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I grabbed some food, smiled at the dog, and waited for things to calm down so that I might get the chance to have a private word with David. Sitting in the break-room just waiting, I scrolled through social media for a while until I felt the presence of someone sitting next to me. I looked up and noticed a kid resting his chin atop his hands on the table, just glancing around the room. He couldn’t have been older than eight or nine.
“Oh, hello,” I said. “I didn’t even notice you sit down.”
“Sorry, did I scare you?” he asked, his voice soft. “Sometimes I do that without meaning to. My dad says I’m like a ghost.”
I laughed. “That’s okay, I wasn’tthatstartled. Who is your dad, by the way? Does he work here?”
He nodded. “Yeah, Matthew Becker.”
“You’re David’s nephew!” I said, realizing only after I said it that I must’ve sounded much too excited to be meeting this kid.
“Yeah,” he said, shyly. “David is my uncle. One of them, that is. I have four.”
“And by my count, three of your uncles are here now, are they not?” I knew Jeremy was the one who brought the food from his restaurant downtown. I had heard one of my coworkers talking about how they went there all the time and that the head chef—Becker brother number four—never disappointed. David was obviously there and Adam had to be as well, I was pretty sure I’d seen him walking out of the break-room a little while ago. That just left one Becker son missing.
I went through the names in my head and tried to come up with the last one, but fell short. I looked at the kid. “David, Matt, Adam, and Jeremy are all here, but there’s one more.”
“Ezra,” the kid said. “He’s not here today. He’s never around.”
“Ah, yes, the elusive Ezra,” I said. “I always forget at least one of the names. Speaking of, what’s your name?”
“I’m Will.”
“I’m Lily.”
“It’s nice to meet you.”
This kid was very polite, though I could tell by the way his cheeks were reddening that he wasn’t used to talking to strangers this much. “You too,” I said. “Do you come to the office a lot?”
He shrugged. “Sometimes. I’m on summer break right now, and the new nanny just quit, so my dad didn’t know what else to do with me.”
I nodded and was about to ask a follow-up question when Matt appeared at my side and grinned at his son. “You want to meet Uncle David’s new dog?” he asked.
“Sure,” the kid said with a small smile, though I could tell by the way he quickly got out of his chair that he was very excited to meet the dog. He waved to me, then walked with his dad in the direction where David was standing, talking with some of the other employees, his pup loyally sitting at his feet. Alone again, I continued to wait for an opening, a time when I might be able to have a quick one-on-one chat with David and make sure he was okay after such a crazy morning. I wasn’t going to call things off with him, not today at least. It had been a decision I made out of fear, after seeing the post from Bret last night. And I couldn’t let fear rule me like that. Not anymore.
So—I waited. Patiently, and without complaining. But to my surprise, every time I thought there was an opening, David made sure to close it.
There were three different moments. I know because I counted them, in which David was alone and I tried to approach him, and he completely and utterly dodged me. The first time, he spotted me walking toward him, and announced loudly that he thought the dog needed to be taken outside. He promptly walked to the elevators and was gone. A couple of hours later, after I finished getting some more work done, I went to track him down in his office, and his secretary told me he was on a call. I knew that was a lie, however, because I could hear him playing fetch with the dog on the other side of his office door. The final time was at the end of the workday. The two of us met in the hallway, both ready to leave the office at the same time, but instead of riding down to the garage with me, David ducked out of the elevator at the last second, mumbling under his breath about forgetting something at his desk.
With that third and final nail in the coffin, I knew for a fact that he was trying to avoid me.
The question was—why?
Unfortunately, I would spend the rest of that week trying to find the answer to that question, but never getting anywhere. He got so good at staying away from me, that I never got the chance to ask why it was he was dodging me in the first place. It was very annoying, and a little hurtful to boot. On Friday, when I had a follow-up meeting with Mark’s lawyer, I was feeling very lackluster about the whole thing, and I went into the meeting room with hunched shoulders.
The other lawyer presented his case, and I tuned in and out, knowing full well this whole thing was just a formality. He and I both knew there was no way Mark was going to get a settlement out of all of this.
When he concluded presenting his case, the lawyer sat down next to his client and folded his hands in front of him. “Well, Ms. McAvoy, what do you think?”
“Huh?” I realized it was my turn to speak. “Oh, yeah, right. Well, I think your case is a joke, and I think Mark will be lucky to walk out of this building without us launching a counter-suit against him.” I pushed a folder of papers across the table toward the two of them. “This is evidence of fraud that your client committed against the company. We know he was logging hours that he wasn’t working, and the way we see it, he owes Becker Technologies anywhere from $5,000 to $10,000 in backpay. We are more than ready to pursue him for this amount unless he is willing to drop his case against us and accept no severance package. We expect him to walk away empty-handed, and in return, we will forget all about this little crime he thought he could get away with.”
The lawyer looked at Mark. His eyes were wide and his mouth hung open as he struggled to come up with something to say. “I—I—”
“Mark, is this true?” the lawyer asked him.
Mark jeered, but the lawyer didn’t back down. He repeated his question, and this time, Mark just shrugged and scowled at me. “Everyone does it,” he said. “I mean, really. Everyone clocks in a little earlier than when their shift starts, and they clock out a little later. It’s not fraud, really. It’s just what workers do when they work at a big company like this. You guys up here make all the money, we’re just trying to get a little cut of it, that’s all.”
“We’re not talking about clocking in a little early, Mark.” I smiled at him. “We have multiple eight-hour shifts that you were clocked in for, in which we are almost 100% sure you were not in the office. We have the social media receipts to prove it. Three months ago, you said you were coming in over the weekend, and you logged six hours on a Saturday, but that same day you were posting stories to your page about being at the beach… Can you explain that?”
