Monday morning, I fill Ryan in—with a bit less detail than I shared with Kari—and he high-tens me again.

“I knew that wasn’t right,” he says. “When you said he was with Kari. I saw how that guy looked at you. No way was he with someone else a week later.”

“Yeah, well. It looked bad,” I say. “But it’s all good now, and I need to buckle down and focus. This last few weeks I haven’t been bringing my A game, and that’s not cool. Hold my calls, okay?”

He agrees, so I’m surprised when, barely an hour later, the door opens and I look up to see Ryan in the doorway. His face is pale, and I set down the file I was flipping through.

“What’s up? Are you okay?”

“I just got off the phone with Leonora, and she says Ben wants you up there. Now.”

“But I’m right in the middle of—”

“You’ve got to go upstairs, Jenna,” he says. “Something is very wrong.”

“But what?” I ask, mystified. Nothing has gone even slightly wrong since that missing report, and even that turned out fine in the end. Plus, that was over a week ago.

“I have no idea, but I want you to understand that I am not remotely joking when I tell you I have never heard him so angry. I could hear him yelling while Leanora was on the phone with me.” He looks away and says, “He said he’d fire me, too, if you weren’t up there in fifteen minutes.”

My stomach turns upside down. “What do you mean, fire you, too?” I say.

He doesn’t answer me.

“Ryan!”

“You heard me,” he says quietly. “Please go figure out what’s wrong with him. My rent is ridiculous.”

Without another word, I stand and bolt past him, toward the elevator.

* * *

I can hear Ben bellowing as soon as I step off the elevator on his floor. This is in part because it’s not a very big floor; there are only four offices and the conference room up here. One of the perks of being upper management, I suppose. That, and threatening to fire perfectly adequate employees for no reason at all, as well as their hardworking administrative assistants.

Ben’s hardworking administrative assistant, Leanora—who probably works a lot harder than Ryan, honestly—grimaces at me as I open the door. Ben’s shouting from the inner office becomes clearer. “I don’t care,” he bellows. “Change it back now.”

“What’s he so pissed off about?” I whisper.

“You screwed up bad,” she says. “What were you thinking?”

“I don’t even know what I did—” I begin, but then Ben bellows again and I scurry over to tap on the door to his office, and open it gingerly.

His face is a livid red, and just as I close the door behind me he slams down the phone. I guess he isn’t done being mad at it, because he picks it up and then slams it down again. Or maybe he was just thinking of calling someone else and changed his mind. Or maybe he’s just trying to intimidate me. Or maybe this is all a mistake and he’s found the person he’s really mad at, and that’s who he was yelling at—

He interrupts my frenzied thoughts, his voice quieter but no less deadly. “What. the. hell. were. you. thinking?” He lays each word down like a brick.

“I don’t know?” I say.

“Well, you’d better think of something, and fast. I’m about ten seconds away from telling you to find another job. The only reason—the only reason—you still have a job is that Leanora, of all people, insists you must have made an honest mistake.”

That comes as a bit of a surprise. I had no idea he valued her opinion so much. For that matter, I had no idea she held any particular opinion, good or bad, of me.

“Ben,” I say, feeling small and terrified. I love my job. “I don’t want to tick you off worse, but I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

He glares at me. “I’m talking about the design changes. You’ve just cost me tens of thousands of dollars and a lot of very valuable manpower at a time when we have neither of those things to spare. And as far as anyone can tell, you’ve done it on nothing more than a whim.”

I latch on to the only thing in his little speech that makes any sense. “What design changes?”

“The ones you decided to implement without consulting anyone, including Creative.” His face goes even redder, which I kind of wouldn’t have thought possible, and his voice keeps getting louder. “The ones that went into production and arrived this morning at all of our branches, in the form of hundreds of boxes of brochures and posters and other collaterals. The ones that look like they were designed by a colorblind three year old.”

I’m speechless. I have literally no idea what he’s talking about, to the point where I’m starting to think he’s having a break with reality. Very quietly, trying not to make him any angrier, I say, “I don’t mean to be obtuse, I swear, but I have no idea what on earth is going on here. I haven’t made any design changes in anything since we agreed on the palettes and layouts. This was all decided over a week ago.”

