up at my door without calling first.
She never did that. Michelle is a texter, a planner, a “let’s set something up for next week” kind of friend. But suddenly there she was, on my porch with a bag of groceries.
“Don’t say anything,” she told me, shouldering past me into the kitchen. “Your pantry looked at me funny last time I was here.”
In went a rotisserie chicken, a bag of clementines, the expensive yogurt I only bought when it was on sale.
“You think I don’t pay attention?” she said when I raised an eyebrow at the yogurt. “Please.”
She stayed just long enough to see me eat something—half a chicken leg, a clementine peeled in strips—and to make sure my hair was still being washed and my trash was still getting taken out.
One night, she sat at my kitchen table scrolling on her phone.
“You know you could sue him,” she said, not looking up.
“Michelle…”
“What he said, where he said it, with witnesses? That’s textbook hostile work environment, Tam. I googled it.”
“I know,” I said. And I did. I’d worked in healthcare long enough to know how hostile workplace claims work. I knew the timelines. I knew about legal fees and how drawn-out everything gets. I knew the odds of a settlement, the non-disclosure agreement that would follow, the gag order I’d be effectively placing over my own mouth.
“I could spend the next three years of my life fighting that man,” I said. “And at the end of it, nobody would be allowed to talk about what he did, including me.”
“That’s not normal,” she said. “That’s you protecting people who didn’t protect you for twelve years.”
We almost argued. I could feel the shape of one forming between us—me on one side, stubbornly practical; her on the other, righteously furious on my behalf. Instead, I changed the subject and asked about her kids, and she let me, because she knows the difference between me still deciding and me done defending a choice.
But her words sat with me long after she left.
Protecting people who didn’t protect you.
I carried that sentence around the way you carry a stone in your pocket. Not heavy enough to weigh you down, but solid enough that you feel it every time you shift.
The lowest point came on a Wednesday.
Nothing happened. That was the problem.
I went to Brookshire’s on Mansfield Road to buy milk. That was all. Just milk. A simple errand on a weekday morning.
I walked in. Picked up a basket. Turned down the cereal aisle.
I stood there staring at boxes for nine minutes.
I know it was nine because I checked my phone twice—once to see the time, once just to have something to hold. An entire world of crunch and sugar and fiber and cartoon mascots blurred into meaningless color.
A woman about my age squeezed past me, a toddler perched on her hip, his hand fisted in her shirt.
“Sorry,” she said.
“It’s fine,” I answered.
And it was, technically. Nothing was wrong. Nobody was yelling at me. No one was humiliating me in front of my peers. I was just standing in a grocery store aisle on a Wednesday morning without any place I needed to be.
What I missed, with a ache that had no words, was Tuesday mornings. That peculiar heaviness of waking up knowing exactly where you’re going, exactly who expects you, and exactly what you’re responsible for. The mild annoyance at emails piling up before you even pull into the parking lot. The sense of being needed.
Sitting in the silent car later, I realized I missed being needed the way you miss a tooth. Not enough to incapacitate you, just enough that you feel the absence every time your tongue moves in that direction.
That night, sleep wouldn’t come. I made it to midnight, lying in bed, listening to the whir of the ceiling fan, before I gave up and went to the couch.
“Just looking,” I told myself as I opened my laptop. “Just…checking something.”
I clicked on the “Work Backup – Just in Case” folder.
Eight hundred forty-seven emails.
I opened the oldest one. A campaign brief from March 2020. My name in the document header. My language in the strategy section. Sent from my Crestline address to a vendor, forwarded to myself the same day.
I opened another: a budget request from 2021. Scan attached. My signature in blue ink on the approval line.
A performance summary I’d written after our first HMA nomination. A deck I’d sent to the board. A set of copy options for a billboard Preston had hated until the numbers proved him wrong.
I read for two hours, wrapped in my couch blanket, the house dark except for the laptop glow. Sometime around half past twelve, rain started outside, tapping the windows in a steady, patient rhythm.
By one a.m., I’d barely scratched the surface. Maybe sixty emails. The grief was still there—large, sour, sitting in the center of my chest—but something else had snuck in beside it, something with edges.
