Chapter 7 - The Reckoning
Elena stepped up shoulder-to-shoulder with her mother. The trembling was gone from her posture. She folded her arms, looking down at Brenda not with hatred, but with the cold, assessing clarity of someone who had just finished an audit.
"You called me a charity hire," Elena said calmly. "You said I wasn't dirt on the bottom of your shoes. And then you told me to get on my knees."
"Elena—miss Vance—please," Brenda’s voice turned shrill, high-pitched, desperate. She extended trembling hands, palms up, pleading. "I was stressed! The third-quarter projections were running late! Carter gave me bad data! I haven't slept in forty-eight hours! I had no intention of—"
"Carter," Evelyn barked, not even turning her head.
Carter jumped three inches off the ground. "Yes, ma'am!"
"Call corporate legal. Tell Arthur I want the non-disclosure agreements, the employment severance packages, and the forensic auditing division assembled in boardroom A in three minutes."
"Right away, Mrs. Vance!" Carter practically sprinted toward the glass corridor, abandoning Brenda without looking back once.
Brenda stumbled backward until her spine hit the side of the heavy commercial printer. "Forensic audit? Why... why would you need forensic audit? This is an HR dispute! A workplace misunderstanding! We can handle this through mediation!"
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Evelyn reached into her pocket and pulled out a small black flash drive, holding it between two fingers.
"This morning at six-thirty, my daughter didn't print quarterly reports, Brenda," Evelyn said, her voice dropping into a register that signaled total destruction. "She was downloading five years of your ghost-consulting kickbacks from our shipping vendors in New Jersey."
