Chapter One

Monday morning, I carried a whole box of Honeycrisp apples from a New Jersey farm into the meeting room.

By the time the meeting ended, everyone on the team had taken two, and between bites they told me how sweet they were.

Only Chloe, the intern, had forgotten to disconnect the projector.

Her Slack was still up on the big screen, and a channel called "Corporate Cattle Club" was going off nonstop.

Everyone on my team was in it.

Except me.

[Farm apples? Team Two got pour-over and fresh-baked croissants today.]

[How much commission did she take home last month? This cheap, and she thinks fruit is enough?]

[Everybody remember the year-end anonymous review — give her the lowest score. Best case they pull her and get us a new lead.]

I sat there for a second, blank.

Then I remembered last Christmas, when I used my own bonus to buy every single person on the team the newest iPhone.

I still had their thank-you messages saved on my phone.

That afternoon, I didn't lose my temper. I just quietly withdrew the pay-raise request for the whole team that I'd submitted that morning.

They wanted a different lead.

Fine. I'd give them one.

Chapter One

I was the only one left in the meeting room.

Chloe's laptop was still connected to the projector, unlocked.

I knew I shouldn't look. My fingers had already opened the channel.

Created by: Chloe.

Two months ago.

The first thing she posted was: [Thanks for sitting with me, everyone. If it weren't for you guys I don't know how I'd have gotten through today.]

I remembered that day.

It was the Christmas sales push, and Chloe was in charge of configuring the discount rules.

She missed a stacking limit. The promo codes could be applied an unlimited number of times.

Within six hours of going live, the company was out two hundred thousand dollars.

I looked at her record.

Raised in foster care. Worked her way through college on scholarships. Still carrying student loans. She'd sent out three hundred résumés before she got this internship.

HR was going to let her go on the spot.

I sat in the VP's office for an entire afternoon and took the responsibility onto myself, and what I got in exchange was this: she only had to write up an incident review and read it aloud at the weekly meeting, and she could stay.

I took a formal written warning. My annual performance bonus was docked to zero.

None of that got a single word in the channel.

[Dragged out in front of everyone to read a self-criticism — nobody could take that.]

[Don't be sad. We're not her. We're the ones with a heart.]

I scrolled up. The two most active people were Liam and Nora.

They were already on this team the day I became its lead.

Liam is pushing forty. He never learned the new ad-buying tools. Last year his name was on the layoff list.

I put my own performance review on the line and got his name struck off.

Last week I left a few revision notes on his proposal.

[Three days of work, and she crosses it out with a red pen. Must be nice being the boss. All you have to do is talk.]

Nora came back from maternity leave last year, her baby not yet one. I took two of her projects off her and ran them myself. She said she couldn't cover daycare, so I transferred her five thousand dollars and didn't ask for an IOU.

[Team One's lead doesn't even write her own proposal cover pages, she puts her subordinates' names on them. Ours takes the big cut of my project bonus and throws me the crumbs.]

Across those two projects, she put in less than a week of work total.

The loudest complaining was about the Christmas overtime.

Christmas through New Year is the company's biggest sales season of the year. Somebody from Brand Operations has to be on watch.

I argued two rounds at the management meeting and got the whole team triple holiday pay, plus a paid week off after the campaign ended.

When I asked who wanted to stay, every hand went up.

But in the channel, it was a different story:

[A week off in mid-January — who am I supposed to go traveling with? A drone?]

[Trading everybody's Christmas for her own performance points. Why hasn't this one quit yet?]

[Team Two never works overtime. Six o'clock and they're out the door. I'm crying with envy.]

Thousands of messages. I scrolled through them one by one.

I started at the bottom too, as an assistant.

I know how exhausting this job is, which is why I booked the venue for team-building myself, covered the budget shortfall out of my own pocket, and fought for every year-end allowance one at a time.

So in their eyes, all of it was just owed to them.

A new message popped up:

[Inside info: Teams One and Two are merging next quarter. Odds are Tiffany takes the director slot.]

[Great. Finally a lead who doesn't grind us.]

Chloe followed right behind:

[Waiting isn't enough. Isn't next week the proposal showdown with Team Two? Let's leak our proposal to them first. A little welcome gift.]

A string of thumbs-up reactions underneath.

I closed the laptop, went back to my office, and opened the HR system.

The pay adjustment request I'd written over three nights and submitted that morning still read "Pending Approval."

I clicked Withdraw.