She winces. “I didn’t mean it like that. You’re great at your job. Everyone knows that.”
“Everyone except the people making the decisions.”
She doesn’t argue. We both know I’m right.
Becca disappears back to her side of the partition, and I let out a long breath. She’s not wrong about any of it. I have no connections here. No allies in management. No one would go to bat for me if my name ended up on a list. I came to this company straight out of a smaller firm, lured by the better salary and the promise of growth opportunities. Eight months later, I’m still waiting for those opportunities to materialize.
I’m good at my job. Great, even. My performance reviews have been stellar. I’ve caught errors that would have cost the company thousands. I’ve streamlined processes that nobody else bothered to fix.
But in corporate America, none of that matters if you don’t have someone in your corner.
My phone vibrates with a calendar reminder.Staff meeting in ten minutes. Mandatory attendance.
Perfect.
I grab my notebook and head toward the conference room, joining the stream of anxious coworkers filing through the door. Everyone knows something is coming. We just don’t know what. Small clusters of people whisper to each other, throwing nervous glances toward the front of the room where our department head is shuffling papers.
I find a seat near the back and flip open my notebook, more for something to do with my hands than any real intention to take notes. The guy next to me—Derek from marketing, I think—is bouncing his knee so fast the whole row of chairs vibrates.
“Attention, everyone.” Our department head, Mr. Crawford, stands at the front of the room with a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes. “I know there’s been a lot of speculation lately, so I wanted to address the elephant in the room. Yes, we are merging with Karpov Industries. The transition will begin immediately.”
Murmurs ripple through the crowd. Derek’s knee bounces faster. I write the date at the top of my blank page and underline it twice.
“The new ownership team will be here on Monday to introduce themselves and outline their vision for the company going forward. Until then, it’s business as usual.” Crawford clasps his hands together like he’s about to deliver good news. “Any questions?”
A hand shoots up near the front. “Will there be layoffs?”
Crawford’s smile tightens. “There will be a restructuring period as we integrate our operations. Some positions may be consolidated.”
Corporate speak for yes.
More hands go up. Crawford fields questions for another ten minutes, saying a lot of words that mean absolutely nothing. Synergy. Optimization. Strategic alignment. The kind of buzzwords that executives use when they don’t want to admit people are about to lose their jobs.
The meeting dissolves into clusters of panicked whispering. I slip out before anyone can rope me into a conversation I don’t want to have.
Back at my desk, I stare at my computer screen without really seeing it.
Monday. The new boss arrives on Monday.
Which means I have three days to prove I’m indispensable.
I pull up the quarterly reports I’ve been working on and try to focus, but my mind keeps drifting. Not to the merger. Not to the layoffs.
To those documents.
It happened two weeks ago. A misfiled folder in the shared drive. I clicked on it, thinking it was the Henderson account data I needed for a presentation. Instead, I found myself staring at spreadsheets that made no sense. Transaction records with no corresponding clients. Money moving between accounts that didn’t exist in our official system. Names I didn’t recognize attached to payments that seemed too large, too frequent, and too suspicious.
I closed the folder right away. Pretended I never saw it.
But here’s the thing about having a photographic memory: you can’t unsee anything. Every number, every name, every impossible transaction is burned into my brain whether I want it there or not. I can recall the exact font size of the column headers. The shade of red used to highlight certain cells. The date stamps didn’t match the filing system.
I’ve tried to convince myself it was nothing. A bookkeeping error. Old files from a defunct project. Anything other than what it looked like.
But something was wrong with those documents. I know it. And I can’t stop thinking about it.
At night, when I’m lying in bed trying to sleep, my brain replays those spreadsheets like a movie I can’t turn off. Numbers scrolling past. Names repeating. Questions multiplying with no answers in sight.
My phone goes off again, this time with a text from Becca:Drinks after work? I think we all need it.
