Fifteen Minutes

I spent that night, and most of the next morning, building something I never imagined I'd have to build: a case file on my own employer.

Priya helped me organize it into something a stranger could follow in ten minutes flat — the vendor payment pattern, the state registry showing Reeve Calder, the timeline lining Calder's payments up against the fabricated complaints, and, worst of all, a printed transcript of the exact dates my HR file had been accessed, cross-referenced against a company badge log showing Holt's own key card swiping into HR's records room after hours, four separate times.

At 9 a.m. I sent a short, careful email to the chair of the Audit Committee, a board member named Winslow Prager whom I'd met exactly twice at holiday parties. I attached nothing yet — only a request for fifteen minutes before Friday's meeting, and a line I'd rewritten eleven times until it stopped sounding desperate: I have information the committee will want to review before any personnel decisions are finalized.

I hit send at 9:14. My hand was still on the mouse when my desk phone rang.

Holt's extension.

"Corinne." His voice was warm, almost affectionate, the voice he used for donors and reporters. "Can you come in? I'd like to talk. Just the two of us."

I looked at the clock. 9:16. Two minutes since I'd emailed the board.

There was no possible way he already knew. And yet something in his voice — too warm, too careful — told me he did.

"Of course," I said, and stood up on legs that didn't quite feel like mine, and walked toward the glass office where I had spent twenty-two years bringing him his coffee, wondering for the first time in my career exactly what I was walking into.