I rode the elevator up to the 40th floor instead of down. Marcus, the CEO, was already waiting in the executive boardroom — the same Marcus who’d cornered me at the Christmas party three weeks earlier, not to flirt, but to ask why every brilliant insight in Vivian’s reports sounded exactly like the woman who’d interned under him five years ago. Me. He’d asked for proof. I’d spent twenty-one nights compiling it: timestamped drafts, email metadata, Slack exports, the original Figma files Vivian had screenshotted and pasted into her own decks. I handed him the folder. He didn’t even open it — he just slid a contract across the mahogany table. ‘Director of Strategy. Your own team. Triple her budget. We announce in fifteen minutes.’ Down on the 32nd floor, Vivian was still rehearsing her victory speech, smoothing her blowout in the bathroom mirror, when the all-staff email pinged on every phone in the building. Subject line: Leadership Transition, Effective Immediately. I watched from the glass mezzanine as she read it. Her latte slipped. Beige foam bloomed across the white marble like a slow apology. She looked up, scanning the atrium, and found me — standing beside Marcus, badge already reprinted, the merger proposal projected on the wall behind us with my name in the author field for the first time in two years. She mouthed something. Maybe ‘please.’ Maybe ‘wait.’ HR was already walking toward her desk with a cardboard box. I didn’t gloat. I didn’t smirk. I just lifted my coffee — the one I’d poured myself, for once — and gave her the same polite nod she’d given me a thousand times when she dismissed me from a room. Then I turned and walked into my new office. The dry cleaning, by the way, is still sitting at the front desk. Unclaimed.
