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“Well, please, enlighten us all.” His eyes are full of steel, unrelenting hardness, as he takes a seat across from me. He crosses his arms over his chest as though bored, but his eyes lock on mine with an intensity that is almost scary.
“Greg Standley is my uncle.”
I pause for a response, but there is no reaction as I look around the table. Liz has yet to make eye contact. She seems to be very focused on her fingernails. Dax’s usually friendly face is taut with an unyielding stare that puts me more on edge if that’s even possible.
“My uncle, Greg, invited me over for dinner one night several months ago. He was upset and told me he was about to lose his business. He said that the Anders Group had purposely spread malicious and false information about his business in order for him to go under. He told me you contacted his vendors and lied about him not paying bills. Then, he claimed that you called the banks and stopped his loans from being approved.”
“That’s a fucking lie,” Jake says through clenched teeth.
I clear my throat before continuing. “I didn’t understand why a company would go to so much trouble to discredit such a small business.He said that you were trying to have his business devalued to the point that he would have to accept your lowball offer. I had never seen my uncle so upset. His business is his life. I did the only thing I could think of. I put together a resume and applied to get a job here at the Anders Group.”
“And just what did you think to accomplish when you took the job here?” Jake asks, his jaw clenched.
“I actually don’t know. I didn’t really have a plan. I just knew that I had to help him,” I reply.
“So, you falsified your resume and job application, lied to everyone here, and you expect us to believe that you did all of that without having any sort of plan? Is that what you are telling us?”
“I know. It sounds really stupid now. But, Jake, I didn’t go through with it. I didn’t do anything. When you gave me the files for his company, I told you I couldn’t work on them. I never even read them.”
“That’s interesting,” he says, his voice seemingly calm and controlled. “Because my IT department checked, and it appears that our server shows that you printed a copy of these documents. Maybe you didn’t realize that we save images of everything that is printed in our offices. Do you know why we do that, Lana?”
“To prevent sensitive documents from getting leaked out,” I reply miserably.
Dax broke in before Jake could reply. “What did you do with those copies? According to Liz, you told her that you were going to shred them. I’m assuming that was another lie.”
Until this very moment, I had actually forgotten about the documents. I look over at Liz, but she refuses to look me in the eye. She’s never going to forgive me. I’ve destroyed the trust that she had in me.
“I still have them in my bag. I printed them, but then I felt terrible afterward. I never read them or gave them to my uncle. I swear to you, I meant to destroy them, but I just forgot about them.”
Jake’s laugh was forced and strained. “You have got to be kidding me. You forgot about them? Let me drop a little bit of truth on you, Lana. You know my brother Ethan? The one that likes to start projects and never finish them? Well, your uncle’s company was one of his . . . well, we’ll call it a charity project. Your uncle’s company was going under. He was so far in debt that he had no way to crawl his way out. We had no part in the vendors refusing to do business with him. He did that when he didn’t pay his bills. Banks wouldn’t loan him money because he was already defaulting on existing loans.”
I voraciously shake my head at him. “No, no, that’s not right. My uncle has been in business for thirty years. He never even took out a loan for the company.”
“I hate to break it to you, but it looks like lying runs in your family,” he says snidely. “If it weren’t for me and this company buying him out last week, your uncle would have lost everything. I suggest you fact-check this with him. Your uncle’s company wouldn’t have survived another six months at the rate he was burning through cash.”
Dax stands up and nods over to Jake. “I think we have all of the info we need here. It doesn’t really matter at this point, anyway. There wasn’t anything in those files that would have made any difference to the outcome of the sale.” Dax looks at me, and behind the anger, I can see just a bit of pity in his eyes.
Jake stands up, too. “You’re right. Everyone can leave. Except you.” His eyes pierce me in an unblinking stare as they practically shoot daggers at me.
I guess it’s now time to face the lion. He was tame before, but I see the anger he is holding back. I’m terrified of what he is about to say to me.
No one says a word to me as they file out of the office.
Jake sits back down at the table and rests his elbows on the table. His stare is unnerving. I nervously lick my lips and see his eyes follow. He sits back with a disgusted look on his face.
“I could have forgiven you for most of this had you come to me and told me the truth. You spent months planning this behind my back.”
“I wanted to tell you. But I was scared that you wouldn’t believe me.”
He continues on like I haven’t spoken. “Do you know what I can’t forgive? I can’t forgive you for making me believe you cared for me. That we had something special. I actually thought I loved you. Was everything from you a lie? Even that?”
I cringe at the cold, emotionless tone of his voice. His face is a mask of hatred. I feel everything slipping away.
“Nothing about our relationship was a lie, not how I feel about you. I love you more than anything. I need you to believe that, even if you don’t believe anything else,” I plead with him, desperate to make him understand.
“What I believe is that you’re a liar. And that I can’t trust a word out of your gorgeous, lying little mouth.”
“Jake, please. Don’t do this to us.”
