I’ll take care of you.
No one has to know.
Those words belong to me. I wrote them in the dark, past midnight, while Nora slept beside me. Hours when I refused to consider consequences, refused to picture anyone’s pain but my own wanting. I had typed each letter without a single thought for what comes after.
Briana sobs harder, burying her face in her hands. “I didn’t want it to be like this. I just wanted him to love me. I thought if I did what he asked, if I helped him, he’d choose me.”
“That’s not true,” I say, my voice hoarse, panic clawing its way up my throat. “Yes, we had an affair. I won’t deny that. But that’s all it was. I never stole anything. I never touched company funds. Briana, tell them the truth.”
She shakes her head violently, her hair sticking to her tear-stained cheeks.
“I just wanted him to love me,” she repeats, her voice cracking. “I did everything he asked because he said—”
“That’s a lie!” I shout, taking a step forward.
“Julian,” Chris says sharply, his voice cutting through the room. “Enough.”
I freeze.
My chest is heaving. My hands are shaking. I can feel the eyes of everyone in the room on me.
Chris turns to me, his expression grim. Disappointed. The specific, flat disappointment of a man who has made a bad investment and is now calculating how to write it off as a tax loss. “This looks bad, Julian. You had a clear power imbalance with her, and then there’s the affair.”
“I know how it looks, but that doesn’t mean I did it,” I say, my voice catching. “She had access too. She—”
Briana shakes her head violently, tears still streaking down her face. “He told me what to click. He walked me through it. Hesaid he’d handle the rest. I didn’t understand what I was doing. I just… trusted him.”
My stomach twists.
“Tell them the truth,” I beg her, my voice falling to almost nothing. “Please. Briana, just tell them the truth.”
It is a revolting sensation, this type of begging. I haven’t done it in years. The world gave me what I wanted before I asked. People stepped back to let me pass. Doors opened without me ever lifting a finger. Luck bent my way.
Now I say it again. Please.
She refuses to look up.
Her eyes stay locked on the table, on her hands, on the phone in her grip—the phone containing every message, every photograph, every piece of evidence she collected while smiling at me.
Caleb’s eyes fill with pity. Not for me. For the mess. For the hours of paperwork ahead, the interviews, the investigations, the slow bureaucratic drudgery of untangling this disaster. I am nothing but a mountain of tedious filing.
My boss rubs his temple, slow and tired.
“The authorities have already been notified.” His voice is grim. “Given the amounts involved and the nature of the breach, we were legally obligated to report.”
The wordauthoritiesknocks the air from my lungs.
The police. Investigators. Detectives will come with questions. They will want answers. They will look at me and see someone guilty.
“No,” I say. The protest is weak and thin. “Wait—you can’t—”
The floor drops out from under me. Everything I trusted to hold me up gives way.
This isn’t an HR issue anymore.
This is criminal.
“I didn’t do this,” I say to no one. “I didn’t.”
