“Yes. She said she didn’t send the photograph.”
“I know.”
My stomach tightened. “You know?”
“I believe she didn’t.”
“Why didn’t you tell me you confronted her?”
A pause.
“You’re right,” he said. “I should have.”
I sat on the edge of my bed, looking at the gray morning beyond my window.
“She thinks someone else is behind this.”
“So do I.”
“Who?”
“I’m not certain yet.”
“But you suspect someone.”
Another pause.
“Yes.”
“Nathan.”
“I don’t want to give you half-formed accusations.”
“I don’t want to be protected from information that affects me.”
His exhale was quiet.
“You’re right.”
There was that phrase again, and this time it did not feel like surrender. It felt like learning.
He said, “There’s a board member named Victor Hale. He opposed the Whitmore deal, then suddenly supported it after a private meeting with Celeste’s father. He has also been pushing for a leadership restructuring.”
“What does that have to do with me?”
“If he can prove my judgment is compromised by a relationship with an employee, he can question my fitness to lead during negotiations.”
I closed my eyes.
“So I’m not the target. I’m the instrument.”
The sentence tasted bitter.
Nathan’s voice sharpened with emotion. “You are not an instrument.”
“To them, I might be.”
He did not deny it.
That honesty hurt, but it mattered.
“What happens now?” I asked.
“I keep investigating through proper channels. Quietly.”
“And me?”
“You keep doing your job. You tell me, Denise, or Priya if anything strange happens. And Maya?”
“Yes?”
“Do not meet Celeste alone.”
I almost smiled despite everything. “She might say the same about you.”
“She would enjoy that.”
The tiny thread of humor between us surprised me. It did not erase the danger or the uncertainty, but it reminded me we were still two people, not just pieces on someone else’s board.
On Monday, Northstar buzzed with an energy I could not immediately identify.
People clustered near coffee machines. Conversations stopped when managers passed. My inbox held a calendar invitation marked mandatory: All-Hands Meeting, Friday, 4:00 PM.
By noon, rumors had multiplied.
A merger announcement.
A leadership change.
A major acquisition.
Layoffs.
No one knew anything, which meant everyone knew everything.
That afternoon, while reviewing a data file from the strategic forecast, I found something odd.
At first, it looked like a simple version mismatch. A column of regional implementation dates differed from the file we had used in the meeting. In the official shared drive, the dates supported the optimistic Q3 rollout. But in the archived vendor communications, the dates clearly showed delays.
Someone had manually overwritten the model inputs.
I stared at the screen, pulse quickening.
This was not just aggressive forecasting.
This was manipulation.
I checked the file history.
The change had been made six weeks earlier by an executive admin account.
Not a person’s name.
A shared credential.
My mouth went dry.
I downloaded the logs, saved copies, and sent them to Priya with a simple note: I may be misunderstanding this, but these inputs appear to have been altered after vendor confirmation. Can you review?
Then I sat very still.
Ten minutes later, Priya appeared beside my desk.
“Conference room,” she said quietly.
No greeting. No explanation.
I followed her to a small internal room with no glass walls.
Denise was already there.
So was Julian.
And Nathan.
My steps faltered when I saw him, but his expression told me he was not there as the man who had held my hand beside the river. He was there as CEO.
Priya closed the door.
“Maya,” she said, “walk us through exactly what you found.”
So I did.
I explained the discrepancy, the archived communications, the altered dates, the file history, the shared admin account. My voice shook once near the beginning. Then steadied as the facts took over.
Julian asked precise questions. Denise took notes. Priya’s face became more serious with every answer.
Nathan said very little.
When I finished, the room was silent.
Finally, Julian removed his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose.
“If this is accurate,” he said, “the board has been reviewing inflated projections.”
Priya looked at Nathan. “And signing a contract based on them could expose the company legally.”
Nathan’s jaw tightened. “Can we trace the admin access?”
“Possibly,” Priya said. “But we need to handle this carefully.”
Denise looked at me. “Who else knows you found this?”
“No one. I emailed Priya and came here.”
“Good.”
Nathan’s gaze met mine across the table. There was pride there, and concern, and something deeper he did not allow to show fully.
“You did the right thing,” he said.
The words should have reassured me.
Instead, they made everything feel more dangerous.
Because if someone had altered the numbers, and if that someone knew I had found it, then my quiet life had already been pulled into the center of something much larger than a complicated romance.
By Friday, the all-hands meeting had been postponed.
No explanation.
The office became tense in a way people tried to disguise with productivity. Calendar invites vanished. Executives moved through hallways with closed expressions. Celeste did not appear again, but her name surfaced in whispers near elevators and behind half-closed doors.
Nathan and I did not speak privately.
Then, at 7:18 Friday evening, as I was packing up to leave, my desk phone rang.
Almost no one used desk phones anymore.
I stared at it for two rings before answering.
“This is Maya Bennett.”