If grief is standing at a locked door, pressing your palms against the wood, that feeling was the weight of a key in my hand.
I hadn’t turned it yet. I wasn’t even sure what it opened. But I could feel the teeth of it pressing into my palm.
I closed the laptop. The rain kept going. Somewhere around three, I checked the window, then drifted into a thin sleep.
The next morning, grief arrived on schedule, as it had every day for three weeks. But it landed on top of something solid, not just empty air.
I made coffee. Pulled a yellow legal pad out of the junk drawer—the one where I keep batteries, rubber bands, and orphaned keys whose locks I no longer remember. I dug out a blue pen.
I sat down at my kitchen table and went back into the folder.
Four days.
That’s how long I sat there, day after day, working through those emails and turning them into a record.
Not a rant. Not a manifesto. A record.
I made columns across the top of the pad: Campaign Name. Date Initiated. My Documented Role. Evidence Type. Supporting Files.
For each email, I asked: What is this? Where does it fit? What does it show?
Authored brief. Signed budget request. Performance report with my analysis. Award submission draft. Vendor contract I’d negotiated down twelve percent. Notes from a meeting where I’d laid out a launch plan and attached the slide deck.
Some things couldn’t be proven. The ideas born in quick hallway conversations. The tweaks made on the fly with a designer hovering in my doorway. The calls to a vendor that never generated an email. All of that lived only in outcomes now—in the numbers, in the success stories, in Preston’s PowerPoints with his voice over my work.
I let those gaps be gaps. No use pretending they weren’t there.
But the rest? The rest was more than I’d realized.
By the end of day two, the first legal pad was full—front, back, margins. By day four, there were two pads, every line marked. My handwriting grew steadier as I went.
It felt familiar, in a way I hadn’t expected. The same calm I feel when I’m halfway through a well-built strategy document and I know it holds. Anger was there, yes, but it had cooled, gone from wild heat to something more like electricity, running through wires toward a specific outlet.
I finished the last email and set my pen down.
I didn’t know what I was going to do with all of it yet. But I knew one thing with absolute clarity:
I knew what I’d built. And now I could prove it.
Deja texted on a Thursday.
Hey. Just checking on you.
Three words. Six letters, eight if you count the emoji heart she almost certainly deleted before hitting send. I’d known Deja for six years. She was not a casual texter, especially not about feelings, especially not from a building where the man who’d humiliated her boss now held her career between his fingers.
I called her.
She answered in the tone of someone who is carefully pretending they are in a completely harmless conversation.
“Hey, Ms. Tam.”
“You somewhere you can talk?” I asked.
A beat. “Sort of.”
We both knew what that meant: someone nearby, thin walls, the invisible but very real presence of risk.
She told me, in the cautious, clipped way of someone stepping around tripwires, that Jace had taken over the Women’s Health Initiative.
I’d assumed he would. It made a cruel kind of sense.
Apparently, no one had asked me for the briefing materials before revoking my access. The documents, the timelines, the rationale for the media mix—all of it had lived in the folder I’d built in my own private structure. They’d cut me out, erased the folder, and handed Jace a project without a map.
“He made a couple of calls,” Deja said, and I could hear the effort it took not to editorialize. “Not great ones.”
“What kind of calls?” I asked, even though I already knew the shape of them. When you pull a thread without understanding the whole garment, it’s very easy to unravel something important.
She described a change in messaging, a switch in vendors, a decision to cut a community partnership I’d spent months cultivating because it didn’t look “efficient” on paper. None of it catastrophic. All of it…off.
“How are you doing?” she asked when we’d finished.
The way she said it, quiet, like she really wanted to know, nearly undid me.
“I’m working on something,” I answered.
“Good,” she said. And you could hear the exhale in that word, like she’d been holding her breath for three weeks and finally felt it was safe to let some of it out.
After we hung up, I added two lines to the legal pad: Women’s Health Initiative – knowledge gap created by access removal. Date of Deja’s call.
