Chapter 4 - The Boardroom Confrontation
Within an hour of the payroll incident, I was summoned back to the top-floor boardroom. This time, however, the atmosphere wasn't paternalistic or manipulative; it was dripping with defensive panic. Monica, Carl, the CFO, and corporate counsel sat around the long table like cornered animals who had just realized their trap had backfired.
Monica tried to open with her usual soothing, patronizing tone, suggesting that payroll access discrepancies were complex administrative matters that would be sorted out internally over the next few quarters.
I didn't sit down. I dropped a printed copy of Ben’s recovered audit trail—complete with the manual override timestamp and the executive terminal signature belonging to Carl himself—directly onto the center of the mahogany table.
"You didn't make an administrative adjustment, Carl," I said, my voice cutting through the heavy silence of the room. "You embezzled my performance distribution to pad the retention bonuses of executives who couldn't even compile Route without my code."
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The corporate attorney snatched up the paper, his eyes darting across the code logs before looking up at Monica with a sharp, alarmed expression. They hadn't expected me to find the digital trail. They assumed an engineer who specialized in backend logic wouldn't know how to check a database ledger.
When Monica realized the lie had collapsed, her mask of corporate grace slipped away entirely. She leaned forward, lowering her voice into a vicious whisper. "Lena, you have a non-compete. You have an eight-year contract extension on this table. If you make a public scandal out of this, we will drag your name through every tech court in Texas, tie up your career for a decade, and ensure you never work in software development again. Take the $170,000 salary increase and sign the papers. Consider the rest the cost of keeping your peace."
