Chapter 1

The annual client dinner got dumped in my lap.

CEO Richard made his instructions painfully clear.

"Arthur, cash flow's tight right now. Don't go overboard, but it still has to look impressive."

As a finance director who'd been doing this for years, I understood exactly what he meant.

Spend less money, but don't make the company look cheap.

I scrolled through Yelp listings until my eyes started to blur.

The options were either private clubs charging five hundred bucks a head, or tacky bargain bars with no class at all.

So to keep costs down, I booked my aunt's independent waterfront restaurant in Manhattan, a high-end place with panoramic views.

It was elegant, private, and because we were family, she waived the venue fee and service charge. We only had to cover the cost of food and alcohol.

Once the venue was locked in, I posted the details in the company-wide Slack channel:

[If anyone has feedback about the dinner venue, feel free to speak up.]

Quite a few people at the company had already held private parties at my aunt's restaurant, and almost everyone had a great experience.

The chat quickly filled with thumbs-up reactions.

Just as I was about to finalize it, Chloe, the company's new intern, suddenly dropped a string of messages into the channel.

[Arthur, I'm not trying to accuse you of anything.]

[But I do want to ask—how much of a kickback did you pocket by picking your relative's restaurant for the dinner?]

[This is coming out of our team's project budget. No matter how you spin it, you can't just line your own pockets with money that should be part of our bonus.]

[And honestly, if it's your aunt's place, do they really need to charge us at all?]

[So shouldn't you give that money back to the rest of us?]

...

Reading those messages gave me an instant headache.

Chloe was a new sales intern.

From the day she joined, she'd been saying she was here to "clean up illegal workplace practices," so anytime the company asked people to work late, she was always the first one on Twitter complaining about it.

She loved throwing around labor laws.

Not only did she refuse to answer emails after 5:00 p.m., she also acted like no one else should work late either.

According to her, working overtime was "bowing to capitalism." She had the whole office in chaos, preaching that we shouldn't live like corporate drones, that we should embrace freedom and defend human rights.

People had started speculating that for a new hire to act this bold, she probably had some heavyweight lawyer for a dad.

And now she was publicly accusing me, the finance director, of taking kickbacks and embezzling company funds.

If that label stuck, I wouldn't just lose my job—I might end up getting audited by the IRS.

I quickly replied in the Slack channel:

[Every reimbursable expense has a compliant itemized invoice. No one's bonus pool is being touched, and there are no kickbacks involved.]

I thought that would be the end of it.

I was wrong.

The next morning, the second I stepped into our office building on Wall Street, I could feel every eye in the open workspace turning toward me.

My gut told me something had happened.

Sure enough, the moment I sat down, Slack started blowing up like crazy.

Chloe was flooding the channel.

[@Arthur, I checked the restaurant's standard private event pricing. A full buyout costs at least $30,000 a night!]

[So if it's your family's place, there's no way we're actually paying that much.]

[And yet you're still claiming you didn't inflate the invoice and skim money off the top? The company gave you a $40,000 budget.]

[If you don't want us reporting you to HR and the Department of Labor, then why don't you split the kickback with everyone?]

At the end, she added a tongue-out emoji.

Combined with the weird way everyone had been looking at me earlier, I had a pretty good idea what was going on.

But the truth was, I couldn't exactly explain myself.

On the surface, Richard had announced a generous budget in the meeting. Behind the scenes, though, he'd called me into his office and quietly forced the per-head number way down.

We were a cybersecurity company, and with all the layoffs hitting the industry lately, business had been terrible.

This dinner was for the benefit of our client—Mr. Brooks, the head of the biggest cloud storage company in Silicon Valley.

The contract on the table was an eight-figure enterprise firewall deal. If we landed it, everyone's bonuses and stock options next year would be safe.

So the assignment was basically impossible: Make it look like a top-tier Manhattan event, while keeping the per-person cost down to fifty bucks.

If the contract fell through because I screwed this up, I'd be the one blamed forever.

Nobody wanted a miserable assignment like that. Which was exactly why it landed on me.

With pressure from the CEO on one side and suspicion from my coworkers on the other, I was completely boxed in.

After sitting at my desk and thinking it over for a long while, I decided to give Chloe a private explanation.