Access Denied: I Revoked My Permission To Thrive

Synopsis

At the bell-ringing ceremony for Edward Grant's IPO, I sat offstage. Not next to my husband, the CEO, but in a cramped corner of the family section, squeezed next to the driver at a wobbly table. Meanwhile, Sophie Lane, an intern who started three months ago, was under the spotlight. She was wearing a sold-out designer dress that used to hang in my closet. Her arm was linked through my husband's, and she was soaking up the applause and camera flashes as if she belonged there. When the reception wound down, Edward tossed me the plastic cake knife. His face held that familiar, cold expression that had become his default setting. "Olivia, don't stand there like a statue. Scrape the plates and stack them. The cleaning crew charges double if we leave a mess, and we need to watch our burn rate." All around us, employees and executives, everyone clutching their new stock option paperwork, stared at me. They looked at me as if I were a busboy who had been standing by their table for too long. I glanced down at the plastic knife covered in vanilla frosting, then back up at Edward's smug, victorious face. I didn't kneel and start wiping crumbs off the tablecloth the way I always used to. Instead, I pulled out my phone and calmly typed a command. I revoked the authorization for the company's core algorithm, the ghost protocol I had built from scratch. If he was so sure I was dead weight, I wanted him to feel exactly how heavy that weight could be when it was gone.