Chapter 2My Boss On My Payroll

By my third week, I had settled into the corporate cadence of Beacon Media.

The rule of thumb was simple: keep your head down and produce. The ambient pressure around Margot Reed’s office had a way of muting everyone within a fifty-foot radius.

Except Dustin.

He sat in the pod adjacent to mine, possessing a level of workplace audacity I could only dream of. He’d scroll through sports highlights with the volume low but completely unmuted. Whenever Margot walked by, he’d slide his phone under his keyboard without flinching and stare at an Excel sheet with the furrowed brow of a man solving world hunger.

I respected him. Mostly, I respected that he was still employed.

That Friday after clocking out, I shot off another three hundred dollars to "my sister."

"Hey kid, it’s the weekend. Take your roommates out for a decent meal. My treat."

"Don't rot in your dorm all Saturday. Get outside. College flies by, and before you know it, you’re stuck in an office regretting your twenties like your brother."

"How are the roommates, anyway? Anyone giving you grief? Let me know. I can’t win a fistfight, but I can out-argue an entire sorority on your behalf."

Feeling particularly sentimental, I held down the microphone button to send a voice memo. I lifted the phone to my mouth.

"Hey, kid. Gotta tell you something wild. That female boss I mentioned? Reed? You have no idea how terrifying she is in person. She walks into a conference room and the temperature drops ten degrees. Dustin swears every time she cracks a smile, our parent company’s stock plummets half a point. I used to think he was joking. Now? I’m a believer. She looked at me today and I genuinely thought security was coming to escort me out. It’s this look... like you owe her two million dollars and she’s just too exhausted by your existence to collect. Anyway, off to make some ramen. Go to sleep early."

A fifty-three-second voice memo. Sent.

I tossed my phone onto the bed, whistled my way to the kitchenette, and felt like a model older brother.

At that exact moment, in Margot’s penthouse.

She had just stepped out of the shower, a plush towel wrapped around her hair, sitting on her mid-century modern sectional. She tapped the audio bubble.

My voice filled the quiet living room, crisp and resonant through her phone speaker.

Every single word.

Especially the parts about the "temperature dropping ten degrees", "looking like security was on the way", and "owing her two million dollars".

The memo ended. The living room hung in silence for ten unbroken seconds.

Margot reached out and tapped the play button again.

She listened to the whole fifty-three seconds a second time.

Then, setting the phone on the glass coffee table, she picked up her remote and changed the channel. A cooking show was detailing the technique for slow-braised short ribs.

Margot stared at the screen. The corner of her mouth gave a faint, microscopic twitch upward. It was so subtle that unless you were standing three inches from her face, you’d never catch it.

It was the largest facial movement she had made in three months.

Monday morning, corporate lobby.

I was clutching a paper bag with a bagel and an iced latte, waiting near the security gates, when Margot emerged from the executive elevator.

Long wool coat in tailored charcoal, hair swept up, skin pale and immaculate. Her heels struck the marble tiles with the rhythmic precision of a metronome.

I instinctively stepped back toward the wall to clear the runway.

As she passed, her gaze swept sideways. "Sean."

My foot slipped on the slick floor. I almost dropped my latte. "M-Ms. Reed! Good morning!"

She stopped, turning slightly to look at me. "Do you find the HVAC settings in our wing inadequate?"

"What?"

"I heard a rumor that someone felt the office drops five degrees whenever certain people walk in."

A high-pitched ringing erupted in my ears.

That phrasing... was familiar. Horrifyingly familiar.

My brain, purely out of self-preservation, refused to connect the dots. It was simply too catastrophic an equation for my nervous system to process.

"Oh... well, you know, haha... I’ve always been a little sensitive to drafts."

Margot held my gaze for two beats. "Dress warmer," she said simply.

And then she walked away.

I stood there, paralyzed, as condensation from my iced coffee dripped onto the toe of my dress shoe. Something was profoundly, fundamentally wrong. But I couldn't put my finger on the trigger.

Back at my desk, Dustin poked his head over the felt partition. "Did you just have an unprompted conversation with Director Reed in the lobby?"

"She asked me if I was cold."

Dustin dropped his pen. "She asked if you were cold?"

"Yeah."

"Are you sure she wasn’t asking if you wanted to become a cold body?"

I glared at him.

Dustin retrieved his pen, his expression darkening into deep suspicion. "Bro. Have you done something recently that you’re not telling me about? Something catastrophic?"

"No," I said, wide-eyed and honest. "Nothing."

He shook his head, retreating. "God help you."

Over the next few days, however, Margot’s interactions with me took an almost imperceptible turn.

It was tiny. So small I almost wrote it off as corporate fatigue.

In team meetings, when I was designated as the scribe, she would pause slightly after delivering a complex data point. Previously, she never stopped; she rattled off deliverables at auctioneer speed, and if you fell behind, that was your personal failure. Now, she would pause, let her eyes drift toward my legal pad, wait until my pen finished scratching across the paper, and only then proceed.

When she reviewed my slide decks, she didn't just slash red ink across the pages with a curt "Redo".

Instead, she wrote margin notes: "Section three lacks narrative coherence. Refer to the Q2 appendix."

Once, at the bottom of a project brief, she wrote five words in her sharp, elegant script:

"Heading in the right direction. Continue."

I stared at those five words for thirty seconds before taking a picture and messaging Dustin.

Dustin replied with twenty question marks, followed by: "Is our unit facing layoffs? She’s softening the blow. That’s severance etiquette."

I brushed it off.

The transfers continued. The texts continued.

"Hey kid, payday again. Sent eight hundred. Don't be cheap this month."

"Did you ever buy those boots you wanted? If not, let me know, I’ll send more."

"Is midterms week brutal? Remember to eat. You can’t study on an empty stomach."

Every transaction brought a warm wave of contentment. Even if all I got back was that sparse, solitary "K."

My sister had always been a girl of few words. Our dad died when she was barely ten, and our mom had broken her back working double shifts at an elder care facility just to keep the lights on. I had nearly skipped college to take a warehouse job before my guidance counselor secured an emergency scholarship for me.

I promised myself back then: once I had a salary, Phoebe would never have to beg, scrape, or feel less-than.

A few hundred bucks here and there was nothing compared to that peace of mind.

What I didn’t know was that every single dollar, every piece of unwanted advice, and every voice memo was cataloged in Margot Reed’s personal device.

She hadn’t deleted a single one.

In fact, that fifty-three-second voice note—the one comparing her to an industrial freezer—she had played at least four times. On the fourth listen, she had held the speaker directly against her ear, volume dipped low, listening like it was a secret whispered through a keyhole.