Chapter 3

It was Mr. Lewis, a longtime employee who had just applied for $4,500 in emergency assistance for his father’s medical bills last month.

I had personally gone to the hospital to visit his father.

Now he had silently liked Tara’s video.

When Tara saw the change in my expression, the curve of her mouth deepened. She even tapped her screen on purpose, showing me the numbers climbing at a terrifying speed.

“Ms. Lee, do you still think this is just my personal request?”

As soon as she finished speaking, the front desk called through the internal line.

“Ms. Lee, the company phone is getting flooded. People are calling nonstop to curse us out. Several partners have also called to ask how we’re handling the backlash.”

Just like that, a social media firestorm against the company had been sparked by one intern and one holiday gift basket.

I looked at Tara, smug and self-satisfied in front of me, then at Greg, pretending to mediate beside her, and suddenly I felt exhausted.

Give people an inch, and they will take the whole world.

I had given them too much.

So much that they had forgotten who they were.

Overnight, negative stories about our company spread all over the internet.

The company name and my photo were plastered everywhere.

Insulting private messages and phone calls flooded my phone.

Some called me a heartless capitalist. Others said my company deserved to go bankrupt by tomorrow.

The PR manager came to me with dark circles under his eyes and handed me an emergency plan.

“Ms. Lee, we have to issue a statement immediately. We should explain the $300 gift cards and attach records from previous years. That should clear things up.”

I rubbed my temples.

At first, I had thought the same.

I asked him, “Do you think posting that now will look like an explanation, or like a guilty excuse?”

The manager froze and said nothing.

I had believed that if we put the facts out there, someone would believe us.

But I was wrong.

I refreshed the comment section under that trending video. A new anonymous comment had been pushed all the way to the top.

The commenter’s profile picture was gray, and the username was a string of gibberish.

[Stop trying to clean this up. I work at this company. What $300 gift card? I’ve never seen one. We just want one holiday gift basket so we can feel appreciated. Is that so hard?]

Under that comment, the likes were climbing visibly by the second.

Plenty of people claiming to be current employees started echoing it.

[Exactly. I can confirm it. There were never any gift cards.]

[Our boss is insanely cheap. Last year, the annual party raffle prizes were expired products from her own house.]

The lies spread like a virus.

I stared hard at that comment.

I knew this was the last straw.

If Tara had been the one to light the match, then these “current employees” who echoed her and liked her video were the ones pouring gasoline on the fire.

A flood of images flashed through my mind.

In the early days, all of us had crowded into a tiny office, eating instant noodles together.

On employees’ birthdays, I booked restaurants to celebrate with them.

When an employee had a family emergency, I led the donations and approved half a month of paid leave.

I could honestly say I had never mistreated any of them.

Yet in the end, this was what I got in return.

A collective knife in the back.

They enjoyed my goodwill, then stabbed me the moment they turned around.

So the “family atmosphere” I had worked so hard to build was nothing but a self-indulgent joke.

The PR manager was still urging me.