“It was,” he agrees. “And then after the design decisions were finalized, you sent the design team an email—circumventing Aiyana, by the way, which in itself is a firing offense—and told them to redesign and use a new palette. And if you’d pulled it off, I suppose we were all supposed to think you were a genius, but unfortunately you’ve confused your marketing expertise with creativity. Your changes, quite frankly, look like shit.”

He picks up something off his desk and throws it on the floor at my feet. It’s a trifold brochure like the one we designed for Grow, only in garish shades of orange and yellow and green. Perhaps it’s supposed to look postmodern. I reach down to pick it up and to my horror I realize it is a brochure for Grow—it says that right across the top: “Grow with us at Home Bank.” I scan the copy quickly. It’s the copy we agreed on. Everything is just as it was supposed to be for the Grow brochures but all the color choices have been turned on their heads—and Ben is right, it looks like it was designed by a colorblind child. Possibly one who was on drugs.

I look up at him, speechless. “What the hell—” I begin, but he cuts me off.

“Is this deliberate sabotage instead of a stupid design mistake?” he asks hotly. “Because you lost the debate about what to name the program?”

I shake my head vehemently. “Ben, I would never do this. It’s not just that this isn’t my job—I’m not qualified to do this. This is Aiyana’s job.”

“You’re technically Aiyana’s superior,” he points out. “Maybe you think you know her job better than she does?”

“I don’t think anything of the kind,” I say, shaking my head again. At this rate I’m going to shake my brains out, which will be a blessed relief, as they’re obviously not doing me a lick of good.

Maybe they would, if I used them.

Mitch’s voice echoes in my head. You might want to think about who benefits if it looks like you can’t handle your job.

It’s like a bolt of lightning.

“Ben, someone else did this. On purpose. To sabotage me.”

“That’s a very serious accusation.” His glare is steely, but at least he doesn’t dismiss me out of hand.

“I know it is,” I say. “I haven’t wanted to believe it myself. But it’s true. It’s all part of the same thing—since when do I make decisions that affect the whole company without asking? Since when do I lose reports, or collateral material, or forget about important meetings?”

“My understanding is that you’ve got a lot going on,” he says. “Personally.”

“I do,” I tell him earnestly. “But what difference does that make? I went through a bad breakup last year, and you never saw that in my work, did you?”

“Not that I’m aware of,” he says.

“I didn’t do anything wrong, Ben, and I haven’t been forgetting things. I don’t understand how it’s being done, but it’s all very clear if you look at it the right way.”

“I don’t think I’m entirely sure who it is you’re accusing, Jenna.”

“Someone told me recently that I should think about who benefits if it looks like I can’t handle my job.”

“If I were looking for someone to replace you in your position,” he says, and I kind of want to throw up, “my first instinct would be to offer it to Aiyana.”

“That’s what I said,” I tell him.

“But Aiyana would most likely turn it down.”

“That’s also what I said.”

“Which leaves….”

I nod. “Yes.”

“You’re making a very serious accusation here.”

“I know. Will you have Leanora ask Ryan to come up? I think he’ll have some insight.” I say a quick prayer that this was why Ryan was being snarky.

He makes the request, and Ryan joins us so swiftly I suspect he might have even taken the stairs.

Ben takes the lead, filling Ryan in on the email I supposedly sent that basically equated to everyone in the entire building, right down to the night janitor, wiping their asses with big handfuls of hundred-dollar bills.

Ryan doesn’t even look at me before speaking. “No way would Jenna do that, sir. Not ever. She has a lot of respect for chain of command, and for Creative in particular.”

“Why do you say so?” Ben wants to know.

“I’ve often heard her say you couldn’t pay her enough to do what they do.”

“It’s true. I have said that. I don’t have a creative bone in my body—though, even in spite of that, if I had secretly designed that brochure it wouldn’t look as bad as it does.”

“Can I see it?” Ryan asks, and Ben pushes one across the desk to him. Ryan glances at it and winces. “Oh, that is bad. This is a bank, not a Taco Loco.”

