Tell me if I’m wrong – I pretended not to recognize my former colleague when I ran into her at a thrift store, and now I can’t stop thinking about what I did.
I’m Debra (50F), and I worked in commercial real estate for almost fifteen years. Back then, I was part of a team of about twelve people, and Sandra (I think she’s around 52 now) was our top producer. The woman was SHARP. Closed a $14 million deal the year I was hired and never let anyone forget it. She wore Chanel to client meetings. She had a laugh that filled the whole floor.
That was maybe nine years ago. I left the firm in 2018 for a smaller company, lost touch with most of that crew.
Last Saturday I was at the Goodwill on Fletcher Avenue, looking for a bookshelf. I was in the back near the furniture when I heard someone talking to one of the employees – asking if they had any coats in a size medium that had just come in.
I turned around.
It took me a second, but I KNEW it was Sandra.
She was wearing a gray hoodie with a frayed cuff. Her hair was in a bun that looked like it had been there for days. She had a plastic shopping bag with her instead of a purse, and her shoes – I recognized the way she walked before I recognized her face, this confident, forward-leaning stride she always had, still there, just quieter somehow.
I froze behind a rack of winter coats.
She hadn’t seen me yet. The employee went to check the back and Sandra stood there, running her thumb along the sleeve of a denim jacket on the rack, checking the price tag.
I had maybe four seconds to decide.
And I turned and walked to the other side of the store.
I stood there for twenty minutes pretending to look at picture frames I had zero interest in, and when I finally went to check out, I looked for her and she was gone.
On the drive home I told myself I was protecting her dignity. That walking up and saying “Sandra? Oh my GOD, hi!” would have been humiliating for her. That she wouldn’t have wanted that.
But my friend Tara (51F) thinks I’m completely full of shit. She said, “Debra, you were protecting YOURSELF from an uncomfortable conversation, and you know it.” My husband thinks I didn’t do anything wrong. My friends are split and I genuinely don’t know anymore.
Because here’s the thing I keep coming back to.
When I was new at that firm, I made a mistake on a contract addendum – a bad one, the kind that could have cost someone their job. Sandra was the one who caught it. She pulled me aside, fixed it quietly, and never told a single person.
She protected me.
And when I finally got home and sat down, I opened my laptop and started searching her name.
What I found made me close the computer and sit in the dark for a long time.
What the Internet Told Me in About Four Minutes
Sandra’s LinkedIn was still up. Last updated two years ago. Her title still said Senior Director at the firm, but there was nothing after it. No new role. No “open to opportunities.” Just a profile that stopped in 2022, like someone had walked out mid-sentence.
I searched her name plus the firm’s name.
There was a local business journal piece from late 2022. “Restructuring.” That word that means nothing and everything. The firm had shed about a third of its people, and Sandra’s name was in a list of departures buried in the fourth paragraph. No quote from her. No “we wish her well.” Just a name in a list.
I found one more thing. A court filing index. Public record. I didn’t dig into the details because I couldn’t make myself, but the case type was there: foreclosure.
I closed the laptop.
My kitchen felt very quiet. The refrigerator was humming. My husband had left a coffee cup on the counter and hadn’t rinsed it, which is a thing that usually bothers me. I didn’t care at all.
The Version of Sandra I Knew
Here’s what’s strange about running into someone from a past chapter of your life. You freeze them. In your head, they stay exactly where you left them, doing exactly what they were doing when you looked away.
My Sandra was 43, maybe. Sharp blazer. Heels that cost more than my car payment. She had this way of walking into a conference room like she’d already won whatever meeting was about to happen. She remembered everyone’s names, not just clients. She remembered the names of clients’ kids. She sent handwritten notes. Actual handwritten notes, on cream-colored stationery, after every significant deal.
I was twenty-eight days into the job when I screwed up that addendum. A zoning clause, wrong version attached, wrong signature block. It would have created a liability issue for the client. Sandra caught it during a routine cross-check she did on everyone’s work, which I didn’t even know she did. She came to my desk at 4:45 on a Thursday. Sat down in the chair across from me. Didn’t make a big thing of it. Just said, “Hey, I found something we should fix before this goes out. Let me show you.”
We. She said we.
