Am I a terrible person for pretending I didn’t recognize her?
I (50F) have been volunteering at the St. Vincent de Paul on Route 9 every Saturday for about eight months now. I sort donations, help customers find sizes, run the register. It gets me out of the apartment since the divorce, and honestly it makes me feel like I’m doing something that matters. I tell myself that a lot lately.
I used to work in finance. Fifteen years at Meridian Capital, mid-level analyst, the kind of job where you know everyone’s name and their bonus range and their coffee order. Donna Przybylski was three desks over from me for six of those years. She was sharp. Sharper than me, honestly. She made VP before I did, wore the same two blazers on rotation, brought her lunch every single day in a blue cooler bag. We weren’t close, but we were the kind of colleagues who covered for each other, who said happy birthday, who knew things about each other’s kids.
She got laid off in the restructuring in 2019. A lot of people did. I survived that round, then got squeezed out in 2022 anyway, which is how I ended up divorced and volunteering at a thrift store on Saturdays, so.
She came in last weekend with two garbage bags over her shoulder and a cart from a grocery store that wasn’t anywhere near here.
She put the cart against the wall and started going through the winter coats on the rack near the door. Her hands were cracked. Her jacket was too thin for November. She had her hair pulled back with a rubber band, the kind that comes around broccoli, and I stood behind the register twelve feet away and I KNEW it was her. Same jaw. Same way she tilts her head when she’s reading something.
I did not say her name.
I watched her check the price tag on a coat, put it back, check another one. She found a green fleece in her size and held onto it. She picked up a pair of boots and turned them over to look at the soles. She was doing the math in her head, I could tell. I know what that looks like now.
She brought everything to the register. Forty-three dollars. The fleece, the boots, two pairs of socks, a thermos.
She didn’t look at my face. I didn’t make her.
I rang her up. I said “have a good one.” She said “thanks.” She packed everything into one of the garbage bags and walked out.
My friends are split on this. Half of them say I was being kind by giving her privacy. The other half say I abandoned her, that I should have said something, helped her somehow, that I’m a coward who was protecting herself from feeling guilty.
And I’ve been sitting with that second half all week. Because the thing is – I know WHY I didn’t say her name.
It wasn’t for her.
I’ve been going back through my memory of those years at Meridian, the restructuring, who got cut and why, what I knew and what I said to the people above me, and there’s something I haven’t told anyone yet. Something I did in 2019 that I haven’t let myself think about directly until right now.
What I Actually Remember About the Restructuring
The way it worked at Meridian, the cuts weren’t random. They never are, at places like that. There’s always a process, and the process always has a human being at the center of it, and that human being is always someone who needed to protect their own position badly enough to make certain choices.
In early 2019, Gary Fitch called me into his office. Gary was a managing director, mid-fifties, the kind of guy who kept a golf ball on his desk and picked it up when he was thinking. He told me the firm was going to have to make some difficult decisions about headcount. He said he valued my institutional knowledge. He said the word “candid” three times in ten minutes, which is a tell.
He asked me who on my floor was, and I’m using his word here, redundant.
I want to be very precise about what happened next. I didn’t make a list. I didn’t point a finger and say Donna Przybylski. What I did was something quieter and more defensible and, I think now, worse. I said that I thought certain people’s skill sets were better suited to a different kind of firm. I said that some people on the team had stopped growing. I said it in the careful, regretful tone of someone who hates having to be honest.
I was talking about Donna.
I knew I was talking about Donna. Gary knew I was talking about Donna. We both maintained the fiction that I was just sharing a general observation about team dynamics, and then he thanked me for my candor, and I walked back to my desk, and three weeks later Donna’s badge stopped working.
I told myself for years that it wasn’t me. That the restructuring was happening regardless. That Donna’s name was already on a list somewhere before I ever sat down in Gary’s office. Maybe that’s even true. But I also know that Gary called me specifically. That he picked me because I knew the floor better than anyone. That what I said in that office was a piece of information he used.
And I survived that round.
The Blue Cooler Bag
Here’s what I keep coming back to. The blue cooler bag.
Donna brought her lunch every single day. Turkey on whole wheat, usually. An apple. Something in a little container, leftovers from the night before. She was careful with money in a way that some people at Meridian found embarrassing and I found quietly impressive. She had two kids, a boy and a girl, I think eight and eleven at the time of the layoff. Her husband worked in logistics. They weren’t struggling, but they were careful.
