The Meeting

Two days after Voss's call, Delphine Ncube's office requested — formally, through HR, impossible now for anyone to intercept quietly — that I come in for an audit interview.

She wasn't what I expected. No power suit, no theatrics. Just a woman in her fifties with sharp reading glasses and a legal pad already half full of notes before I even sat down.

"Ms. Castellan. Thank you for coming in." She slid a folder across the table — my own screenshots, printed and tabbed, sitting beside a stack of other documents I didn't recognize. "I want to walk through the timeline you sent us. In detail."

I told her everything — the Adjusted tab, the memo, the meeting with Voss, the transfer, the deleted files, Odette Marlow's visit, the missing drive, the login from a city that wasn't mine. She wrote without looking up, occasionally circling a date, occasionally asking me to repeat something exactly as I'd said it.

"This retaliation timeline," she said finally, tapping the page, "is almost more useful to us than the accounting irregularity itself. Fraud is one violation. What you're describing — transfer, access removal, evidence destruction, within days of raising a documented concern — that's an entirely separate one."

Through the glass wall of the conference room, I saw Trent Okoro walking past with an associate of Delphine's, heading into the room next door for his own interview. He caught my eye for one second, confused, like he didn't fully understand why I was there.

I found out later, secondhand, what he told them: that Voss had personally instructed him, twice, to keep his team's numbers "pacing with the growth story the board needs to see," and that he'd never seen the Adjusted tab in his life. He hadn't built it. He hadn't asked for it. He'd just been handed numbers to present and told they were his team's success.

I didn't know any of that yet, though, when I stood up to leave Delphine's office, folder handed over, statement signed. I felt lighter than I had in four months.

Two security guards were waiting for me in the hallway.

"Ms. Castellan, we need you to come with us," the taller one said, not unkindly, but not open to discussion either. "There's been a formal complaint filed against you — theft of confidential company data. Mr. Voss's office. We need to escort you from the building pending investigation."

Behind me, through the glass, I could see Delphine Ncube already on her phone, my folder open on the table in front of her.