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Accueil / Romance / My Love, My Boss / Chapitre 31 - Chapitre 40

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51

The wait

Thursday evening, he texted me at six. Can you come over? I need to see you. I took the subway to the Upper West Side. Arrived at seven. He answered the door in jeans and a t-shirt and the particular exhaustion of someone who had been working without sleeping for too many days in a row. "Sienna publishes Monday," I said. "I know." He pulled me inside. "She called the company for comment. PR is drafting a response. Legal is preparing for investor calls. The board is meeting Friday to discuss strategy." "And?" "And they're going to blame Jordan. Position them as a rogue employee. Someone who acted without board knowledge or approval. Terminate them. Distance the company from the crime." "That's not fair." "It's survival." He walked to the kitchen. Started making coffee neither of us wanted. "Jordan knows it's coming. They've already hired a lawyer. They're preparing for the fallout." "Are you okay?" "No." He stopped. Set the coffee down. Turned to face me. "I'm about to let som

Whispers

Friday, twelve o'clock. The board conference room held fifteen people. Seven board members appearing via video conference, their faces arranged on the large screen like a jury. Eight people physically present: Cazien at the head of the table, Jordan to his right, Rebecca to his left, three senior executives including Carlson, the company's general counsel, and me in the back row against the wall where interns were supposed to be invisible. I wasn't invisible. Rebecca noticed me the moment she walked in. Her expression didn't change but something flickered behind her eyes — recalibration, strategy adjustment, the quick mental work of someone whose plan had just encountered an unexpected variable. She sat. Arranged her materials with practiced efficiency. Looked at the screen where the board members were settling into their respective cameras. "Thank you all for making time on short notice," she began. Her voice carried the warmth I'd heard at dinner, the professional competence I'd

Light is Coming

Rebecca looked at me with an expression I couldn't fully read. Not anger. Something closer to respect. Or recognition. "You're right," she said finally. "I made that decision. And I've regretted it. Not because your father's company had value to me — it didn't, strategically — but because I've learned that decisions made in boardrooms affect real people in real ways. And I didn't consider that then. I'm trying to consider it now." "By destroying him?" I gestured at Cazien. "By using the same kind of calculated evaluation you used on my father? By deciding he's not worth keeping?" "I'm not destroying him. I'm holding him accountable." "For what? For trying to protect people he cares about? For giving someone a second chance instead of immediately prosecuting them? For making the hard choice to prioritize three thousand jobs over one person's justice?" I stepped closer to the table. "You want to talk about accountability? Fine. But let's be honest about what you're actually doing. Yo

A new dawn

When it ended, I went back to my desk. Tried to work. Couldn't. At eleven, my phone buzzed. Rebecca. We need to talk. Coffee. Noon. Same place as last time. Don't say no. I shouldn't have gone. Should have stayed at my desk and ignored her and let whatever was coming come without walking into it deliberately. But I went anyway. Because I needed to know what she knew. What she was planning. What came next. The restaurant in Tribeca was quieter during lunch than it had been at dinner. Still exclusive. Still expensive. Still the kind of place where conversations about destroying companies happened over perfectly plated food. Rebecca was already seated when I arrived. "Thank you for coming," she said. I sat. "What do you want?" "Direct. Good. We don't have time for pretense." She slid a folder across the table. "Open it." I did. Inside were documents. Not the ones she'd sent me before about Atlas Digital. New ones. Dated from 2010. Communications between Rebecca Wolfe and the

Answers

"What do you want me to do?" I asked. "I want you to do the right thing. Whatever that is. Even if it destroys me. Even if it destroys us." He touched my face. "I want you to be able to look at yourself in the mirror and not see someone who compromised everything she believed in for someone who wasn't worth it." "You are worth it." "No," he said quietly. "I'm not. But maybe I can become someone who is. If I survive this. If I do the hard thing for once instead of the strategic thing. If I stop protecting myself and start accepting consequences." I left his apartment at eleven. Took the subway home. Sat on my bed. Looked at the USB drive. And made my choice. Wednesday morning, I gave Rebecca the files. Not at the office. Not over email. I met her at the restaurant in Tribeca at seven a.m. before either of us had gone to work. I slid the USB drive across the table the same way she'd slid folders across it twice before. She looked at it. Then at me. "You're sure?" she asked.

