Your Future Belongs in My Trash Can

For six years, Jenna has carried the company on her back. She joined when it was a cramped, near-bankrupt operation, and through grueling unpaid overtime she helped drag it to four floors of a high-rise, running point on five critical accounts. Her reward: a salary that crept from sixty thousand to sixty-six thousand one hundred and fifty dollars, while three new assistants were hired just to keep up with her.

Then she overhears the newest hire—three months in, out the door at five—has been made permanent at a base of one hundred and twenty thousand dollars. She resigns to Dahlia Stone, the HR Director, who offers a single devastating explanation: Jenna is a woman, twenty-eight, about to marry, and Rich Kingsley fears a honeymoon and maternity leave. Dahlia herself earns eighty thousand—because Rich is her cousin.

Her boyfriend Spencer Wells, a Project Manager making three hundred thousand, tells her ability doesn't dictate pay; Rich does. So Jenna takes her voice recorder and heads for the elevator, determined to demand an answer for six years of her life.