Schemes Come to Naught novel · Chapter 4 of 24

Chapter 4: Ninety People Stand Up

The all-hands met at eleven in the big conference room on the fourth floor.

Ninety people came, some standing along the walls, a few on the video call from the Cleveland office.

Ines stood at the back with her arms folded and a notebook against her chest.

Valeria sat in the front row with her hands folded in her lap.

I had practiced the speech in the car.

I said we were growing, and growth meant restructuring.

I said certain functions would be consolidated under new leadership.

Nobody moved.

"As part of that," I said, "the operations role is being eliminated, effective at the end of the month."

I made myself look at Ines.

She looked back, and her face didn't change.

She didn't blink.

I had expected anger, or at least a tear.

I got a plain, patient face.

"I want to thank everyone who..." I said, and heard how thin it sounded.

A chair scraped.

Ben Ostrow stood up in the third row, holding a coffee mug.

"Which operations role?" he asked.

"Ben, we'll go over details after."

"There's one operations role, Dex. She's standing at the back." He turned and pointed his mug at her. "She wrote the onboarding guide. She found the vendor who saved us two hundred thousand a year. She stayed here till two in the morning in March when the servers went down and I was the one who panicked."

"This isn't the time."

"You promised her a place in front of a clerk," he said. "Most of this building heard about it that same week. Are we going to pretend that didn't happen?"

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