Ally

Thursday morning, Cazien was arrested. Not at his apartment. Not at the office. At the police station where he'd turned himself in the night before. The charges were filed formally: obstruction of justice, conspiracy to conceal a crime, making false statements to federal investigators. The bail was set at five hundred thousand dollars. He posted it within an hour. By Thursday afternoon, Rebecca was named interim CEO. By Friday, the stock had dropped thirty percent. By the following Monday, Jordan's trial date was set for eight weeks out. And by the Monday after that, I was sitting across from Sienna in her apartment in Brooklyn, watching her work on a follow-up article about corporate accountability and the cost of protection. "You did the right thing," she said. "I know." "But it doesn't feel like it." "No. It feels like I destroyed someone I love to prove a point." I looked at her. "Did I? Do the right thing?" "Yes. But that doesn't mean it was easy. Or that it won't hurt

And then again

Friday morning, Sienna called at eight. "I heard you resigned," she said. "News travels fast." "It does when it involves the intern who exposed a fifty-million-dollar embezzlement scheme and took down a CEO in the process." She paused. "Can I buy you breakfast? I want to make sure you're okay." "I'm not okay." "Then I want to buy you breakfast anyway." We met at the diner in Park Slope where she'd once told me I looked terrible and handed me a blueberry muffin. She did the same thing this morning. Same table. Same muffin. Same look of concern mixed with professional curiosity. "Tell me everything," she said once we'd ordered coffee neither of us would finish. So I did. Not the sanitized version. Not the strategic one. The real one. I told her about the print room and the stairwell and the late nights in his office. About the silver pen and the hand-holding and the way he'd looked at me in a locked space and told me I wasn't trapped. About the gym and the panic attack and the w

You and I

Six months later. I stood at the window of my new office — if you could call it an office, more like a repurposed storage room with a desk and a chair and a window that looked out over Queens Boulevard — and watched traffic move through Jackson Heights with the particular late-spring energy of a city that had survived winter and was now pretending summer might actually come. The Workers' Rights Collective was a nonprofit that operated out of a building that had once been a warehouse and still smelled faintly like whatever had been stored here before we arrived. We had twelve employees, six of whom were volunteers. We worked on labor violations, wage theft, corporate accountability cases that were too small for major law firms and too complicated for individuals to navigate alone. I'd been hired in February. Three months later, I was running intake and case management and occasionally writing policy briefs that got sent to lawmakers who probably never read them. It wasn't Wolfe Indu

Jordan

Jordan's trial began on a Monday in early June. I didn't attend. Couldn't. The prosecution had put me on their witness list as someone with knowledge of the financial structures, which meant I wasn't allowed in the courtroom until after I testified. Which meant I sat in a waiting room with fluorescent lights and uncomfortable chairs and watched the clock move with the particular slowness of time that doesn't want to arrive at what's coming. They called me on Tuesday afternoon. The courtroom was smaller than I expected. Not the grand theatrical space from television dramas but a functional government room with wood paneling and overhead lights and about thirty people distributed across benches that could have held sixty. Jordan sat at the defense table in a gray suit that looked expensive and slightly too formal. Their lawyer beside them. Their hands folded on the table in front of them with the same controlled precision they'd used at Wolfe Industries when preparing for difficult

And then again

The trial lasted another three days. Jordan's lawyer argued that the embezzlement had been strategic protection, not theft. That Jordan had always intended to return the money if the company stabilized. That they'd acted out of loyalty, not greed. The prosecution argued that intent didn't matter when fifty million dollars went missing for four years. That loyalty didn't excuse wire fraud. That protection didn't justify theft. The jury deliberated for six hours. They returned a verdict Friday afternoon. Guilty on all counts. Jordan sat very still when the verdict was read. Didn't react. Didn't cry. Just sat with the same controlled precision they'd maintained throughout the trial and accepted what was coming. The judge set sentencing for three weeks out. The courtroom emptied. I stayed in my seat for a long time after everyone else had left. Just sitting. Processing. Trying to understand what I felt about watching someone I'd once worked with get convicted of a crime I'd helpe

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