The Corner Office
The Quiet Transfer

Missing Copies

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

I sat very still for a long moment after the drawer search, forcing myself to think instead of panic. The drive was gone. Fine. That wasn't the only copy.

Months ago — the same night I'd found the Adjusted tab, actually, before any of this started — I'd emailed myself a handful of screenshots from my personal account, the paranoid habit of someone who'd once lost a laptop the week before a deadline. I hadn't thought about those emails since. I hadn't needed to.

I opened my personal email on my phone, hands not quite steady, and searched Adjusted Q2.

The emails were still there. Four screenshots, timestamps from that first night, still sitting in my sent folder exactly where I'd left them. Relief hit me so hard I had to sit down on the edge of the desk.

Then I saw the security notice at the top of my inbox, the kind I usually swiped past without reading.

New sign-in detected. Device: unknown. Location: — the city listed wasn't mine. Time: 2:14 a.m., six days ago.

Six days ago. Two days before Odette Marlow walked into my basement with a job offer and a smile.

I checked my sent folder history more carefully this time — a feature I hadn't used before, buried in settings. It showed the four original screenshots I remembered forwarding to myself. And one download event, from that unfamiliar sign-in, on an attachment I definitely hadn't opened in six days.

Someone had gotten into my personal email. Someone had seen exactly what I had.

I sat there in the fluorescent hum of B2 with my phone in my shaking hand, running the timeline in my head. They'd taken the physical drive. They'd been inside my personal account. Whatever they were looking for, whatever they were trying to erase before Delphine Ncube's team came asking, they were being thorough about it.

Which meant, somewhere between now and whenever the audit team reached my old floor, I had a very small window to get what was left of the truth into hands that couldn't be bought, warned off, or quietly reassigned to a basement.

I changed my password with hands that wouldn't quite stop shaking, forwarded the four screenshots to a second, older account nobody at Brindlewood had ever known existed, and started looking for a way to reach Delphine Ncube directly — before whatever was coming for me arrived first.

Continue the story Part 8: Running Out of Floor →

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