I know this because she told me things. Not intimate things. Just the ordinary background radiation of sitting near someone for six years. Her son had a thing with his ears. Her daughter did competitive swimming. She drove forty minutes each way because the closer apartment was three hundred dollars more a month and she’d done the math.
She was doing the math on those boots too. Standing there in her November jacket, turning them over to check the soles.
I rang her up for forty-three dollars and said “have a good one” and she said “thanks” and I let her walk out into the cold with a green fleece in a garbage bag and I told myself I was giving her dignity.
I wasn’t.
What I Was Actually Protecting
I didn’t say her name because if I said her name, she might have looked at me. And if she’d looked at me, she might have recognized me. And if she’d recognized me, I would have had to stand there behind that register and be seen by her. Not as the woman who was kind enough to volunteer on Saturdays. As the woman who sat three desks over for six years and then said the words that ended her career at Meridian.
I don’t know for certain that what I said to Gary is why she got cut. I’ll probably never know. But I know I said it. And I know she doesn’t know I said it. And I know that the version of me she might have smiled at, if she’d recognized me, would have been a false version. A woman who got to feel generous and sad and complicated about running into an old colleague at a thrift store, without ever having to account for her part in how that colleague got there.
That’s what I was protecting. Not her feelings. Mine.
The Friends Who Said I Was Kind
I love them. I do. And I understand why they said it, because the story I told them was incomplete. I told them about Donna coming in, about the boots and the fleece and the rubber band from the broccoli. I told them I didn’t say her name. I framed it as a question about privacy versus connection, about what you owe someone from your past when you see them at a low point.
I left out Gary’s office.
So of course half of them said I was being kind. I’d given them a story where kindness was possible. Where the only question was about the right way to handle an awkward moment. Where I was a decent woman making a judgment call about someone else’s dignity.
That’s not the story.
What I’ve Been Doing Every Saturday
Eight months. I started in March, right after the divorce was final. My therapist suggested volunteering, said it would help with the purposelessness, which is the word she used. I liked the St. Vincent de Paul because it was close and because the other volunteers didn’t ask too many questions. There’s a woman named Barb who runs the floor on Saturdays, sixties, hair like a snow globe, absolutely no patience for anything. I like Barb. There’s a teenager named Marcus who comes in for community service hours and always looks shocked when he ends up having a good time.
I sort donations and I run the register and I tell myself I’m doing something that matters.
And maybe I am. I don’t think the good cancels out the bad. I don’t think forty-three dollars of winter gear makes me square with anything. But I’ve been using this place as a kind of personal accounting, and last Saturday the accounting got complicated.
Because Donna Przybylski walked in with a grocery cart from a store that wasn’t anywhere near here, and she needed a thermos and a pair of boots, and I know something about how she got to that point that she doesn’t know I know.
What I Haven’t Decided Yet
I have her name. I could probably find her. LinkedIn, mutual contacts, any number of ways. I’ve thought about what I would say. I’ve written versions of it in my head at three in the morning, which is when I do my worst thinking.
Hey, Donna. I saw you last Saturday. I should have said something. I’ve been thinking about you.
And then what. Do I tell her about Gary’s office? Do I let that part sit? Do I offer help in some concrete way, money or a connection or just coffee, and carry the thing I know quietly for the rest of my life? Or is finding her just another version of the same thing I’ve been doing all along, making myself feel better at her expense, putting my own need for absolution ahead of what she actually needs from her day?
I genuinely don’t know.
What I know is that I stood twelve feet away from a woman I helped push out of a career, and I watched her count out forty-three dollars for a fleece and a thermos, and I said “have a good one,” and she said “thanks,” and I’ve been calling that kindness.
It wasn’t kindness.
I don’t know what it was. But it wasn’t that.
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If this one stayed with you, pass it on. Someone else is probably sitting with something similar right now.
For more stories about awkward encounters and ethical dilemmas, you might enjoy reading about the nurse who revealed a secret about a patient’s mom or the time someone refused to help their mom with a sixty-dollar shortage at Goodwill. You can also check out this story about a daycare parking lot confrontation.
