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

Chapter 5: Ninth Floor

On Monday morning I went back to the ninth floor to get my camera.

Hattie still had her key card.

Ansel stood in the lobby with his hands in his coat pockets and said he'd wait there.

"This is mine to do," I told him.

"Understood," he said. "I'll be at the bottom of the stairs."

The elevator opened on the open-plan floor, and every keyboard stopped.

Sixty people looked at me.

Some of them had clapped on Friday.

Some of them looked at their screens now, and a few looked at the floor.

The camera case sat in the studio room at the back, where it had sat for six years.

I was halfway down the aisle when my mother stepped out of her glass office.

She wore a cream suit and her pearls, and she looked rested.

"Mara," she said gently. "You came."

"I came for my camera."

"It's company equipment, sweetheart. It's in the letter."

"I bought it myself at twenty-two. The receipt's in Hattie's files."

"Receipts can be wrong." She turned to the room. "I'm sorry, everyone. My daughter isn't herself. She had a hard year, and her surgery has affected her."

A man from accounting put down his pen.

"What surgery?" he said.

"It's private," my mother said. "Mara knows."

She said it with a smile, and then she looked straight at me.

It was a quiet warning, and I understood it.

If I said another word about that surgery in front of sixty people, she would say the rest of it herself, and she'd choose which words.

I took the folded bank notice out of my coat.

"Mom," I said. "Tell them what the five million is."

"I don't know what you're holding."

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