Claire's desk contained three dying plants, a tiny ceramic goose, and a campaign headed Built for the People Who Keep Going. Dave recognized the slogan. He had approved it between two investor calls without reading the employee stories beneath it. She bought him vending-machine coffee and warned him that the machine considered cream an optional rumor. He drank it anyway. On her monitor, a supplier reconciliation flashed red. Someone billed us for twelve thousand launch kits. We ordered four thousand. Now finance wants my signature before Friday's anniversary gala. Will you sign? I'd rather be unemployed with a working conscience. Though I'd prefer employed. My landlord has a very narrow appreciation of integrity. He smiled. She was thirty-one, she told him, and had moved back to Chicago to help her father after a stroke. Marketing was supposed to mean finding honest ways to make people care. Lately it meant explaining why workers were smiling in photographs while their benefits disappeared. When she asked about his family, he told her his father was gone. That much was true. She softened without making a performance of pity. Mine still calls whenever he fixes a cabinet hinge. Apparently every hinge is an emergency press conference. Her phone lit up: Dad. She answered, listened, and told him she was eating vegetables. Dave glanced at the gummy bears beside her keyboard. She covered the microphone. Green ones count. Don't look at me like that. He laughed so suddenly he spilled coffee on his cuff. She reached to blot it; their fingers tangled over the napkin. Neither moved immediately. The vending machine chose that moment to loudly grind something it should probably have already ground. Claire drew back, pink-cheeked, smiling at the floor. Dave remembered meetings in which beautiful people had calculated his worth before he spoke. This felt dangerously different. Before leaving, she printed a reconciliation request and sealed it for records. The envelope carried the same crooked blue handwriting as the warning at his house. Did you send someone a message about these invoices? I tried the protected reporting address. It bounced. Then I tried the CEO at home. Maybe that was stupid. No. It wasn't stupid. Her smile faded at his certainty. Somewhere behind the copier, a shredder started. Dave could follow the paper trail through facilities, or ask Claire to walk him through her campaign orders. Either way, tonight he would stop merely watching.
An undercover CEO. A marketing strategist who sees the man beneath the uniform. A betrayal hidden inside the company he thought he knew.
Listen closely. Choose carefully. Carry the consequences.
Every path leaves a different story.