Petsa ng paglalathala:
The report was due at ten. I’d blocked out the morning for it two days in advance, checked the calendar Sunday night before bed to be sure, and walked in Monday assuming I had until ten to finish it.
At nine-fifteen, Garrick appeared at my desk holding a printout. “Where’s the Q3 vendor summary.”
“It’s not due until ten. I’ve still got.......”
“It moved to nine.” He set the printout down in front of me, and there it was, right there on my own calendar, the entry showing the deadline shifted back an hour, with a timestamp from Friday afternoon that I never saw. “Which means it was due fifteen minutes ago, and Whitmore’s people are asking why they don’t have it.”
“I never got a notification for the change.”
“The system sends one automatically.”
“Then it malfunctioned, because I didn’t see it.” My voice came out tighter than I wanted it to, defensive in a way that probably made me sound guiltier than I was. “I can have it finished in twenty minutes, it’s basically done, I just need to....”
“Twenty minutes isn’t the point, Freya.” He said my first name the way you’d say a warning. “The point is a deadline moved and you didn’t catch it. That’s not a small thing on this floor. People make decisions off these reports. If you can’t track your own calendar accurately, that’s a problem I need to know about now, not after it costs someone real money.”
I wanted to tell him someone had moved it on purpose. I wanted to say Catherine’s name out loud and watch his face for whatever reaction it got me. But I had no proof beyond a feeling, and I already knew exactly how that would sound. The new hire, three weeks in, accusing a director on another team of sabotaging her calendar because she didn’t like being corrected in front of the floor staff. Garrick already thought I’d talked or slept my way into this job. Handing him a reason to think I was also paranoid or petty felt like a door I didn’t need to open.
“It won’t happen again,” I said instead, and finished the report in fifteen minutes flat, and sent it with an apology to Whitmore’s assistant even though none of it had been my fault.
Garrick didn’t say anything else about it. He didn’t have to. I could feel the shift in how he looked at me for the rest of the day. A little less patience in his voice when he handed me tasks and a little more checking behind me on things he used to just trust me to handle. Whatever thin credit I’d built up my first two weeks, the missed deadline had ruined it, and I had no way to earn it back that didn’t involve accusing someone I couldn’t prove anything about.
I found out how it happened at lunch, more or less by accident. I was refilling my water in the break room when I overheard two of the junior assistants from Brand Partnerships talking near the vending machine, not bothering to lower their voices because they clearly didn’t think anyone worth caring about was listening.
“...Catherine had me pull the whole shared calendar Friday, said she wanted to check for scheduling conflicts before the Whitmore call. I didn’t think anything of it.”
“She change something?”
“I don’t know, she took my laptop into her office for like ten minutes. Why?”
I didn’t wait to hear the rest. I went back to my desk with my water, my hands not quite steady and thought about walking straight into Catherine’s office and asking her outright, just to see her reaction. I didn’t. There wasn’t a version of that conversation that ended well for me. Thwe best case scenario would end with her smiling at me and saying she had no idea what I was talking about, and me looking unhinged in front of anyone who happened to be walking past.
I called Talia that night instead, because there was no one on that floor I could say any of this to without it turning into ammunition against me.
“She’s building something,” Talia said, after I’d gotten through the whole thing; from the timestamp to the assistants I overhead by the vending machine. “You know that, right? This isn’t just her being petty. She’s setting up a pattern. Freya’s unreliable, Freya can’t be trusted with details, Freya keeps making mistakes. So that when something bigger happens, nobody on that floor is surprised.”
“I know.” I sat on the edge of my bed with the phone against my ear, staring at the water stain on my ceiling I still hadn’t gotten the landlord to fix. “I just don’t know how to fight something I can’t prove.”
“You start writing it down,” Talia said. “Document everything. Dates, times, what got changed, who was around. You don’t say a word to anyone yet. You just build your own file to match hers.”
It wasn’t comfort, exactly. But it was something to do with my hands besides sit there feeling defeated and helpless and feeling like the walls in that office were closing in on me with no one inside the building to to help me hold them back.
