Boss Framed Me, so I'm Reborn Petty

When I told my boss, Jack Davenport, I was resigning, he looked at me with genuine surprise. "Annie, what brought this on?"

I handed him the letter. "Mr. Davenport, you were the one who suggested I take a voluntary pay cut so I wouldn't be a burden on the company. My current salary is enough to hire three fresh graduates in the same field. My leaving isn't exactly a bad deal for you."

Jack glanced at the resignation letter. I knew he had been hoping that I would quit for a long time. My salary was substantial, after all.

But he was afraid of pushing me out. I had handled the company's finances for years and knew too much about what was really going on with the books.

So Jack brought in Julie Trent. On paper, it was to lighten my workload. I believed that at first.

But it didn't take long before Julie started ganging up on me with the rest of the office. I had wanted to walk away then, but I couldn't bring myself to give up the salary I had spent years building up to.

This time around, though, everything was different.

Why would I stay at a company that was about to collapse? Once it went under, it wouldn't matter how high my salary was. They wouldn't be able to pay it.

"Annie, if that's what you want, I won't try to stop you. I wish you all the best." Jack signed the letter without hesitation.

When he looked at me again, I caught the hint of a smile. He looked pleased, almost relieved. To him, this probably felt like finally getting rid of a problem he had been losing sleep over.

What Jack didn't realize was that Julie, the woman he had handpicked to replace me, was completely incompetent. Worse than that, she had been eyeing the company's accounts for a long time, waiting for her chance to skim from them.

But I wasn't going to tell him any of that.

"Mr. Davenport, I'll do a proper handover with Julie. Once that's finished, I'll be on my way."

Jack nodded. The moment I left his office, he picked up the phone and called HR.

By the time I got back to my desk, Julie was already there with the HR manager. She thought that once I was gone, there would be no one left to stop her from siphoning money out of the company.

What she didn't know was that the books were already rotten to the core. If I hadn't spent years holding everything together, this place would have gone under a long time ago.

And now Jack had just signed off on a massive purchase of raw materials. I gave it ten days, maybe less, before the hole in the accounts swallowed the company whole.