Chapter 22 – The Paper Trail

By Tuesday, the quiet sabotage had evolved from exclusion to manipulation.

Evelyn sat at her desk, a fresh layout file open on her screen, her brows furrowing as she scrolled through the campaign assets for the new LunarTech partnership. Something was off. The tagline had been changed. It wasn't just reworded. The tone had shifted, the visual cues clashing with the campaign's initial branding direction.

She double-checked her version history. She always saved backup drafts.

Her original file was clean. Approved language. Proper tone. Aligned with what the client had signed off on.

This one… this wasn't hers.

At first, she thought it was just a system error. Maybe someone had accidentally overwritten her file. She pinged the junior designer. No, they hadn't touched it. She checked the file metadata: last modified by Linda Chang.

A tight knot twisted in Evelyn's stomach.

The changes were subtle but enough that to an outsider, it would look like Evelyn had simply made a mistake. A bad one.

The next day, she noticed her email thread with a key vendor had been mysteriously deleted from the shared archive. When the vendor failed to deliver a mock-up on time, Linda called her out in front of the team.

"Evelyn, I expect better coordination. You've worked with AVX Creative before. This is sloppy."

"I followed up three times..."

"Then why don't we have anything to show for it?"

Noah caught her gaze across the room. His jaw tightened, but he said nothing.

Later that evening, Evelyn dropped onto Noah's office couch, exhausted. Her planner lay open, half-scribbled with to-dos and fragments of the day she couldn't explain.

"She's trying to make me look incompetent," she said softly. "And no one will question it, because Linda's trusted."

Noah sat beside her, laptop open, a folder already built with screenshots and timestamps.

"I started tracking document changes yesterday. Every time someone modifies a shared file or reroutes a task, the admin console logs it. You were right. Linda's been editing your work silently. Not suggesting edits. Overwriting."

Evelyn blinked. "But why?"

"Genevieve," he said simply. "She's feeding Linda just enough doubt to turn her into a weapon."

Evelyn stared at the screen as Noah pulled up a series of files, each timestamped and color-coded: red edits made by Linda, green originals from Evelyn. The contrast was damning. Not just in tone, but in outcome. Metrics were missing, messaging skewed. It painted Evelyn as careless, imprecise.

"I knew something was off," Evelyn muttered. "But no one will believe me without proof."

"We'll get you that proof," Noah said, pulling up the latest calendar update. "They've moved the mid-quarter review presentation. You were cut from the speakers' list."

"I created that deck!" she said.

"I know."

He hesitated, then turned toward her. "We might need to play a little dirty."

Evelyn's eyes narrowed. "How dirty?"

The next morning, Evelyn walked into the Seoul office with practiced calm. Her blazer was crisp, her hair pulled into a tight twist, her expression unreadable. She passed Genevieve in the corridor. The woman's eyes flickered to her, then away like Evelyn was already irrelevant.

Linda called out without looking up from her phone. "Evelyn, I sent you revisions on the Q3 projections. I expect your version back by 3 p.m."

"Of course," Evelyn replied evenly.

She sat at her desk, opened the file, and began working.

But what Linda didn't know was that every change from that moment forward was being logged into a mirrored cloud folder Noah had built overnight.

By Friday, they had a folder of twenty-eight manipulated files. Seventeen emails that had been quietly deleted. Six altered calendar invites.

And one particularly interesting document Evelyn hadn't touched at all - an anonymous memo drafted by Genevieve, but routed through Linda's corporate ID, accusing Evelyn of ethical misconduct. It hadn't been sent yet, but it was saved to Linda's draft box.

Evelyn stared at it, chilled to her core. "They were going to use this."

"Not anymore," Noah said. "Now we know what they're capable of."

She closed her laptop slowly.

"I have a plan," she said quietly. "But it has to be public. I'm done being quiet."