My Holiday Bonus Was a $5 Million IOU! I Quit and Their Company Collapsed novel · Chapter 10 of 24

Chapter 10: New Year's Eve

Mara's POV

By New Year's Eve the story called him a predator in four languages, and I had made one video about it.

It was a very short one.

I shot it in Hattie's kitchen with my phone propped on the sugar bowl, and I wore the same sweater I'd cooked in.

"This is the house in the photo," I said to the lens. "That man came at midnight with eggs. He cut a potato wrong and I corrected him. The page I posted last week is real, and so is my mother's bank. That's all."

I posted it on Sunday Table with no caption.

The comments turned inside an hour.

"He cut the potato wrong??"

"She really said 'I corrected him.' I love her."

"Delete the first article, Madison Dispatch, you've been played."

Ansel's communications director sent him a message at nine that night.

It said the story had been "contained," and that he should lie low until the second.

"I'm not hiding," I told him in Hattie's front hall. "If we hide, they win the picture."

"What do you want to do?" he asked.

"Go out."

Forty minutes later the three of us were wedged into a booth at a bar called Tolley's, with Hattie in a sequined cardigan, ordering a gin and tonic with great ceremony.

The place was packed.

The crowd pushed in from the door in waves, and a band was tuning in the corner.

"I love it," Hattie shouted over the noise. "I haven't been out after nine since the Clinton administration."

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