Chapter 9
By the time Charles finished, I understood everything.
Twice we had made major directional shifts, and twice Richard had tampered with the process from the middle.
To Charles, he claimed the changes were coming from my team. To me, he insisted the client had changed their mind.
So Charles thought we were the ones dragging things around for no reason, while I thought the client was the one making our lives impossible.
Both sides were convinced the other was being unreasonable, when the real problem was sitting in his office on the 32nd floor, the same man who had looked perfectly composed yesterday when he told me to go apologize.
My fingernails pressed deep into my palms.
"Mr. Bennett," I said at last, "thank you for telling me this."
Charles gave me a long look. "I'm not going to tell you how to handle things inside your own agency. But three days from now? That proposal is yours. I'd suggest you keep it that way."
"I will," I said, nodding.
I walked into the elevator.
As the doors closed, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirrored wall.
My face was completely blank. But beneath that blank surface, something was already burning.
Every single bit of this—the eight rounds, the sleepless nights, the endless revisions—had come down to Richard.
None of it had been the client jerking us around.
It had been my own manager, pulling the strings the whole time, while I stayed late and burned myself out over a problem that never should have existed.
Why? What possible reason could he have?
The elevator reached the first floor, and the doors slid open.
I stepped out of the building, and the sunlight hit my face hard as I stopped on the curb to take a long, slow breath.
On the way back to the office, I needed to figure out two things. First, what was I going to do about the proposal in three days? And second, what exactly was Richard really up to?
I pulled out my phone and sent Emily a message. [Can you look into something for me?]
Her response came back within seconds. [Look into what?]
[Do you have any way of checking the email logs?]
[Me? No. But Susan in admin handles that stuff, and she and I get along pretty well. Why? What's going on?]
[I need to see the emails between Richard and Fordwell Group. Specifically around the time we went from V3 to V4, and then again from V6 to V7.]
There was a brief pause before she responded. [You think he's been messing with things?]
[I just got confirmation from Mr. Bennett. That big change after V6? The client never asked for it. Richard made the whole thing happen on his own. He lied to both sides.]
A longer silence followed. Then she asked: [Are you sure?]
[Mr. Bennett told me himself. Neither of those directional shifts came from him. Richard told him it was our internal idea, and he told me the client had changed their mind.]
[Holy shit.]
That was the second person today who had said the exact same thing to me.
[Don't say anything yet.] I typed back. [Just see if you can get those emails. I need proof.]
[Got it. When are you coming in?]
[Half an hour.]
I hung up the phone. On the subway ride back to the office, I began piecing everything together from the start.
What exactly was Richard's motive in all of this?
A few possibilities came to mind.
The first was that he wanted the project to fail, but that didn't really hold up. If the project went under, he wouldn't stand to gain anything from it. The results would still count toward his own performance review.
The second possibility, which seemed far more likely, was that he was trying to push me out and bring in someone else to take over.
If the proposal kept getting shot down, the client would start questioning the person in charge of delivery.