Then I sat there, looking at the stacked pads, feeling the anger fold itself into a shape I recognized: a plan.
I thought about calling Carol Broussard for three days before I did it.
Carol ran the Louisiana chapter of the Healthcare Marketing Association. We’d met at conferences, spoken on a panel together once in Baton Rouge about “Women in Healthcare Marketing”—which, if you’ve ever sat on one of those panels, you know is code for “How to Do Twice the Work for Half the Credit and Smile the Whole Time.”
We’d shared a drink in New Orleans afterwards, both of us with our heels hooked on the crossbar of the barstools, swapping stories like battle scars.
She was careful. Professional. Perceptive.
I needed all three.
When I finally dialed her number, I kept my voice light.
“Hey, Carol, it’s Tamson. I had a quick, maybe boring question for you about authorship records on HMA submissions.”
We talked policy first, like two professionals having an ordinary conversation about forms and fields and record-keeping. How they logged submissions, whose names were listed, how corrections worked if someone realized there’d been an error.
Then, casually, I mentioned that I had authored both of Crestline’s award submissions for 2022 and 2023. The strategy write-ups, the data, the justifications—my words, my work. I also mentioned that I had the original drafts, the submission emails, and supporting documents with my name on them.
There was a pause on the line. Not long, but long enough.
“I’d like to schedule a follow-up call,” Carol said.
I wrote the date on my legal pad and underlined it twice.
The following Saturday, Michelle came over for dinner. Before the food was ready, I spread the legal pads out on the kitchen table like evidence in a detective show.
She sat down and paged through them slowly, her finger tracing the columns.
“Tam,” she said finally, in a voice I don’t hear from her often, “you’ve been keeping receipts for five years and didn’t even know it.”
“I was just backing up my files,” I said weakly.
“Same thing,” she said. “The only difference is intent.”
We didn’t fight that night. We cooked smothered pork chops the way Mama taught us—slowly, letting the onions go translucent before adding the meat, turning everything over in the pan until the house smelled like every Sunday of my childhood. When she left, she paused in the doorway, squeezed my arm, and looked at me as if she were checking inventory.
“You’re getting there,” she said.
She didn’t say where “there” was.
She didn’t need to.
The recruiter email came on a Tuesday. I always liked that about it.
Subject line: Opportunity – Director of Brand & Strategy.
I almost deleted it. I’d been getting a lot of those lately—algorithmic shots in the dark from people who’d scraped my LinkedIn profile and decided I might be a fit for a “dynamic sales environment” that turned out to be selling knives door-to-door.
But this one mentioned Baton Rouge Regional Health System. It mentioned a base salary of $127,000. It mentioned a team of six. It mentioned words like strategic ownership and cross-functional collaboration and direct line to executive leadership.
I read it twice.
The familiar voice came up right on cue: Are you sure you’re qualified? What if it’s too big? What if you were never really as good as the numbers suggested and this is just a fluke?
That voice had moved into my head long before Preston. Teachers, bosses, small off-hand comments from people who never even knew they’d planted something in me—it all adds up.
I looked at the two legal pads on the table next to my coffee cup. Two pads full of campaigns, budgets, results, authored documents. The arc of my career, written in my own hand.
I knew exactly what I brought to that table. I could see it in blue ink.
So I wrote back.
Thank you for reaching out. I’d be interested in learning more about the role. I’m available for a call this week.
Before I could talk myself out of it, I opened a new email to Carol.
Subject: Authorship Correction Request – Crestline Submissions
Three paragraphs. Direct. Professional. Attached: a folder of documents to support what I was saying. My name on the drafts. My name on the strategy decks. My name on the submission emails.
I sent Carol’s email first.
Then I poured fresh coffee and started preparing for an interview.
Two tracks, running parallel. Preston didn’t know about either of them.
The interview was scheduled for a Wednesday two weeks later. I left Shreveport before sunrise, the sky still that deep indigo you only see in the hour before day starts telling you about itself.
On the drive, I ran through my answers out loud. Not because I was bursting with insecurity, but because preparation is what makes me feel like myself. I don’t walk into important rooms hoping improvisation will save me.