Ben nods curtly. “And I’ve got an email here, originating from Jenna’s email address, that clearly lays out that palette as the ‘most recent and final change’ to the brochure.” His eyes flick to me again. “No one can log into your internal email from anywhere other than your desk, Jenna.”

“When was it sent, sir?” Ryan asks.

God bless him; I haven’t even thought to ask that.

Ben shuffles some papers and comes up with a printout of the email. “Thursday before last,” he says. “At four-thirty.”

I close my eyes and think back, counting days, then open them and look at Ryan.

He’s grinning at me, fiercely. “Is it?” he asks me.

“It is.” The worry rolls off me like the rock from the tomb of Lazarus. To Ben, I say, “I left early that day, at four. It’s in my time tracker.”

He tilts his head and looks at me. “I wasn’t aware you left.”

I nod and wince a little. “I didn’t exactly tell anyone. I asked Ryan to keep it quiet unless someone asked directly.”

“But you put it in your time tracker.”

“I left early to get ready for a date,” I say. “It was personal time.”

Ben actually smiles, just a little. “You left a measly hour early, and you made sure to note that for HR?”

“It was personal time,” I repeat. “We’re supposed to mark personal time.”

“I have to say, HR should consider using this example in that little training they do about why you shouldn’t fudge your hours even a little bit. Marking that personal time just saved your job, Jenna.”

The relief is so huge and overwhelming that I sag a little where I’m standing. Ryan catches my arm at the elbow and steers me into a chair. He’s so getting a raise.

“Now what?” I ask, weakly.

“Now we have to figure out who did this.”

“We know who did it,” I say.

“Knowing and proving are not the same thing,” he reminds me.

And Ryan, bless him again, chimes in. “It was Melody.”

“What makes you say that?” Ben asks.

“She was in Jenna’s office that afternoon.” To me, he says, “I told her you went to the cafeteria and she said she would just go leave you some stuff to look at. I was going to mention it the next day but you went home sick, and then the next time I saw you we were talking about the missing report, and I forgot.”

“That report went missing at the same time,” I said. “She could easily have deleted the report and sent that email, right from my desk, that day. She didn’t know I’d have an excuse.”

“She was in your office the morning I sent you the email about the meeting being moved,” Ryan says. “The meeting that you almost missed, about the brochure.”

“That was a Monday,” I say.

“Yeah, the meeting was on a Monday, but the email I sent you was the Wednesday before, remember? And I looked for it after you said you never got it, to make sure I definitely sent it. It was the morning of the day you had the—” He hesitates, very clearly decides what the hell, and forges onward. “The day you had the picnic in your office.”

Ben raises an eyebrow, but doesn’t say anything.

“That’s right!” I exclaim. “There was a mouse pad on my desk when I got to work. I thought she just wanted to show me how well they came out.”

“They didn’t come out well enough to qualify her for your job,” Ben says.

The quiet fury in his voice is fully as terrifying as the red face and raised voice earlier. More so, in fact. I’m awfully glad it’s not directed at me.

“What are you going to do?” I ask. “She’s not going to want to admit it.”

“She’ll admit it to me,” he says, very calmly. “And then I’m going to fire her on the spot and have her escorted from the building.”

“Oh,” I say. “What will happen to her?”

“Maybe the Taco Loco is hiring,” Ryan says.

Ben’s lips twitch, but he holds it together. “It’s no concern of mine what happens to her once she’s gone. My only question is, do you want to be there? As her supervisor, you’re entitled to be there.”

I shake my head mutely. I want no part of it. I tried to help her; I tried to give her a chance. The whole time she was stabbing me in the back, I was handing her knife after knife. I don’t want to look at her ever again.

“Can I be there?” Ryan says eagerly. “I’ll watch her pack up, make sure she doesn’t steal anything.”

“We have security for that, Ryan,” Ben says, and waves us both out. “Go back downstairs. Not one word to her.”

So we do as he says, and go back to Ryan’s office, and when the security guys pass by on their way to Melody’s cube, I just look away and shut the door.