Chương 17: Chapter Sixteen

Friday October 21st The thing about promises is that they're easy to make when you feel guilty and you're drinking wine with your best friend. We'll always stay in touch. We'll be in love forever. I'll never forget to do that thing again. You know the ones. They're also much harder to keep when you're alone in your apartment at two in the morning staring at a wall that's exactly the shade you made it with your mind and you should have gone with a different color.

But you're normal now, and normal does not involve changing the colors of things with your mind. It's also much harder to keep when you are thinking about all the ways you've been wronged. I myself, had been let go that afternoon. My state is at-will and the company was 'going through restructuring,' 'it wasn't me', 'they wished me luck in my next endeavor.' They got off the phone with an NDA in my email, a promise of a glowing letter of recommendation and a six month severance if I signed it.

I put in job applications all week, the normal way. A far different way than only just eight years ago when I got hired straight out of college at a job fair. Apparently, everything was done through Linked In now or other hiring boards. They went through three layers of AI filtering before they got to the email of the hiring manager who probably would still never see it because thousands of emails already made it through and they were busy wading through which were real, and which were just bots.

You'd think with a six month severance and as much money as I could ever possibly want that I'd be happy. But, for a workaholic it felt like my skin was itching. The person I'd been in contact with most at Allmart reached out to connect. So I did and I was waiting for a reply. All I would have to do would be a small push to get my resume through the filters, and to the top of the email inbox and I could do the rest. Let my work speak for itself. No. I shouldn't do that. I promised.

Although, if I just looked, maybe at what the keywords were to get through the filters I could give myself a fighting chance. I wouldn't be doing anything, not really. So I got out of bed and padded over to my computer. I wiped my sweaty palms on my pajama pants and began looking. I found out that a lot of the jobs I'd been applying to weren't even real jobs.

They were simply using it as a way of gathering data on people, that they were then selling to people like recruiters and other people that I didn't look into. I felt disappointed, not the wild sense of accomplishment that I had after digging around inside of Daniel's personal files. That had been a new challenge, thrilling. This was just slop. There was nothing satisfying about learning that the jobs I thought I was applying to weren't ever really there. I told myself I was just browsing.

I just wanted to see if I could glean any information that could maybe help Kate navigate work easier this week. That I was just curious about what he was saying about me, about the security vulnerabilities. Really any of it. What I found was weirder than I expected. Greg's work email was clean. The emails between he and Rebecca were gone, and nothing I opened was more than scheduling, meaningless back and forth over optics and budgets. Normal, boring and professional. Nothing at all incriminating.

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation. The sent emails though, was where things got weird. He either forgot or didn't know how to remove things from there. Every few days emails would be forwarded to a gmail account that was just a random string of numbers. This was definitely an email someone who watched too much television thought was a good way to hide something they didn't want connected to themselves in any way. I should have stopped there.

I'd seen enough to know that Greg was hiding something, and that was interesting. It wasn't my problem anymore. I'd promised Kate. I was going to be normal. But, the mystery of it was chewing at me. The thrill of looking at something that someone in control of so many lives wanted to keep secret bubbled in my blood. I worked my way inside of the burner email, which was harder to access than the internal secure work one was.

I slipped around security patterns, bypassed the need for a phone authentication code and squeezed through the biometrics layer. Every time I made it further I felt the power of this ability flare inside of me. It didn't make my head hurt any longer, I no longer felt nauseated–well at least from my ability. The contents of the email was a different story altogether. There weren't any deleted emails here. There were dozens. Meticulously sorted into folders.

Employees that had rubbed Greg the wrong way, who'd been quietly encouraged to resign rather than face formal proceedings. Employees who'd gone to HR over behavior concerns about Greg's behavior. Employees whom Greg had used in one way or another and were now a part of his grotesque wall of shame–or conquest hall. And the women. God, the women. I didn't read all of the emails. I physically couldn't, there were hundreds.

Not all of them were from his work email, some of them were pure correspondence coordinating illegal activities, parties, bribes, hush money. There were email chains that had been forwarded over from personal and work emails detailing torrid affairs, and grooming employees, or other women. The same story repeated over and over. He'd take a special interest in someone, mentor them, promote them, make them feel special and then inevitably he would make his move.

If they said yes, he saved every single piece of that relationship, every text, every photo, every email tucked away here on an anonymous email account forever. Once he'd had his fill he'd push them out, and if they said no… well there was a spreadsheet. A spreadsheet. My mouth dropped as I opened it. The spreadsheet was outlined like an expense report.

Women who received severance packages were reduced to line items, "consulting fees" for women who didn't work at the company, and in some cases one time payments to a private clinic that corresponded with those other two fees. These were tied to individual NDAs and other legal settlements that were buried so deeply they'd never see the light of day. As I scrolled down a name caught my attention. Jessica Hudson. Jessica started at H&S around the same time as Kate and I did.

We were all bright-eyed junior designers fresh from college with the egos to fit. Jessica was ambitious and had a natural talent that pushed me harder and harder to keep up with. We all hung out quite frequently, mostly at Kate's insistence. Then one day she was just gone. She'd resigned for personal reasons. She stopped responding to texts and calls and had moved over an hour away if her LinkedIn was to be believed. She was now working for herself and her company seemed to be doing well.

It was actually the thing that, after finding it, had driven me and Kate to want to start our own company. According to Greg's spreadsheet she'd received $50, 000 and an NDA. I couldn't bring myself to go into the folder in his email that corresponded. I felt sick thinking about the young and vibrant girl who was so talented and so eager to please everyone. I thought about Kate. She was still working there, under Greg's authority.

I thought about all of the women whose names I didn't recognize, whose stories I'd never know–never could stomach knowing. I thought about my promise and then I said out loud, startling myself in the silence of my apartment, "Well. Fuck it."