Tell us about a time you led a cross-functional team through a challenging campaign.
Describe a situation where you had to make a case for a risky strategy.
How do you think healthcare marketing needs to evolve over the next five years?
By the time I pulled into the parking garage in downtown Baton Rouge, I knew what I was going to say and why I was going to say it. The two legal pads sat in my bag like talismans. I didn’t take them out during the interview. I didn’t need to. I just needed to know they were there.
The interview went well.
I don’t mean they showered me with praise and offered me the job on the spot. It wasn’t a movie. People asked hard questions. I answered them. We talked about numbers. We talked about patient outcomes. We talked about how to market maternal health services in zip codes where trust in hospitals had eroded with every generation.
At some point, one of the executive VPs said, “You clearly know how to get results with limited resources.”
It landed in me like a warm stone. Not fireworks, not confetti. Just solid recognition.
“Limited resources,” I said, nodding. “That’s been the job for twelve years.”
When it was over, I walked back to my car feeling…not triumphant. Something quieter. Like a building that had been declared structurally sound after a long inspection.
Eleven days after I left Crestline, Preston called.
I was standing at my stove, stirring a pot of red beans—the proper way, from dried, with a slow patience that requires you to commit to the process—when my phone buzzed across the counter.
His name on the screen startled me more than it should have. After twelve years of seeing it in my inbox, it felt wrong on my personal phone, like a work email had slipped under my front door.
I let it go to voicemail. Turned the burner down. Pressed the speaker icon.
“Tamson. It’s Preston.”
As though I might have forgotten.
He sounded smooth, but there was a tightness underneath—barely there, but audible to anyone who’d spent years listening to him finesse his way through difficult conversations.
He mentioned “some client communication nuances” that Jace was working through. He talked about “continuity concerns.” He floated the idea of “a brief transitional consultation—purely professional, of course—that could be mutually beneficial.”
Mutually beneficial.
I stared at the beans, simmering peacefully in the pot, and felt something like incredulity bump up against amusement.
He had fired me in public. Humiliated me in front of thirty-one people. Cut off my access to my own work. Now he wanted me to come back, hat in hand, for a “mutually beneficial” consultation.
I saved the voicemail. Not because I knew what I’d do with it, but because I’d learned not to delete things that might someday turn out to be important.
Then I turned my attention back to my beans.
The HMA process moved the way institutions move: slowly, methodically, impervious to human urgency.
Carol’s office sent a letter to Crestline requesting confirmation or correction of authorship records on the two award submissions. I didn’t have to see it. I could picture it well enough. Polite. Firm. Stripped of drama. Our records indicate X. Documentation provided by Ms. Bechum indicates Y. Please clarify.
They reached out to me twice for additional documentation. Each time, I sent exactly what they asked for, no more, no less. I didn’t add commentary. I didn’t send a paragraph about Preston’s comments or the humiliation of that conference room. I trusted the documents to do what words of anger couldn’t.
Eventually, my name went into their database.
Awards Submission Author: Tamson Bechum.
Two lines in a system most people in the world would never know existed.
It meant more to me than any plaque ever had.
It wasn’t revenge. It wasn’t a public spectacle. No one sent a company-wide email exposing what Preston had done. No one called to say, “Wow, we had no idea.”
It was just the truth, corrected quietly in the place where it was supposed to live.
Sometimes, that’s enough.
Three weeks after the HMA letter went out, Deja called me on a Tuesday evening. I could tell, from the first word out of her mouth, that she’d been holding something in.
“You got a minute?” she asked.
“Always,” I said.
She told me about a board meeting.
The letter about the authorship correction had made its way to the executive level. From there, it had slipped—like all interesting documents do—to one of the board members, a man I’d met maybe twice in twelve years: Gerald Arsenault. I remembered him as the kind of man who always looked like his shoes were more expensive than yours.
What I didn’t know—and what Deja’s informant in the building had told her—is that Gerald’s wife had run her own accounting firm for twenty-two years before selling it. Three other board members had wives with high-powered careers of their own.
