The Corner Office
The Fourteenth Floor

Six Years Back

August 25, 2026 · Part 5 of 10 · 2 min

Naomi Ostrander looked younger than her byline photo, red hair scraped back in a bun that had given up an hour into her shift, a laptop bag she set on the vinyl booth seat like it mattered more than she did.

"Walk me through it," she said. "Everything. Don't skip the part where you're scared, because that's usually the part that's true."

He told her. The lit boardroom, the trustees vote, the spin-off, the folder, the dates.

She'd already blown the photos up on her laptop by the time he finished his coffee, tracing a column with one finger.

"These reallocation entries," she said. "You said the takeover's being planned now, right? Meeting, votes, a Friday deadline?"

"That's what I heard."

"Then why does this spreadsheet have transfers going back six years?" She turned the screen toward him. "This isn't a plan for a takeover. This is a paper trail for money that already moved. Whoever built this spin-off idea didn't invent a way to hurt the pension fund. They invented a way to explain why it's already hurt."

Roland thought of Bethany's text. *Under restructuring review.* Eli's treatment, denied on a Tuesday for money that — if Naomi was right — had left the building years before anyone in a boardroom said the word *hostile.*

"I need one more thing," Naomi said. "The original audit. Not the spreadsheet — the source document, the one that would've flagged this the first year it happened, if anyone still had it. Everything I've got is compelling. That's what makes it airtight."

"Where would that even be?"

"If it still exists, it's in Corrigan's private safe. Physical copy, probably — that's how you keep something out of a server that can be subpoenaed." She closed the laptop. "Is there anyone in that building who's been there longer than the fraud has? Someone who'd still have the combination?"

Roland's mind went, unbidden, to a woman he passed in the elevator most Tuesdays — Corrigan's assistant of eighteen years, always the last light off besides his own, who'd started saying *good night, Roland* like she meant it about two months ago, right around the time her eyes had started looking like she wasn't sleeping either.

"Dorothea," he said slowly. "Dorothea Voss."

Continue the story Part 6: The Woman With the Drive →

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