He Asked Me to Lie For Him After He Had Already Lied About Me

The email said URGENT in capitals, and I read it hanging off a jeepney rail on EDSA with my phone an inch from my nose.

Manila traffic had stopped dead somewhere near Guadalupe, so I had time to read it four times. Meeting with HR, nine o’clock tomorrow, bring your company ID, regarding the refund portal.

I was not worried. This is the part I still can’t forgive myself for. I thought they wanted me to explain something, because I was always the one who explained things.

I should tell you about Jerome Dizon. We met eleven years ago in a boarding house near Recto, two broke students splitting one Lucky Me pancit canton and arguing about who would wash the pot.

He was the funny one. He could talk a guard into opening a locked gate, a landlord into waiting another week, a girl into giving him her number in the time it took a train to close its doors.

When my father was in the hospital in Batangas, Jerome rode six hours on a bus with me and slept sitting up in a plastic chair. He never mentioned it afterward. I never forgot it either, and that is how debts like this one get built.

Last February his company in Ortigas let go of forty people on a Friday afternoon. He called me that night from the 7-Eleven outside his old building. I’m okay, Pre, he said. He was not okay.

His wife Ria was five months pregnant, rent in Pasig was ₱14,000, and the cost of living in this city had already eaten whatever they saved.

I worked in billing at a freight forwarding company in Makati, earning ₱32,000 a month, which is enough only if nothing happens. There was an opening on my team. I went to my supervisor, Ma’am Celeste, and I said it plainly.

He’s solid, ma’am. I’ll put my name on him.

I meant every word. Remember those words, because they came back to me.

Jerome started in April. IT told us his system access would take two weeks, because the ticket queue was a graveyard. He was falling behind and Ma’am Celeste was watching.

On a Wednesday at the Jollibee downstairs, he asked me, quietly, like it embarrassed him, if he could use my login just for encoding invoices until his came through.

I knew the policy. Everyone knew the policy, there was a poster about it in the pantry. I wrote my password on the back of a receipt and slid it across the table next to his Chickenjoy.

Just invoices, I said. Nothing else.

Just invoices, he said. Promise, Pre.

His access came through nine days later. I never changed my password. Nobody does. Honestly, I forgot, because I was busy, and because it was Jerome.

The HR office on the nineteenth floor smelled of carpet cleaner and burnt coffee. Mr. Tan sat on one side of the table with a man from Internal Audit I had never seen before. A laptop was turned toward me.

Fourteen refunds had gone to a client account that did not exist. The total was ₱412,000, spread over six weeks, every one approved under my user ID. Many were logged at ten or eleven at night, from an address in Pasig.

This isn’t me, I said. I was home. Check where the logins came from.

We did, said Mr. Tan. This is why we asked you here.

Pasig is where Jerome lives. I did not say that out loud yet. My mouth had gone dry, and I could hear the aircon fan ticking over my head.

Mr. Tan slid a printed page across the table. It was a statement, signed and dated the previous afternoon at 4:40.

Jerome wrote that I had offered him my login on his first week. He wrote that I had told him how to route the refunds and asked for half. He wrote that he was scared for his job and his baby, and that his conscience was bothering him, so he was coming forward.

I read it twice. My phone buzzed against my leg.

I looked at it under the table. It was a Viber message from Jerome, sent at 6:12 that morning, which I had not seen on the jeepney. Pre please. Whatever they ask, say you approved by mistake. I will return everything, I swear on the baby.

He had filed his statement the afternoon before. Then, in case it did not work, he had asked me to confess as well. I put the phone on the table and turned it toward Mr. Tan without a word.

I told them everything. I told them about the receipt, the Jollibee, the nine days, and the password I never changed. I admitted I had broken policy, because it was true and because there was no version of the story where I came out clean.

It was not enough. The text message proved Jerome was asking me to lie. It did not prove I had not taken half. The preventive suspension was thirty days, no pay, pending investigation.

Ma’am Celeste passed me in the hallway as I carried my box of things to the elevator. She did not stop. You vouched for him, she said, to the wall, not to me.

Jerome never came back. His email said he was resigning for family reasons. His number went to voicemail, then stopped ringing at all.

The weeks after were not dramatic. They were small and mean.

I borrowed ₱15,000 through a lending app inside GCash at an interest rate I did not read. I told my mother in Batangas that the company was “restructuring,” in my “don’t worry, Ma” voice, and she sent me ₱2,000 anyway, which I cried over in a Mercury Drug queue.

I stopped sleeping properly. I lay awake in my rented room in Cubao listening to tricycles and replaying the Jollibee table. My chest tightened every time my phone lit up. A friend told me this was anxiety. I told her it was just Manila.

On the twenty-first day, a message came through Messenger from a name I knew. It was Ria.

Kuya Paolo, she wrote. The baby came last week. 3.1 kilos. I am sorry to write to you. I found the receipts from the cousin’s account in his bag. He told me you made a mistake and got in trouble by yourself. I know now it was not true.

A photo followed. A tiny face inside a yellow blanket, one fist out, as if the baby had already decided to argue with someone.

He says he will tell HR the truth, she wrote. But only if you ask him. He says he wants you to ask him first.

I put the phone face down on the bed. HR had told me, in the same flat voice they used for everything, that a retraction from Jerome would reopen my case. It could end the suspension and clear my name. It could also put him in front of a police report with a newborn at home.

I picked the phone up again. I typed Tell him to come to the office tomorrow. I deleted it. I typed Tell him I will not ask, and deleted that too.

The cursor kept blinking in the empty box. I know exactly what I would tell a stranger to do. I still don’t know what I am going to do.

Helping someone is a loan you make with your own name, and some people never plan to pay it back.