“When they heard what he said to you, and then saw that letter about the awards…” Deja said, and let the sentence trail off.
“He,” of course, being Preston. The board members with wives like theirs didn’t love the optics of a CEO publicly dismissing a long-serving female director as “a housewife.”
The board meeting where Preston had to answer questions about the authorship discrepancy was described to Deja as “not comfortable.” He kept his job. Of course he did. Men like Preston hedge their bets and cultivate the kinds of relationships that don’t vanish over one incident, no matter how ugly. I never expected a letter from HMA to topple him from his position.
But something shifted.
In the way people looked at him when he spoke. In the quiet that followed his announcements. In the invisible social math of trust and doubt that accumulates in halls and conference rooms over time.
Shifts like that don’t always make noise. They just compound.
“I thought you should know,” Deja said.
“Thank you,” I told her. And I meant it all the way through, not just for the gossip, but for everything: for her stillness in that room, for her text, for this. For choosing, repeatedly, to tell the truth when silence would’ve been safer.
After we hung up, I sat for a long moment at my kitchen table, hands flat on the wood, feeling strangely…peaceful.
I hadn’t destroyed him. I hadn’t even tried. I’d simply put my name back where it belonged and let the rest take care of itself.
Sometimes justice looks like that: not a thunderclap, but a small correction, recorded in ink.
I think about Jace sometimes.
It would be easy, in the story version of all this, to cast him as the villain’s sidekick—the ambitious younger man who takes the place of the woman who built everything and then falls flat on his face.
Real life is almost never that simple.
He was twenty-five. Smart. Genuinely talented at the digital things that make older executives feel like they’re staring at hieroglyphics—short-form video, organic engagement, storytelling with a phone camera and a ring light. If he’d come to us under different circumstances, I would’ve liked mentoring him.
But healthcare marketing is not just about “content.” It is about HIPAA regulations and FDA language and patient privacy and the ethics of telling vulnerable people’s stories. It is about understanding that behind every “lead” is a living body that can be harmed by what you say or the expectations you set.
From what Deja told me, that hit him hard within weeks. A post he’d put up about a patient story got flagged by compliance. Details were included that the patient hadn’t formally cleared. The post came down quickly, and the outside world never knew, but inside the building, it was a red flare.
What he needed was a net of institutional knowledge. Guardrails. Someone who could say, “Here’s where the line is, and here’s how close we can safely walk to it.”
That person had walked out the door with a tote bag.
I take no joy in that. I don’t tell you this with vindication. It’s simply one more fact in a pile of facts.
The offer from Baton Rouge Regional came in December, on a Friday afternoon.
I’d spent the morning doing very ordinary things: paying bills online, cleaning out the fridge, finally gathering up the laundry on my bedroom chair that had been lobbying hard to become permanent decor.
Then my email pinged.
We’re delighted to offer you the position of Director of Brand & Strategy…
I read it three times.
Salary: as previously discussed. Benefits: comprehensive. Team: six, with room to grow. Start date: flexible.
I called Mama first.
“Thank you, Jesus,” she said before I’d finished the sentence. “I knew He wasn’t going to let that be the end of your story.”
Then I called Michelle.
“Say it again,” she demanded.
“I got the job.”
She made a noise I had never heard from her before, somewhere between a victory yell and a laugh. “I’m coming over,” she said.
“Don’t bring anything,” I told her.
She brought wine.
After the calls, I stepped out onto my back porch. December in Shreveport is cold enough that the air bites a little, but not enough to push you back inside right away. The pecan tree stood bare against a pale sky, its entire frame visible now that the leaves were gone. Branches I’d forgotten existed revealed themselves.
I thought of Preston’s most recent voicemail—the one where he’d dropped the smooth corporate phrasing and gone awkwardly personal. The one where he said he hoped there were “no hard feelings,” as if what he’d done could be smoothed over with coffee and a half-hearted apology.
I hadn’t deleted that voicemail. I hadn’t saved it either. I’d let it exist in limbo, the way you let a piece of junk mail sit on the counter until it’s too late to matter.
