The Intern is the Undercover Boss novel · Chapter 3 of 24
Chapter 3: The Lounge
Whitney moves Dara to the filing room, Noelle befriends her, and then Noelle admits she leaked the video.
Cullen moved first.
He stepped in front of me and held out his hand, flat.
"Delete it," he said.
Whitney Dole tilted her phone to catch his face.
"Mr. Averill. I wondered why a famous man needed six weeks in my building."
"Delete the video."
"Or what? You'll tell Marlowe that the director of design caught their consultant with his hands on an intern?"
"I'll tell them the director of design films her staff in stairwells."
"They'll believe me. I've been here nine years."
Her eyes slid past his shoulder to me.
She was enjoying this the way some people enjoy a good meal.
I stepped out from behind him and picked up my glasses.
My hands were shaking, so I put them on slowly.
"What do you want, Ms. Dole?" I said.
"Oh, you can talk now."
"I'm asking what you want."
"I want you to understand where you are."
"I understand."
"Do you? Because you will be spending the rest of this week in the filing room, in the basement, with the old client boxes. Alone."
"Is that an order?"
"It's a promise."
"And if I tell someone about the order?"
Whitney smiled with all her teeth.
"Then this video goes to Martin Soames, who runs this studio."
"By lunch you'll be gone, and so will Mr. Averill's contract."
She shrugged.
"Neither of you will find work in Chicago."
I let a second pass.
On the inside of my cardigan, a little pen clipped to the lining had caught every word.
"I understand completely," I said.
She turned and clicked back up the stairs.
The door banged.
Cullen was breathing hard through his nose.
"I'm going to take that phone from her."
"Don't."
"Dara, she's blackmailing you."
"I know."
"Then why are you standing there like you've been told the weather?"
"Because I need to be in that basement," I said.
It came out before I thought about it, and he stared at me.
"Why?"
"There's a reason."
"I'd like to hear it."
"Not yet."
He rubbed his jaw with an inky hand, and I noticed the faint tremor in his fingers.
He was angry for me.
Nobody had been angry for me in years.
My staff was afraid of me, and my family wanted a favor.
"I took this job because of a person," he said finally.
"A person this woman hurt. I'm not going to let her do it to you."
"Whose person?"
"Not yet," he said, and almost smiled, and handed my own answer back to me.
I laughed, once.
Then I went down to the basement.
The filing room was a long gray cellar with a flickering light and nine hundred cardboard boxes.
It smelled like wet dust.
A girl was sitting on the floor in the corner with her knees pulled up, eating a granola bar.
She had short red curls and a baggy green sweater.
She was the girl who had slid me the paper clip.
"Hi," she said, with her mouth full. "I'm Noelle. I'm also being punished."
"For what?"
"Existing. Also, I took the last good chair."
I sat on a box across from her.
"Dara."
"I know. I saw you stand up to her. Nobody stands up to her."
"I didn't stand up. I just didn't bend over."
"Same thing here."
She handed me half the granola bar without asking.
I took it.
It was stale and perfect.
"How long have you been in this basement?" I asked.
"Eleven days. They moved me down after the video."
"What video?"
I kept my voice flat.
She looked at me for a long moment.
She was twenty-three, I knew from her paperwork.
She held her hands.
"You've heard about it," she said.
"Everyone has. It's in the news."
"Forty seconds. A woman screaming at another woman in the middle of the floor. The other woman was crying so hard she couldn't breathe."
"I heard."
"She was a senior designer, and she quit the next day."
"Do you know her?"
"I sat next to her for a year."
She put the granola wrapper down very carefully.
Her chin was shaking.
"Dara, if I tell you something, will you promise not to say it to anyone?"
"I can't promise that until I hear it."
"That's fair. That's honest. Okay."
She wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand.
"I'm the one who sent the video to the reporter," Noelle said. "I recorded it, and I leaked it."
The light above us flickered.
"And Whitney is looking for who did it," she whispered. "She's been going through everyone's phone. She's starting with the interns."
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