Sloane pov
The strange thing about dying is how quiet it is. I expected pain. I expected some dramatic sirens, maybe, or the specific cinematic clarity people describe when their life flashes before their eyes. What I get instead is the rain, still falling through the fractured windshield, each drop catching the streetlight for exactly one second before it disappears.
Something in my chest is very heavy.
Forty-seven incidents, I think. Timestamped. Cross-referenced and Locked.
Three more weeks and I was going to walk into that building and burn it to the ground, professionally and legally and completely, and now I'm sitting in a car wrapped around something I didn't see coming and the file is on my laptop and nobody is ever going to find it.
The memories start arriving, and I stop fighting them, because there is nothing left to do but let them come.
I remembered walking into Vantage Consulting for the first time with a Finance degree, Secondhand blazer I pressed three times to get right, no connections, no safety net, nobody waiting with champagne and a soft landing — just a scholarship that covered sixty percent, four years of 5AM waitressing shifts that covered the rest, and the specific stubbornness of someone who learned early that no one is coming to help.
I was twenty-two and I believed competence was enough. It took me years to understand how wrong that was.
The Henderson project was mine. Every data model, every framework, every slide. I stayed until midnight on Tuesdays. I came in on Saturdays. I rebuilt the entire financial projection from scratch when Gregory suggested the numbers be more optimistic, because accuracy was the one thing I had never been willing to compromise on.
Monday morning he walked into the boardroom wearing the confidence of a man presenting his own work. Which is exactly what he told them it was.
The executives nodded and leaned forward and took notes, and when it was finished they stood up and applauded. Gregory shook every hand in the room. I stood at the back holding his coffee and smiled.
What else do you do but to watch a man receive a standing ovation for months of your life?
Three more weeks, I told myself. Three more weeks and the documentation file is complete and I walk in with something they cannot dismiss.
A few weeks before the crash, Gregory called me back from the corridor.
Just a moment, Sloane. Close the door.
I walked in and saw it immediately — the wine already poured, two glasses, the low lamp, his jacket folded over the back of his chair. He was perched on the edge of his desk instead of sitting behind it, which closed the distance between us by exactly the right amount, and I stood just inside the door and catalogued all of it in the first three seconds and kept my face completely neutral.
He told me there was a senior consultant position opening. That he'd been advocating for me internally, that I had real potential and he wanted to develop it, and he said it with such practiced warmth that if I hadn't spent years watching him I might have believed he meant it.
"That's good to hear," I said, because I was still buying time.
He handed me a glass of wine I hadn't asked for. I set it on the edge of the desk without drinking it. He talked for a while longer — about my future at the company, about how much he'd invested in my growth, about protecting me. That word specifically, the word men use when they want you to understand that your safety is conditional on their goodwill.
Then his hand landed on my knee. I looked down at it, then back up at him. Without breaking eye contact, I picked up his hand and removed it from my leg.
He smiled, unfazed. "Don't be like that, Sloane. I've been protecting you in this building for years. A little gratitude isn't unreasonable."
I stared at him — at the years of standing too close, the shoulder touches, the elevator "accidents," the way he always made sure we were alone. I stood up, grabbed my bag, and said calmly,
"I'll have the Henderson report on your desk by eight."
Then I walked out.
I made it to the bathroom, locked the door, and stood at the sink with the water running. I breathed in for four counts, out for four counts, for exactly four minutes. After that, I fixed my lipstick, went back to my desk, and finished the report like nothing had happened.
When I got home, I opened the documentation file and added Incident Forty-Seven. I cross-referenced it, timestamped it, and locked the file.
Just a few more weeks, I told myself.
The rain is very soft now, or maybe I just can't hear it anymore.
The heaviness in my chest has spread to my arms, my hands, and I watch my fingers resting on the steering wheel like they belong to someone else which maybe they do, maybe that's already happening — and I think about Gregory and I think about Brett and I think about the two of them saying the same thing in different voices.
Brett said it out loud, sitting on the couch in the apartment I paid for.
Cheap. You've always been cheap, good enough for a placeholder. Not good enough for anything real.
Gregory never said it. He just lived by it, years of walking into boardrooms wearing my work like it was his.
Every time he looked at something I built and took it, because what was I going to do about it? I pressed my blazer and still showed up early the next day and smiled.
Two men, with different damage but the same verdict.
I should have been angrier. I should have let myself be angrier a long time ago.
The streetlight through the fractured windshield is doing something beautiful — splitting into a hundred small pieces of light scattered across the glass — and I watch it and I think about the file, forty-seven incidents, all that careful work.
I think about the version of me that took two buses in the rain to apologise to someone who was already in bed with someone else, and I want to tell her something, I want to reach back and say.
The light goes.
Then nothing.