My name was on the HMA records now. My name was on a job offer letter. My name was written across two full legal pads documenting twelve years of work.
I didn’t need anything from him anymore.
That night, Michelle stayed until nearly eleven. When she finally left, she stood in the doorway and scanned my face again.
“You good?” she asked.
“Getting there,” I said.
“Good enough for now,” she replied.
Three months, I thought, locking the door behind her. Three months and everything will look different.
I was right. I just didn’t realize how different it would feel from the inside.
I started at Baton Rouge Regional on a Monday in early March.
The sky was powder-blue. The air coming in through my cracked car window smelled like cut grass and something blooming I couldn’t name. I’d packed my rolling suitcase the night before: work clothes, toiletries, a pair of running shoes I fully intended to use, and a small framed picture of the pecan tree.
My new office was on the third floor of the freshly renovated east wing. Smaller than my old one, with a single big window overlooking a patch of green space where patients’ families sat on benches. The walls smelled faintly of fresh paint.
I set the picture of the pecan tree on the corner of my desk. A little piece of home.
My new team watched me the way you watch a new teacher on the first day of school. Open, but cautious. I didn’t take it personally. They’d had leadership turnover before, and no one wants to bet their heart on someone who might be gone in six months.
So I started small.
I learned their names. All six of them, by lunch, no cheat sheet. I watched what they reached for when we were in meetings—who instinctively grabbed a pen, who opened a spreadsheet, who looked at the ceiling while thinking. I asked questions and then shut up long enough to actually hear the answers.
By day three, I knew that Marcus, my senior strategist, needed ten minutes alone with a problem before he’d share his ideas. Patricia, my coordinator, had already thought three steps ahead by the time she opened her mouth. I knew which designer stressed when given too much freedom and which one froze when given too much direction.
On that third day, Patricia lingered in my doorway.
“My daughter graduates from Grambling in May,” she said, apropos of nothing. “Marketing degree. She keeps saying she wants to get into healthcare but doesn’t know where to start.”
“That’s exciting,” I said. “Tell her congratulations for me.”
After she left, I wrote her daughter’s name and graduation date in my planner, inside the cover. The place I reserve for details that matter in ways that don’t show up on performance reviews.
Some habits are who you are. Not where you work.
The hardest part wasn’t the job.
The hardest part was Sunday evenings.
The commute itself—an hour and forty minutes on a good day, longer when traffic decided to be petty—was manageable. I listened to podcasts, to music, to a Baton Rouge morning radio show whose hosts spent an entire segment once arguing about the best way to eat boudin balls. I didn’t mind the miles.
But packing up my house on Sunday nights, knowing I wouldn’t sleep in my own bed again until Friday, was something else. There is a specific emptiness to a home you’re about to walk away from for five days, knowing it’ll sit there, still and quiet, waiting for you.
I’d roll my suitcase to the door. Check the stove twice. Turn off lights. Tug on the front doorknob to make sure it latched. The silence did a strange echoing thing around me those nights.
I had lived alone for a long time. I thought I knew solitude. It turned out I’d only known the weekend version.
I started calling Mama from the road on Sunday nights. What had once been a twelve-minute morning check-in became a twenty-minute rolling conversation. Sometimes she prayed in the middle of it, casually, like someone adding a spice while cooking. I stopped letting those prayers float past me. I let them land.
Michelle started meeting me at the house on Fridays. She had a key—had had it for years—and now she used it. I’d walk in to find her sitting at my kitchen table with takeout, or cutting up vegetables, or on my couch with a beer waiting beside her on the coffee table.
“They overworking you yet?” she’d ask.
“Ask me in six months,” I’d say.
She never made a speech about being proud. She just showed up. Week after week. That was her way of saying, This is still your life, not just your job.
The maternal health campaign launched in June.
It was the first major initiative I owned, start to finish, at Baton Rouge Regional. Sixteen weeks of research, community meetings, strategy sessions, creative reviews, and compliance conversations that required more patience than I’d had at twenty-five and exactly as much as I had at forty-four.
