Chapter 2
By the time I reached my desk, the mop bucket was gone and a sealed envelope sat where I’d left my lunch.
My supervisor stood at the end of the hall, pretending to inspect a light fixture. He didn’t meet my eyes. Nobody at Oakridge wanted to be caught watching the man who’d just been promoted out of the janitorial closet.
I took the envelope upstairs.
Darlene was alone in her office. The brace was hidden beneath her suit again, but she held herself carefully, as if even breathing too deeply might cost her.
She gestured toward the papers. “The terms are in there.”
I didn’t sit. Abigail’s name was printed on the top page of the folder beside her desk. My hands went cold.
“Before I read anything, take her file out.”
Darlene’s gaze followed mine. For a moment, the Iron Queen looked less like an executive than a woman caught doing something she couldn’t defend.
“You’re right,” she said.
She opened the folder, removed the pages with Abigail’s name, and placed them in a separate envelope. Then she closed it and slid it across the desk to me.
“I shouldn’t have had those records in my office.”
“No,” I said. “You shouldn’t have.”
She didn’t ask me to soften it. That counted for something, though it didn’t make the envelope feel any lighter in my hand.
I tucked it beneath my arm and opened the job terms.
The title was there: temporary executive-protection liaison. So were a salary, health benefits, and a description of duties vague enough to cover anything from keeping Darlene company to stepping in front of a bullet.
“What does protection mean to you?” I asked.
“Watching for trouble before it reaches me.”
“And what does it mean to Grant?”
Her expression tightened. “He wants an emergency board vote to authorize the sale of Oakridge.”
“To whom?”
“He hasn’t told me the whole story. He’s pushing the vote through before anyone has time to look closely at the terms.”
The office seemed to shrink around us. Outside the glass walls, employees crossed the floor with coffee cups and bright folders, pretending our conversation wasn’t the most interesting thing happening in the building.
“How soon?”
“Within five days.”
I thought of Grant’s warning. You’re going to be removed before the week is over. He hadn’t sounded like a man bluffing.
“And you think he’ll stage a scandal,” I said.
“I think he’ll use whatever makes the board question whether I’m fit to lead.” Her fingers pressed against the desk edge. “He’s already started.”
The word cover-up returned to me, colder now. Grant had thrown it into the room like bait. I still didn’t know exactly what he meant, but I understood the shape of the trap: give the board a story about Darlene, and they might never ask what Grant stood to gain.
I looked back at the papers. “My daughter stays out of this. No calls to her school. No one following her. No using her medical records to decide what I’ll do.”
“Agreed.”
“I want that in writing.”
Darlene took a pen.
“No cash,” I added. “No private favors. I work the hours, I get the salary. Benefits start when the job does.”
She wrote each condition on the last page, then signed beneath them.
“You’ll have a brief trial assignment,” she said. “You can leave after it. You can leave today.”
“And you won’t make my staying a test of loyalty?”
“I won’t.”
Her voice held steady, but I noticed how long she took to straighten after leaning over the desk. She was asking me to protect her while hiding the very fact that made her vulnerable. I didn’t know yet whether that was courage or another kind of mistake.
I set the signed page back on top.
“I’ll try one shift,” I said. “That’s all I’m promising.”
Darlene nodded once. “That’s enough.”
It wasn’t trust. It wasn’t even a yes, really. But it was a choice I’d made with my eyes open, and that mattered.
I left Oakridge before dark with the envelope of Abigail’s records tucked inside my jacket. The unfamiliar sedan was parked across from my apartment building, its windows too dark to show who sat inside.
I kept walking.
On my kitchen table, the eviction notice lay beneath a grocery circular. I’d left the blinds open a crack. A photograph had been slipped under my door: my notice in sharp focus through the apartment window, the glass reflecting the street and the vague shape of whoever had taken it.
My stomach clenched.
The sedan’s engine started.
I reached for my phone, but it buzzed before I could call anyone. A new message. No name, no words—just a photograph.
Abigail was in it, walking home from school with her backpack bouncing against her shoulders. The angle was distant, as if the picture had been taken from across the street.
May you like
The car pulled away.
I stared at my daughter’s face on the screen, and the signed job terms went slick in my hand.
