The projector bulb was blindingly bright. Clara stood at the head of the long glass table in Conference Room B, gripping the edges of the podium so hard her fingernails dug into the wood veneer.
At the opposite end sat Marcus, the Regional VP. He had flown in from Chicago, skipping lunch to squeeze this review in. Next to him was David, a silver pen twirling casually between his fingers, playing the role of the relaxed, confident manager.
"Whenever you're ready, Clara," Marcus said. He didn't sound impatient, just busy.
Clara clicked the presentation remote.
Slide one appeared on the massive screen behind her. It wasn't the sleek, corporate-branded title page Arthur had coded for her. It was a stark white background with plain black text.
Q3 Revenue Overview. Draft 1.
She clicked again.
Slide two. A pie chart she had frantically tried to rebuild twenty minutes ago. The colors were the default neon Excel settings. The legend was cut off.
"So," Clara started, her voice sounding thin and reedy in the large room. "As you can see, the trajectory for the logistics sector—"
"Clara," Marcus interrupted. He leaned forward, squinting at the screen. "Are those the finalized Q3 numbers? Because they look like last year's Q4 projections. The axes aren't even labeled."
Clara's mouth was completely dry. She swallowed, desperately trying to summon the silver-tongued charm that usually got her out of tight spots. "There was a... a syncing error with the cloud drive right before the meeting. The data is accurate, I just—"
"A syncing error?" David asked. His tone was sharp. He stopped twirling his pen. He was looking at her like he'd never met her before. "We reviewed the finalized deck yesterday afternoon. It was perfect. Why didn't you just pull it from the local drive?"
He was doing it. Right in front of her. He was building a firewall between himself and her failure.
Clara stared at him. The man who, less than twenty-four hours ago, was whispering in her ear about how she was the smartest woman in the building. Now, he was throwing her directly under the bus to save his own reputation with the VP.
"The local file was overwritten," she said, her voice trembling slightly.
Marcus sat back in his chair, folding his hands over his stomach. "I don't really care about your IT issues, Clara. I care about the seventy million dollars we're supposed to be forecasting. Do you have the numbers or don't you?"
She clicked the remote one more time, praying she had successfully pasted the raw spreadsheet data onto slide three during her panic.
She hadn't.
The screen flashed. Right in the center, in giant, unmissable text, were the placeholder words:
LOREM IPSUM DOLOR SIT AMET.
The silence that followed was suffocating. The hum of the ceiling projector suddenly sounded like a jet engine.
David sighed—a heavy, theatrical sound of disappointment. He looked at Marcus. "Marcus, I apologize. This isn't the standard of work I expect from my team. I'll have the correct file compiled by one of the junior analysts and sent to your hotel by six."
He didn't even look at Clara. He just stripped her of the project entirely.
"Fine," Marcus said, standing up and buttoning his suit jacket. "Don't waste my time like this again, David."
They walked out of the room together. They didn't tell Clara to follow.
Clara stood alone in the freezing conference room, the glaring Lorem Ipsum text burning into her retinas. Her career wasn't just stalling; it was disintegrating in real-time. First the Gallagher account, now the Q3 review. Everything she touched today turned to ash.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket.
She pulled it out with shaking hands. It was a text from Arthur.
Arthur: Just finished my shift. Grabbing some groceries for dinner. Do you want me to pick up a bottle of wine to celebrate the big pitch?
Clara stared at the screen. A single, cold drop of sweat rolled down her ribs.
He doesn't know, she told herself. He couldn't know.
But as she looked at the blank, gutted presentation on the screen—the presentation she was completely incapable of building without his technical skills—a horrible, gnawing thought finally took root in the back of her mind.
What if he did?