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Chapter 23
To Rory’s complete lack of surprise, almost a week after she’d found the “game” scoresheet, her supervisor Brenda informed her after a meeting that she hadn’t been chosen as the Principal Engineer on the AI cloud project.
“It turns out you weren’t what we were looking for.” Brenda pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose and gave a littletoo badshrug.
“Imagine that.” Rory turned away, not bothering to thank the other woman as she headed back to The Hive.
Her enthusiasm for the possibility of the lead position had nosedived considerably over the past week, though part of her had been hoping for the chance at professional vindication. Being transferred to another division would also have bought her some time to look for another job. She could still request a transfer, but given her label as a “troublemaker,” she had little doubt it would be blocked.
As she entered the open office space, the Digicore CEO Brad Dawson, a youngish man with glasses and wheat-colored hair, came out of a conference room. He stepped in front of her to block her path. “Rory.”
Her spine tensed. “Hello, Brad.”
“I’ve been hearing rumors about a little office…dust-up.” His eyes narrowed. “Your name has been mentioned. Given that we don’t tolerate distractions here at Digicore, I wanted to warn you that it appears you’re becoming one.”
She clenched her teeth. “Digicore doesn’t toleratedistractions? Great. In case you didn’t know, harassment and bullying are seriousdistractions. I’m not the one who needs a warning.”
She shoved past him and stalked through the maze of desks back to her workstation. Suppressing her anger out of longstanding habit, she sat and pulled up the program she was working on. All of her recent code reviews had come back with extensive change lists, most of which were either nitpicky or unnecessary and some of which were legitimate. She made the changes and sent them back for another round.
Three more days, and she could return to Bliss Cove for Thanksgiving. She and Grant were spending Thanksgiving Day with her family, then they were driving to San Francisco on Friday for a dinner with his parents.
The holiday couldn’t come fast enough. Rory ached to see her mother and sisters, to be around the people who loved her. Her emotions had been ricocheting through her like bullets. She was at constant war with herself—her self-preserving urge to walk out of the officeright nowbattling her determination not to let the assholes win.
The long weekend would give her a chance to regroup and figure out her next step. She had no intention of staying in her current situation, but she wasn’t going to leave without a plan in place. That plan would likely come without any form of punishment for the men involved, but she’d been through that before. She was hardly the only woman who had.
“Got any candy?” Douglas turned his chair toward her, his eyebrows rising hopefully.
Rory smothered the urge to slap him. He’d been trying, and failing, to act like everything was back to “normal.”
She shook her head, angling her chair so he was out of her peripheral vision. If only they at least had cubicles.
As she was fixing an inconsistency in her code, a noticeable hush settled over the room. Rory looked up. Everyone’s attention was shifting toward the elevators, where a group of six people had just exited. Four Digicore senior executives and CEO Brad followed Edward and Nathan Taylor into the office.
Rory’s heart stuttered. Some of her coworkers were openly looking at Edward, while others cast him surreptitious glances. Most people outside of the insular Silicon Valley tech world didn’t know the Intellix founder on sight, but everyone in the Digicore office certainly did. Brad spoke to him and indicated the open office space, as if he were explaining the company’s operations.
Rory turned back to her computer, her insides twisting. It looked as if Edward and Nathan might be having a high-level meeting with the Digicore C-suite. But why?
They started walking around The Hive, pausing at desks and asking questions. She tried to focus on her work, but it was impossible to ignore them the closer they got.
“I heard he’s here to talk about a possible collaboration on AI solutions.” Douglas’s bitter coffee-breath wafted to Rory’s nose as he leaned closer. “Especially in the hybrid cloud space. That’d be pretty cool, huh? Intellix is doing some amazing stuff with AI.”
Rory edged her chair away from him and didn’t respond. Edward, Nathan, and the execs were getting closer to her workstation. Anxiety gripped her.
Not for a second did she think the execs would deign to discuss the harassment at a meeting—if they all even knew about it—but she’d never imagined what she’d do if her work life intersected negatively with that of the Taylors.
“Hey, Rory.” Nathan’s friendly voice carried over the sound of her heart hammering. “I was hoping we’d see you here.”
“We expected we would,” Edward announced.
Aware of her coworkers going silent with surprise—how, after all, would Rory Prescott know Edward and Nathan Taylor?—she rose to her feet.
“Just a worker bee in The Hive.” She smiled and extended her hand to Edward, then Nathan. “Good to see you both, though I have to say I hadn’t expected it.”
“Kind of an impromptu meeting, or we’d have let you know we were coming.” Nathan smiled.
Edward indicated her workstation. “You work okay here?”
“It’s fine.”
