When I called her the day after receiving the Northbridge email, I told her the situation.
There was a pause. Then she said: “So the training coordinator at Northbridge has booked your husband’s wife to train his department.”
“Yes.”
“Without knowing.”
“The department they’d know the connection from is his, and he presumably doesn’t broadcast that I’m the person in the directory.”
Another pause. “Do you want me to offer the coordinator a substitute?”
“No,” I said. “I want to do the work. I’m qualified for the work. I just wanted you to know the context.”
“Okay,” she said. “Then we proceed as normal.”
That was the whole conversation about it. Julia is professionally efficient in a way I have always appreciated. The rest of our conversation was about logistics: timing, materials, the specific profile of the Northbridge team, what the training coordinator had indicated about their key pain points.
Julia did not express surprise that Daniel had been misrepresenting my career to his family. She expressed something more like a dry unsurprise, which I found oddly comforting. It was the reaction of someone who has worked with a lot of women in professional services and has heard this particular configuration before, which is a depressing data point but also a steadying one.
## Daniel and the Thing About Providing
I want to stay with the conversation Daniel and I had, the one that went three hours and covered things we had not covered before, because it contained something I want to record accurately.