The Corner Office
The Quiet Transfer

Just Numbers, Finally

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

They walked me out through the lobby in front of everyone, which I understood later was exactly the point — Voss wanted it public, wanted the story to already be "disgraced employee caught stealing data" before anyone could hear a different version.

It didn't stay that way for long.

By the time I reached the parking garage, my phone was already buzzing — Felix, then a number I didn't recognize. I let the second one go. It rang again immediately. I answered.

"Ms. Castellan, this is Loretta Sung's office. Please don't leave the property. Ms. Sung would like to speak with you directly, right now, in her office."

I stood in that garage for a full minute before I trusted my legs to carry me back inside.

Loretta Sung didn't waste time on pleasantries. Delphine Ncube was already in the room when I arrived, along with two people I didn't recognize — outside counsel, it turned out, brought in the moment Delphine's preliminary findings reached the board an hour earlier.

"Ms. Castellan," Loretta said, standing. "I understand you've had an extraordinarily difficult four months. I'm sorry. That's not nearly enough, but it's where I have to start."

The forensic review, moving fast now with board authority behind it, found what Delphine had already suspected: a shadow ledger, maintained personally by Voss, tracking the real numbers alongside a set of invoices from three vendors that didn't actually exist — shell companies routing "consulting fees" back toward an account that traced, eventually, to Voss himself. The Growth Team's inflated quarter hadn't just protected his bonus. It had covered a hole he'd been quietly digging for two years.

Trent Okoro, cleared entirely, found me in the hallway before I left that day. "I didn't know," he said, and I believed him — he looked like someone who'd just watched his own success story get pulled out from under him. "I'm sorry. Whatever they did to you for saying something — I'm sorry."

"You didn't do it," I told him. "That's enough."

Voss was gone within the week, terminated, his departure quietly handed to the same authorities Delphine's firm was required to notify. Odette Marlow resigned before anyone could ask her about a missing external drive.

I was reinstated the following Monday — not to my old desk, but to a new one, in a newly created compliance role Loretta created specifically, she told me, "so this never happens quietly again."

Felix brought coffee to my new office on my first morning back, setting it down like he had a hundred times before, back when B2 was just a bad dream neither of us mentioned anymore.

"Miracle numbers," he said, shaking his head at whatever headline was probably running by then.

"No," I said, looking out at a floor with actual windows for the first time in months. "Just numbers, finally. That's all I ever wanted them to be."

The end You've finished The Quiet Transfer.

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