The Corner Office
The Mentor's Shadow

The Draft

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

Naomi didn't sleep well.

She told Omar Fitch about it the next morning, hunched over the espresso machine in the break room, voice low.

"A draft with his name on it? That's it? That's your whole case?" Omar raised an eyebrow. He'd been at Bellwood almost as long as Gerald had, and he loved being the voice of reason. "Naomi, he probably just used her deck as a base for something else. Man's been in this building nineteen years. Half the templates on that drive have his name buried in the metadata somewhere."

"It was dated four days ago. Before the meeting."

"So he reviewed it early. That's literally his job."

She wanted to let it go. She almost did.

Then, that afternoon, she found Talia in the supply closet, close to tears over a stack of printer paper she clearly didn't need.

"Hey. What's wrong?"

Talia wiped her face fast, like she'd been caught doing something shameful. "Nothing. I'm fine."

"Talia."

"I got pulled off the Whitmore renewal. This morning. Gerald said leadership wants 'fresh eyes' on it going into Q4." Talia laughed, short and humorless. "I got the pin yesterday. I got pulled today."

"Who's taking it over?"

"He didn't say. He just said not to worry, that he had my back." A pause. "He always says that."

Naomi's stomach tightened at he always says that. She'd said the exact same sentence about Gerald, in this exact tone, more times than she could count.

That night, staying late to help Talia rebuild a handoff document, Naomi went hunting through the old client archive for a Whitmore precedent — something similar Bellwood had handled years back. She searched Whitmore, strategy, precedent and got nothing.

She searched rising star, reassigned instead, on a hunch she didn't want to name.

One result surfaced from a folder she'd never opened, buried under a decade of subfolders: an old performance file, water-stained by scan artifacts, belonging to someone who'd left the company nine years ago.

Hargrove, Celia — Final Review.

Naomi had never heard the name in her life.

Continue the story Part 3: The Message →

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