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People were willing to go to great lengths to save their own asses. Not many were willing to commit a federal crime by tampering with the mail.
“Overnight, please,” I told the woman at the desk, trying to keep myself from jumping around, forcing a smile. Jumpy, nervous people didn’t get their mail sent through with the rest of it. They got detained as the cops searched their packages.
I honestly didn’t remember putting my card in the machine, getting my receipt, or making my way to the door.
I went from asking for a next-day package to being out on the street again, looking both ways like an amateur drug dealer on the lookout for cops.
Objectively, I knew what I should have done, what the smartest move was.
Marching myself down the street, letting myself into my old workplace, to the end of the hall, into Quin’s office, and telling him the truth.
All of it this time.
Tell him about my worries, my suspicions. Then fall on his mercy, beg for him to help me fix things.
That was what he did.
Sure, I couldn’t pay the astronomical fees that his typical clients could, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t take me on. For nothing else but obligation. I mean, not that I thought he would do so begrudgingly. Quin and I had always gotten along pretty well. He was a good man. He liked helping people. Maybe especially those who genuinely needed it. And the astronomical fees he charged those who could afford it, they made it possible for him to occasionally help the little man.
Like me.
But the situation just… didn’t seem to warrant that.
With the external drive and paperwork safe, on their way to someone who would protect them, and outside of the building where eyes seemed to always be watching me, I felt some of the frazzled nerves ease. My belly settled. My pulse slowed.
Even if David suspected me of something, well, he couldn’t exactly prove it, could he? I had been careful. I always had a reason to be in Phillip’s office. There was nothing to pin on me.
The cops, therefore, weren’t something I needed to worry about. There would be no hideous orange jumpsuits and trays full of fattening slop pushed across me on a cafeteria line in my future.
And, really, if David had no proof that I had actually done anything, what were the chances he would waste valuable money in hiring someone to make me go away?
I hadn’t been working at the office when they’d finally gotten Bellamy to sign up, but Jules had let it slip to me about him being hired, about how much it would cost a client to bring him in.
Quin charged more money than most middle-class families would see in a decade just for basic services.
But for Bellamy’s particular service? Yeah, the average person would likely never see that kind of money.
I knew that Blairtown Chem made an almost unconscionable amount of capital per year, but I also knew they stopped comping parking and that they replaced the weekly fresh flowers all over the building with artificial ones.
I knew enough about cutbacks to know that they were doing all the small things that might make it so that they could avoid layoffs for a while.
People cutting corners like that didn’t drop huge sums of money on taking care of one rogue secretary.
Even if they suspected said secretary was snooping around.
There was no way they could have known what I was looking for, that I could have the information I had when I first walked through their doors, that my presence there was solely because of a mission I had been on since before I’d even sent human resources my very made-up résumé.
I had just been caught up in the moment, paranoid because of what I had found, what it meant.
Yes, David had chased me out of the building. That said, I had also very clearly quit without notice while the CEO, my boss, the man who considered me his right hand, was down with the flu. Which left no one at the helm of a ship that had a tendency to veer violently off in the wrong direction if someone so much as looked away for a moment or two.
It was probably nothing more than that.
That phone call he had been making as I pulled away was most likely to Phillip to tell him that I had abruptly quit.
Nothing more, nothing less.
It was over.
It was all finally, finally freaking over.
I sank back against the wall, feeling almost a bit lightheaded with relief.
My time spent at Blairtown Chem had been the most stressful, overwhelming period of my entire life. And that included finals at college. So it was saying something.
I chalked a lot of that up to the fact that being there, contributing to a place I didn’t believe in, morally objected to, made me feel slimy and uncomfortable in my own skin.
