Chapter 3

I opened the link Mia sent me.

Derek had set up a brand-new social-media account. His bio read: former employee, speaking out.

His post went like this:

I spent three years at Ethan Lane's company. I showed up young and full of energy. I'm leaving with a body that hurts everywhere.

Flex time is a lie. They tell you to pick your own hours, then schedule meetings after dinner and demand revisions every weekend.

In three years I've never taken a full vacation. I can count on one hand the dinners I ate on time.

I'm almost thirty-five, and outside of overtime I don't know who I am anymore.

The post was shared tens of thousands of times.

#NameAndShameLane shot straight to the top of the trends.

I threw my phone onto the couch.

Every word of it was a lie.

Company policy explicitly banned meetings outside working hours. Derek was the project manager. He set his own meeting times.

As for never taking a vacation, the attendance system showed he'd taken five straight days off that very month and flown to Miami Beach.

I'd never seen anyone lie with that much confidence.

What hurt more was seeing longtime employees agreeing in the comments, including people who'd thanked me personally for the benefits.

Mia came in quietly and set a cup of hot tea beside me.

"Don't take it to heart. Most people here support flex time. It's Derek and a few others, that's all."

I waved the comfort away.

"What if I got it wrong?

"Maybe I never should have introduced flexible hours. If we'd all just worked nine to six from the start, none of this would've happened."

Mia's eyes went red.

"Please don't say that. Without flexible hours I couldn't have kept working while I took care of my mother last year.

"If you hadn't let me rearrange my schedule, I'd have quit. There are a lot of people here who owe you the same thing. Some of them are just afraid to say it out loud."

Her sincerity warmed me a little, but I knew we couldn't simply go back to yesterday.

I didn't sleep that night.

I lay there thinking about everything we'd built over three years.

At the all-hands where I introduced the policy, I'd said, "I want this to be more than a place where people earn a paycheck. It should be a place where they can build something without giving up the rest of their lives."

And now?

One selfish man had twisted all of that into exploitation because he wanted more.

He'd already traded his extra hours for time off. Now he wanted overtime pay on top of it.

Around dawn, I made my decision.

They called me exploitative. They called me heartless. They said all they wanted was to be paid for the hours they worked.

Fine.

I'd give them exactly what they'd asked for.