The Corner Office
The Mentor's Shadow

The Catch

August 25, 2026 · Part 7 of 10 · 2 min

Naomi barely slept. By six a.m. she was back in the office, badge scanned before the sun was fully up, heart hammering.

She couldn't get into Gerald's email — obviously — but she could get into the shared drive, and drives kept histories. Version histories. She pulled up the Whitmore file from Tuesday night again, and this time she didn't stop at the metadata. She opened "version history" and watched, in real time, as the software rebuilt every draft anyone had touched.

There it was: a version from eleven days ago, before Talia had even been assigned the account publicly. Gerald had opened a mostly-finished strategy deck under his own login, quietly stripped Talia's name from three slides, and left it sitting untouched — a spare original, ready to be "found" the moment leadership needed a reason to say she hadn't really built it alone.

Not proof of the phone call. But proof of intent, sitting in cold, dated, unarguable metadata.

She was screenshotting the version history, hands cold with adrenaline, when a voice behind her made her jump so hard her coffee nearly went over the keyboard.

"You're in early."

Gerald stood in the doorway of the small workroom, tie already knotted, coffee already in hand, smiling the exact smile he'd worn the day he pinned that crescent on her blazer eight years ago.

"Couldn't sleep," Naomi said, closing the laptop screen a half-inch too fast.

His eyes flicked to it. Just for a second. That same flicker she'd seen at Talia's ceremony.

"Big day," he said pleasantly, stepping fully into the room, close enough now that she could smell his cologne, the same one he'd worn every year she'd known him. "Committee meets at nine. I really do hope it goes well for her."

"I hope so too," Naomi said, and hated how steady her own voice sounded, like she was still that grateful twenty-six-year-old who believed every word out of his mouth.

Gerald's gaze dropped, briefly, deliberately, to the closed laptop under her hand.

"You know," he said softly, "curiosity's a wonderful thing in a strategist. It's a terrible thing in a friend."

Continue the story Part 8: The Threat →

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