The ride up the Harrison-Vane elevator took exactly forty-two seconds, but to Clara, it felt like an hour. She spent the entire ascent furiously tapping at the Chase app.
Account Locked. Please call customer service.
She shoved the phone into her purse just as the silver doors parted on the 34th floor. Her feet ached in her pumps. The $740 deduction from her personal account sat like a lead weight in her stomach. That was her car payment. She had fourteen days to figure out how to cover it.
She didn't even make it to her desk before she heard her name.
"Clara. My office."
David didn't yell. He didn't have to. He stood in the doorway of his glass-walled office, arms crossed over his chest, his expression completely unreadable.
She walked in, and he shut the door behind her, flicking the blinds closed with two fingers. The sandalwood cologne that had driven her crazy last night now just made her feel slightly nauseous.
"Tell me you got the verbal on Gallagher," he said. He wasn't looking at her as a lover right now. He was looking at her as an asset.
Clara swallowed, her throat dry. "I had them. I really did. But there was an issue with the corporate card when the bill came."
David stopped pacing. He turned slowly. "Define 'issue'."
"It declined." Clara kept her voice steady, refusing to shrink under his stare. "Some kind of fraud alert. I had to use my personal debit to cover it, but the mood shifted. Tom and Richard got weird. They left before we could shake on the final numbers."
David stared at her. The silence in the office was absolute. He pinched the bridge of his nose and let out a long, slow breath.
"You took a million-dollar account to Del Frisco's, got your card declined like a college kid, and let them walk out the door," he summarized flatly. "You made us look like a cash-poor startup, Clara."
"It wasn't my fault, David! It was the bank—"
"I don't care if the bank was on fire," he interrupted, his voice dropping to a harsh whisper. "The regional VP is flying in at three o'clock to review the Q3 projections. I stuck my neck out to get you the lead on this presentation. If you fumble this deck the way you fumbled lunch, I can't protect you."
He turned his back to her, dismissing her entirely. "Go prep your slides."
Clara walked out of his office with her jaw clamped shut. Her hands were shaking again, but this time it was purely from anger. David was right. She couldn't afford another mistake today. She needed a win to wash the stench of the Gallagher lunch off her.
She sat at her desk, dropped her purse on the floor, and woke up her MacBook.
The Q3 presentation was her masterpiece. She and Arthur had spent three nights going over the data tables. He had shown her how to automate the Excel macros so the graphs updated flawlessly, giving the slides a sleek, animated finish. It was foolproof.
She double-clicked the file on her desktop: Q3_Projections_FINAL.key
Keynote bounced in the dock, then opened.
Clara leaned forward, ready to do a final spell-check on the title slide. But there was no title slide.
There was just a plain white background with standard black Arial text that read: [Insert Title Here]
Her brow furrowed. She scrolled down.
Slide 2: A bulleted list of lorem ipsum placeholder text. Slide 3: A blank gray square where the intricate, macro-driven revenue graph was supposed to be. Slide 4: Blank.
The air evaporated from her lungs. She aggressively clicked the trackpad, scrolling through all forty slides. Blank. Placeholder. Blank. It was the skeleton draft from a month ago.
No. No, no, no.
She went up to the menu bar and clicked 'File', then 'Revert To', looking for the version history. A dropdown box appeared.
Last edited: Today, 1:42 PM via iCloud Sync.
Her local file had been overwritten by an old cloud backup while she was sitting at Del Frisco's watching her credit card get declined.
Clara frantically opened her deleted files folder. Empty. She opened her outbox to see if she had emailed a PDF of it to anyone. Nothing. The only person who had ever touched the file besides her was Arthur, when he built the macros on his home PC.
She grabbed her phone and dialed his number. It rang twice and went straight to voicemail.
She looked at the clock in the top right corner of her screen.
2:14 PM.
The regional VP was walking into the conference room in exactly forty-six minutes, expecting a forty-slide data analysis. Clara had a blank template, an empty bank account, and a boss who was already looking for a reason to cut her loose.