Page 82 of Apparently, I’m Torture

Stacey was in the hallway. Her eyelids were at half-mast, and her gait was slow.

“Morning, Stace,” I tipped my mug at her and tried not to show how exhausted I was, but she looked up at me curiously.

“You look happy. And tired.” She glanced down at her notebook before I could answer. “You’ve got a call with the department heads in ten minutes by the way. Something about budget overspend?”

Shit.

My sticky eyes flew open.

How did they find out about that? I looked back at Stacey, but she was already heading toward the kitchen.

“Stacey, wait. What budget overspend?”

She shrugged and looked over her shoulder. “Don’t know.” She waved her hand. “But if you want me to look into it, you’re going to have to wait until I finish my coffee.”

I made it to my office, shut the door and loaded the computer. Scrubbing my hands down my face, I slapped my cheeks a few times until the sharp sting made my eyes water.

Shawn

“I don’t understand,” I said, squinting at Pedro, the Head of Finance.

My screen was divided into four squares, and each held a beige or grey office background with a floating, middle-aged male head. The heads were angry.

“What don’t you understand, Mister Jackson? Your volunteer, Miss Lilly Fares, wrote an email to the department last night. She confessed to forging an order–it’s a case of gross misconduct.”

I shook my head, trying to loosen the static there. This couldn’t be happening.

“Could you read the email to me? Or forward it?”

Pedro clucked his tongue and let a breath shoot through his nostrils. “Fine. I’ll forward it. You can read the email in your own time. For now, your job is to fire Lilly Fares.”

A punch to the gut.

“Fire her?”

They must’ve recognized the desperate disbelief in my tone, because Tony, the floating head directly below Pedro, tilted his chin. “Yes. She admitted to forging a superior’s signature. Why wouldn’t we fire her?”

“But it wasn’t… her fault.”

“Whose fault was it, Mister Jackson? Was it yours? Should we blame you?”

I swallowed, almost choking on my tongue. “You don’t understand, I can’t just fire her. There are extenuating circumstances. She wasn’t at her computer last night. She was–” With me. I clamped my teeth down on the words before they escaped.

Pedro’s eyes narrowed. “In the email, she sent logs showing her remote access from her computer at her local school. She didn’t have to physically be in the office to do the work.”

“Or to forge orders,” Tony added. “You’ll feel better about firing her once you read the email.”

Panic filled me, forcing me out until I couldn’t feel. I couldn’t feel how tired I was. I couldn’t feel my aching body. I couldn’t feel the satisfaction I felt less than twenty minutes ago. I was scraped out, replaced by someone who didn’t know what to do or what to say.

Pedro cleared his throat. “There’s also the matter of the money itself. As this was your operation, and your employees were… forging invoices under your nose, we’ve decided to revise the funding.”

My insides twisted. A brief pause ticked by. Then Pedro spoke.

“The additional fifteen thousand will be taken from your percentage, whatever the amount turns out to be.”

I swallowed and nodded. Fifteen thousand in the scheme of what the projected profit margins were wasn’t that hard a hit. My thirty percent was estimated to total around three hundred thousand dollars. I could handle that.

“And we’ve decided to change your final percentage to five percent.”