At the Year-End Party He Thanked Me for Doing His Paperwork, So I Took the Microphone novel · Chapter 11 of 24

Chapter 11: Cropped

There were twenty-two reporters outside the Tsukishiro Grand at twenty to nine on Monday morning.

Chiaki counted them from the taxi.

"You can go in through the car park," the driver said. "Everybody does."

"Not today," she said, and paid him.

They saw her when she was still on the pavement.

They came at her in one wave, cameras up, voices on top of each other.

"Hayase-san! The photo! Suite 1507!"

"Were you alone with the vice-president?"

"What happened at one in the morning?"

Chiaki stopped in front of the revolving doors and waited.

It took almost a minute for them to understand she wasn't going to walk through.

Gradually the noise came down.

She took a large brown envelope out of her bag, and from the envelope a print the size of a magazine page.

On New Year's night a message had come to Haruka from a junior on Chiaki's old floor, the twenty-three-year-old who knew clause twelve.

"I was in that photo," the junior had written. "This is the real one. I'm sorry I'm scared to post it."

Chiaki held the print up with both hands so the cameras could see it.

"This is the original," she said. "October twenty-ninth, four minutes past one in the morning. Count the people."

The same door. The same corridor.

But the picture was wider.

Through the half-open door you could see the long table in suite 1507, covered in takeout boxes and printouts.

Around it sat six Hanamori juniors in shirtsleeves, two of them asleep on their folded arms.

On the whiteboard behind them someone had written "DRAFT 28" and drawn a skull.

"Nobody was alone in that room," Chiaki said. "Not that night, and not any night."

A woman near the front leaned in, squinting.

"What's that in the window?"

"That's what I wanted to show you."

On the right side of the print, the suite's black night window reflected the room.

In the reflection stood a man in a grey suit, holding up a phone.

You couldn't miss the dimple.

"That is Saeki Ryota," Chiaki said. "Hanamori's new head of Sales Planning. He stopped by that night for an hour, and before he left, he took this picture of us all."

The cameras went off.

"It's his photo," she said. "You can ask him who cropped it."

"Hayase-san, are you accusing Saeki-san of leaking the photo?"

"I'm telling you who took it." She put the print back in the envelope. "Excuse me. I'm late for work."

She went through the revolving door.

Her hands didn't start shaking until the elevator.

By noon, the weekly had taken its story down.

By two, a sports paper had the uncropped photo on its website under the headline "WHO CROPPED THE NEGOTIATION SUITE?"

By four, somebody had found the original on Ryota's personal account.

He had posted it in October with the caption "My team grinding. Proud of them."

He deleted it at a quarter past four.

Too late. There were screenshots everywhere.

Tsukishiro's head of PR came down to the 22nd floor at five.

He stood in Chiaki's doorway for a while without speaking, and then bowed and left.

Her team lead put a can of hot coffee on her desk.

"From the vending machine," she said. "Don't get used to it."

Chiaki didn't see Kaname all day.

He had recused himself from anything to do with Hanamori, and he kept to it.

He didn't send a message or catch her eye in the corridor.

At ten that night she stood in the hall of the 41st floor between the two doors.

She had a pen in her hand.

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