She spent forty minutes walking me through it. Showed me the correct version, showed me where I’d pulled the wrong template from, showed me how to make sure it didn’t happen again. Then she said, “Okay, good,” and went back to her desk.
That was it. No one ever mentioned it. Not to me, not to my manager. Sandra just absorbed it and moved on.
I’ve thought about that more times than I can count in the years since. Not obsessively, but it surfaces. When I’m training someone new and I feel the impatience creeping in. When I’m tempted to make an example of a mistake instead of just fixing it. I think about Sandra at my desk saying we.
What I Actually Did at the Goodwill
Tara is right. I know she’s right. I knew it by the time I hit the picture frames aisle.
The story I told myself in the car, about protecting Sandra’s dignity – that’s a real thing, I think. It’s not entirely made up. There’s a version of that moment where I walk up to her and say her name and her face does something terrible. Where she has to perform surprise and warmth and catch-up small talk while holding a plastic shopping bag and checking price tags on denim jackets. Where I make her stand there and be seen.
I can build a case for walking away. I’ve been building it all week.
But I know what happened in my body in those four seconds. It wasn’t a considered ethical calculation. It was a flinch. I didn’t want to deal with it. Didn’t want the awkwardness of not knowing what to say, didn’t want to be the witness to something I wasn’t supposed to see, didn’t want to have to figure out how to be normal in a situation that didn’t feel normal.
I protected myself and I called it protecting her.
The thing that makes it worse: she would have handled it fine. That’s what I keep forgetting. Sandra, even in a gray hoodie with a frayed cuff, checking the price on a denim jacket, would have been the one to make it okay. She would have laughed first. She would have said something sharp and self-aware that cut the tension before I even felt it. She was always the one who made things okay. That was the whole thing about her.
I robbed her of the chance to do that.
The Part I Can’t Shake
Nine years is a long time. I don’t know Sandra’s life. I don’t know what happened between 2022 and last Saturday. I don’t know if the foreclosure was her home or a property she held. I don’t know if she’s okay or not okay. I don’t know if she has people around her.
What I know is that I saw someone who was kind to me, specifically kind, in a moment when kindness cost her something – her time, her silence, her willingness to say we instead of you – and I watched her through a rack of winter coats and then walked away.
I’ve been going back and forth on whether to reach out. I have an old email for her, probably dead. LinkedIn. I could send a message. I’ve written it three times in my head and deleted it every time because I can’t figure out what it would be for. Is it for her? Or is it to make myself feel better? Would getting a message from someone who saw her at Goodwill and didn’t say hello actually feel good to receive?
My husband says I’m overthinking it. He’s probably right, he usually is, but I also think he doesn’t fully get what I owe her. Not in a dramatic way. Just in the quiet, real way where someone did something decent for you once and you’ve been carrying it ever since and now you had a chance to be a decent person back and you didn’t take it.
What I Think I Should Have Done
Said her name.
That’s it. Just said “Sandra?” Quietly. Not “OH MY GOD SANDRA HI” with the exclamation points and the big performance. Just her name, like a question. Given her the choice. Let her decide whether she wanted to be seen or not.
If she’d looked at me and something in her face said please no, I would have read it. We’re both grown women, we’ve been in enough rooms together to read a face. I could have smiled and turned back to the furniture and that would have been that.
But I didn’t even give her the option. I made the decision for her. And I made it in four seconds, and I made it for me.
I don’t think I did something unforgivable. I don’t think I’m a bad person. I think I did the human, slightly cowardly thing that most people would probably do, and I’m sitting with the fact that most people isn’t what I wanted to be in that moment.
Sandra pulled me aside at 4:45 on a Thursday and spent forty minutes saying we.
I hid behind a coat rack.
—
There’s a LinkedIn message half-drafted in my head. I don’t know if I’ll send it. I don’t know if it would land right or just weird her out. But I know I’m going to keep thinking about the back of that gray hoodie until I do something, or decide clearly not to, and either way I’m going to have to be honest with myself about which one it is.
Tara’s going to say she told me so.
She’s not wrong.
—
If this one sat with you, pass it on to someone who’d get it.
For more tales of awkward encounters and unexpected revelations, you might enjoy reading about a son’s surprising playground confession or the time a homeless woman’s past was uncovered at the ER.
