My Holiday Bonus Was a $5 Million IOU! I Quit and Their Company Collapsed novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: What the Clip Left Out

Mara posts the notice on her own account; a process server demands her password. Ends: Ansel Strandberg at Hattie's door.

By seven the clip had four million views, and I had read the first thousand comments.

"Imagine doing that to your own mother at Christmas."

"Some people don't deserve a family."

"Her poor mom. Look at her face."

Hattie put a bowl of oatmeal in front of me and sat down across the table.

"Eat," she said. Then she reached into her cardigan pocket and laid something flat on the oilcloth.

It was a cream-colored page folded in thirds.

"I took it off the cheese tray before the caterer did," she said.

I unfolded it.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF DEBT.

Total owed: $5,000,000.00.

"Everyone's seen forty seconds of me walking out," I said. "Nobody's seen this."

"Then show them."

"How? I don't have a company page anymore."

"You have a different one," Hattie said.

She was right.

Sunday Table was still mine, with four point eight million followers, and the last thing on it was a lemon loaf I'd posted on December ninth.

My phone was already lit up with messages.

The first was from Brynn.

"Mara, please call me. Mom says you're sick and confused and I don't believe it. Are you OK? I'm scared."

I looked at it for a long time.

Then I typed: "I'm fine, Bee. I love you. I'll call soon."

The second message was the email I hadn't answered.

It had been sitting there since the night before.

"I drove up from Chicago and I'm at a hotel downtown. I'm not leaving Madison until you tell me yourself whether you've seen my letters. A.T."

I didn't answer it yet.

I put the page under the lamp, took one photo of it, and laid the phone on the table.

"What are you going to say?" Hattie asked.

"Nothing."

"Nothing?"

"I'm posting the page, and that's all. People can read."

I opened Sunday Table and posted the photo with no caption, no filter and no title.

By eight o'clock it had a million views.

By nine it had three million, and the comments had changed.

"Wait, FIVE MILLION?"

"For a day off? For surgery?? What kind of mother does that."

"Unapproved leave for SURGERY. I'm going to be sick."

"The person who posted the first clip is the one who did this to her."

Someone had put the two posts side by side, and that one was already past a million.

I didn't feel anything I could name.

I felt tired, and my side hurt, and my oatmeal was cold.

"People are asking what the surgery was," Hattie said, reading over my shoulder.

"I'm not telling them."

"I didn't ask."

"I know."

At ten forty-five somebody knocked on the front door.

Hattie opened it on the chain.

A man in a quilted vest stood on the step holding a thick envelope.

"Mara Sjoberg?"

"That's me," I said.

He put it in my hand and said, "You've been served," and went back down the walk without looking up.

I opened it at the table.

It was a letter from the company's law firm, four pages, with my mother's company name across the top.

It demanded the Sunday Table login and password by nine o'clock the next morning.

It demanded the return of "all company equipment in the employee's possession," including two cameras, a light kit and a laptop.

It said that if I didn't comply, the company would "pursue the full amount owed under the Acknowledgment of Debt."

"The camera's mine," I said. "I bought it at twenty-two with my own money."

"I know," Hattie said. "I processed the receipt."

"Which means she knows that, too."

"She knows it and she wrote 'company equipment' anyway. She's counting on you being too tired to check."

I turned the page over to look at the back, which was blank.

"It doesn't say a word about my apartment," I said.

"It wouldn't. The lease is in the company's name, so she can change the locks whenever she likes."

I sat with the pages in my lap, and the radiator knocked, and out on the street a plow went by.

Then I picked up my phone and answered the email.

"I'm at 114 Dayton Street. Come and say it to my face."

Twenty minutes later someone knocked on the door.

Hattie squinted through the window beside it.

"That isn't another process server," she said slowly. "That's a very tall man holding a coffee, and he has snow on his shoulders."

She opened the door on the chain.

He was in his middle thirties, in a long dark coat, with dark hair going grey at the temples and snow melting on his collar.

When he pushed back his sleeve to take out his phone, there was an old burn scar across his right forearm.

He looked past Hattie, and he looked straight at me.

"Ms. Sjoberg," he said.

"Yes."

"I'm Ansel Strandberg."

His voice was level and quiet.

"You've been ignoring my letters for three years," he said.

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