He Called It a Joke. I Called My Lawyers. Chapter 06

Monday morning, Crane & Co. held an emergency board meeting.

I joined by video from London. Theo sat beside me, just off camera, a quiet wall of calm.

On the screen, twelve faces in a Boston conference room. At the end of the table, pale and unshaven, sat Grap. He’d

been summoned as the new VP of Marketing.

He didn’t know I’d be on the call.

“Before we begin,” said the chairman, Richard Crane, “Whitfield Holdings, our majority shareholder, has asked to speak.”

My face appeared on the big screen.

Grant’s chair scraped. “Nora?”

“Ms. Whitfield,” I corrected.

The room went quiet.

“For the record,” I said, “Whitfield Holdings owns sixty percent of Crane & Co. Three years ago, I personally recommended Grant Ellison for promotion after he’d been passed over twice. I vouched for his character.”

I let that sit.

“I was wrong about his character.”

Grant’s mouth opened. Closed. “You… you got me this job?”

“I got you every job, Grant. You just never asked why the doors kept opening.”

Richard Crane cleared his throat. “In light of the video evidence and the pending criminal complaint, the board has voted to terminate Mr. Ellison’s employment, effective immediately. Also terminated: Tyler Banks, Brent Cole, Joshua Reid. And Lacey Monroe.”

Grant shot to his feet. “You can’t do this! It was a prank! Nora, tell them! We’ve pranked each other our whole lives!”

“We put frogs in each other’s lunchboxes,” I said. “You put me in a coma’s worth of chloroform and a garbage bag.”

“I didn’t put you in anything! I stopped them!”

“You said okay, Grant. I have it on tape.”

His face went white.

Security walked in. Two men in gray. They stood on either side of his chair and waited.

He looked at the screen, at me, and his voice broke like a boy’s.

“Nor. Please. I saved your life.”

I’d known he’d say it. I’d practiced my answer in the mirror all weekend, and I still felt it in my throat.

“You saved a six-year-old girl. And then you spent twenty years making sure she knew she owed you. Then you nearly drowned the woman she grew into.” I folded my hands. “We’re even.”

I ended the call.

My hands started shaking the second the screen went dark. Theo didn’t say anything. He just slid a bottle of Water across the table and waited until I could breathe again

“That was very well done,” he said finally.

“I feel sick.”

“That’s what it feels like when you stop paying someone’s bill.” He stood. “Lunch? There’s a place downstairs that does terrible coffee and perfect soup.”

I almost said no. The old me would have. She’d have gone back to her desk and cried alone so nobody would see.

“Okay,” I said.

The soup really was perfect.

By the time we came back upstairs, my assistant Priya was standing at my door, phone in hand, face tight.

“Ms. Whitfield. You need to see this.”

It was a TikTok. Lacey. No makeup, a sweatshirt, a bare bedroom wall. Tears streaming down her face.

“I’m just a girl from Ohio,” she whispered into the camera. “My mom’s a waitress. I got my first real job, and I fell in love with my boss. And his rich fiancée found out, and she… she destroyed me. She got me fired. She’s threatening me with lawyers. Because I’m poor. Because I’m nobody.”

She wiped her eyes.

“The video of her? That was her idea. She staged it. She wanted to make me look like a monster. Rich people can do

anything.”

Seven million views.

The comments were a flood.

Eat the rich.

The heiress is a psychopath.

34

Lacey we believe you

Someone find Nora Whitfield’s address.

Priya swallowed. “Your Instagram has forty thousand new comments. And… someone posted the address of your old Boston apartment.”

I stared at Lacey’s teary face, frozen on the screen.

She wasn’t crying. Not really.

Under the tears, in the corner of her mouth, she was smiling.