His Automated Reply Cost Him His Wife Chapter 11

His Automated Reply Cost Him His Wife Chapter 11

Before dawn the next morning, Ethan was sitting in front of his computer.

His eyes were bloodshot, and he was still wearing yesterday’s wrinkled shirt, but his expression was unnaturally calm. The previous night’s rage had condensed into cold steel.

He logged into his firm’s internal HR system.

His mouse clicks were clean and decisive. On the grounds of “serious violation of professional ethics,” he terminated all of Lena Price’s internship contracts and rescinded every letter of recommendation the company had issued for her.

Then he opened his email and drafted a message with carefully restrained wording.

He used no terms that could be considered defamatory. In his capacity as a firm partner, he merely “kindly reminded” the recipients that in any future collaboration with Miss Lena Price, they “must conduct thorough background checks,” especially regarding “project integrity.”

The recipient list included every major headhunting firm in the Bay Area, as well as the HR directors of the top twenty architecture firms.

Click. Send.

The effect was devastating.

Within forty-eight hours, Lena received polite but cold rejection letters from every company she had been interviewing with. She logged into LinkedIn and discovered that the industry seniors and recruiters who had once been so warm had silently removed her from their contacts.

Every résumé she sent out was marked as *Received* and then went silent.

It wasn’t a blacklist. It was a silent exile. She had been rendered invisible to the entire industry, forever stuck outside the glass doors, watching the people inside pretend not to see her.

And in Chicago, Nora knew nothing of this.

She had just landed a community library renovation project and was standing by Lake Michigan, feeling the damp, cold wind on her face—a wind utterly different from California’s.