We didn’t sit in our shiny offices and guess what women in under-served neighborhoods needed. We went to them. We listened. We heard stories about buses that never came, clinics that didn’t treat them like human beings, doctors who didn’t believe their pain.
We built messaging around those realities. We partnered with churches, community centers, barber shops. We made sure every billboard, every digital ad, every flyer wasn’t just pretty but precise—legally, ethically, medically.
My name was on every document. Not tucked in the middle, not lost somewhere in “team credits.” On the author line. On the briefs. On the decks.
When it came time to submit the campaign for an HMA regional award, I sat at my desk with the submission form open and my fingers hovering over the keyboard, feeling the weight of what I was about to do.
Author: I typed.
Tamson Bechum.
I hit send.
The confirmation email came back within minutes. I read it three times, the way I’d read my job offer. Then I printed it and slid it into a folder I’d started my first week: “BRRHS – Campaign Records.”
Not a “just in case” folder, born of anxiety. Not a backup nobody else knew about. A deliberate archive, built forward, with my name on everything from the start.
Patricia knocked on my door while I was still holding the printout.
“You need anything before I head out?” she asked.
“No,” I said, softly. “I’m good. Have a good evening, Patricia.”
After she left, I filed the confirmation in the folder. It was a small thing. A piece of paper in a drawer. But it felt like a brick in a new foundation.
Preston called again in April.
I was in the Walgreens drive-thru, picking up cold medicine. The pharmacist handed me the bag through the window just as my phone lit up with his name.
For a moment, I considered letting it ring out and then deleting the voicemail unheard. Then I thought, No, let’s see what story he’s telling himself now.
He talked about “miscommunication” around my departure. As if what had happened had been a scheduling error. He said he hoped I didn’t have “hard feelings.” He suggested we grab coffee sometime and “clear the air.”
Miscommunication. Hard feelings. As if my anger was the problem, not his behavior.
I did not call him back. I did not save the voicemail this time. I let it sit in my phone until it expired on its own, like old food in the back of a fridge you eventually clear out.
Some things rot if you hold on to them. Better to let them go.
In July, I hung the shadow box.
I’d ordered it a few weeks earlier: simple black frame, white mat. Nothing fancy. Inside it, I placed two certificates HMA had reissued at my request.
Same awards. Same campaigns.
Different authorship line.
Where Crestline’s name had once been, there was mine.
I hung the shadow box directly behind my desk, centered, at eye level. Anyone sitting across from me in my office would see it. I didn’t call attention to it. I didn’t explain.
My team walked past it every day. They never asked.
It was just there, the way things should be when they belong.
That Friday, I drove home to Shreveport with the windows cracked. The sky was still bright when I turned onto Fairfield Avenue. July in Louisiana wraps itself around you like a wet blanket, but the light lasts long, and the pecan tree was thick with leaves, a deep, assertive green.
I parked and stood under its branches for a moment, listening to the distant hiss of a sprinkler on the next block, the low hum of a lawnmower two streets over, the clink of someone’s spoon in a kitchen sink.
I thought about the woman who’d stood in that conference room in a burgundy blazer, holding her face together while thirty-one people watched her boss erase twelve years of work with one sentence.
She’d been carrying an entire department, an entire history, with no record to prove it. She’d been measuring her own value in other people’s praise, in plaques that didn’t even have her name on them. She’d been protecting a structure that was never built to protect her.
I wasn’t her anymore.
I was the woman who had her name on the records, the job offer, the campaign briefs, the certificates on the wall. The woman who still made mistakes, who still had Sunday nights she didn’t quite know what to do with, whose mortgage still showed up every month exactly on time—but who no longer confused patience with silence, or loyalty with invisibility.
I went inside. Made dinner. Called Mama.
Life didn’t turn into a fairy tale. The commute was still long. Some days at work were still frustrating in all the boring, bureaucratic ways. There were still unexpected bills and minor crises and evenings when loneliness came around like a stray cat looking for a saucer of milk.
But I was building something that belonged to me from the first brick. And this time, I knew how to prove it.
That, I decided, was more than enough.
THE END.
