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I wasn’t someone who did covert things with confidence. I’d never even tried to track down my presents after I found out the truth about Santa. Just the idea of being sneaky had always given me a wobbly belly.
Despite having snuck around Phillip’s office before, it still made my stomach sink, my heart soar up to lodge in my throat, a cold sweat to break out over my skin.
But I managed to force my uncertain legs to quickly carry me into his office, closing the door behind me, figuring it would give me a few extra precious seconds to look like I was cleaning up the food should someone come back early.
Then, nerve endings sparking off, I got myself back into Phillip’s computer, this time at least knowing what files not to bother wasting my time in, ones I had wasted enough time in before.
Phillip was clearly not the kind of person who remembered every once in a while to go through his electronics and clear out unnecessary junk. He likely just bought bigger sim cards or cloud storage for his phone when he was running out of storage room.
His desktop was the kind from nightmares where files were layered upon files, three to four deep at times, making reading the names impossible.
I brought up the finder, looking through everything to be found there, deciding which files to look at now, and which to mentally stash away for the next opportunity.
I had just opened one which contained files whose names didn’t sound like they matched the name of the folder itself when I heard the door in the other room open.
The mouse flew around in my hand out of control for a long second before I managed to ex out of everything and put the computer to sleep, getting over to the tray just in time as the door opened yet again.
“Go ahead and finish up, Jenna,” Phillip told me. After correcting him for a few weeks, I decided to just let it slide. Maybe it was better if he didn’t know my real name anyway. “David and I have a last-minute meeting. I won’t be needing any of that.”
With an onlooker, when he passed me to go into his desk, he didn’t run his hand over any part of me like he typically would. Somehow, though, I think I would have preferred that to the penetrative stare David was shooting in my direction, one I was pretending to be oblivious to as I shuffled everything together with clumsy hands.
“I know I left that notepad somewhere…” Phillip mumbled.
But it was mostly lost to me because as I stood and moved to walk past David, whose head ducked down just as my shoulder nearly brushed his.
“Why are your hands shaking?”
He didn’t actually want an answer. If he wanted one, he would have asked in a voice loud enough for Phillip to hear.
He just wanted me to know he’d seen, that he was watching, that my paranoid thoughts weren’t delusions at all.
Every single part of me was trembling when I made it into the small private kitchen that housed a five-thousand-dollar coffee machine, a fridge, and a small table.
I wanted to quit, to chicken out, to go back on my word.
There was simply no quieting the voice inside that said I was tap dancing near the edge of a cliff. It was only a matter of time before I made one false step, before I went tumbling over.
Eventually, no matter how careful I was sure I was being, David was going to find me out.
What then, I had no idea.
But I didn’t figure it would involve a trip to human resources or even the police station. Something about this situation had me believing it would get much uglier than that, that companies such as Blairtown Chem handled their own dirty work. In less than legal ways.
I spent the rest of the day trying to deep breathe, trying to remind myself that I always tended to think in the most dramatic terms as possible simply because I had worked at Quin’s office for a while, had seen big corporations call the team in to “fix” their various problems. By whatever means necessary.
I couldn’t claim–especially now–to always be an upstanding citizen, that I did everything by the book, that I saw everything in the very defined shades of black and white.
That said, I didn’t believe that just because you could get away with shady things that you should. Simply because you could pay for it.
I hadn’t really considered that until after I had stopped working at Quin’s office. It wasn’t until I had gotten some time and space that I had really started to consider the morality of what they did. Maybe not Quin’s office in and of itself per se, since I knew them mostly to be on the good side of things, but those that did what they did. Fixers, crisis managers, private security. People on a payroll who could make pesky problems disappear.
