Applause

Naomi wasn't scheduled to present — Graham had told her three weeks ago that the board preferred "a single confident voice" for first-look pitches, and that he'd walk her onto the stage properly once Cascade had buy-in. She'd nodded. Rookie moves got you labeled difficult. Better to let the room warm up first.

So she sat in the last row of folding chairs along the glass wall, laptop closed on her knees, watching Graham click through her own charts on the screen at the front.

"Retention isn't a lagging indicator anymore," he said, hands loose and easy in his pockets. "It's predictive. That's the whole idea behind Cascade."

The board chair, a silver-haired man named Whit Pemberton, leaned forward. "You built this yourself?"

"With input from a great team," Graham said, and moved to the next slide.

No names. Not hers, not anyone's. Just "a great team," said the way people say things that cost nothing and commit to nothing.

The room applauded when he finished. Someone said the word visionary out loud, not sarcastically. Naomi clapped too, because not clapping would have looked strange, and her hands felt like someone else's.

Afterward, in the hallway, Graham caught her eye and winked — a small, warm, conspiratorial thing, like they'd pulled off a heist together. "Killed it, right? I'll get you proper credit once it's greenlit. Didn't want to complicate the ask."

"Sure," she said. "Makes sense."

She meant to let it go. She really did, walking back to her desk, telling herself that credit delayed wasn't credit denied, that Graham had earned two decades of trust for a reason.

Then she opened her inbox to pull up the original proposal thread — the one where she'd first pitched Cascade to him in March, complete with his reply, this is good, let's build on it — planning to forward it to HR just so there'd be a paper trail somewhere, quietly, just in case.

The thread wasn't in her sent folder.

It wasn't in her archive either.

It was gone.