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When she smiled, when she smiled and meant it, it felt so damn good.
“Let me echo your good luck sentiment there. Legally, it’s mine. I’m selling it and donating the money to a women’s shelter. You need to move, Brandon, or I call Laine’s office and report you.”
He stepped aside.
“You’ll be sorry for this,” he told her when she opened it.
“No, I won’t. But I am sorry I wasted over a year of my life on someone like you.”
She considered it done, finished, closed.
And she spent what she deemed a productive day finalizing the designs for the Baby Mine account. She moved forward on the Kettering account, creating her mood boards, sharing them and her pitch with her design director.
She noticed the looks—especially the ones who pretended not to look. She noticed the awkward pauses in conversations when she walked in or by.
She suspected Brandon of doing exactly what he’d accused her of planning to do. He’d twist the story, lay blame on her head, outright lie.
She wouldn’t let it matter. And it would all die down in a week or two.
She made it through a week, then two, then a month. And another two weeks.
Every time she thought it had died down, he managed to resurrect it all again.
She caught wind of a rumor she’d cheated onhim. Another went around that their wedding planner had dubbed her Bitch Bride from Hell.
He covered his tracks there, as he hadn’t with her cousin, and the rumors seemed to pop up out of nowhere. And they lingered.
Someone keyed her car.
She came in one morning to find a design she’d worked on wiped off her computer, and her backup corrupted.
She spent fifteen straight hours reconstructing it, and when she finally left the office that night, she had four flat tires.
Knowing he was behind it meant nothing. She couldn’t prove it. But she’d had enough.
The next morning, she knocked on Laine’s door.
“I’m sorry. I need to talk to you.”
“Come sit. You look tired.”
“I am tired. I worked until midnight. The Happy Pet account. The design I’d worked on, had nearly completed, was gone. Wiped off my computer. My backup was corrupted. It wasn’t user error, Laine. I think you know I’m more careful than that. I reconstructed it—maybe even improved it—and when I went out to my car, I had four flats.”
“Oh Jesus, Sonya.”
“I know you hear the rumors that come and go. Most people don’t believe them. But there are always a few. I could handle that. I havebeen handling that. But this was my work, a lot of hard work. If I hadn’t been able to replicate it in a timely fashion, we might have lost the account. My tires weren’t slashed. Someone let the air out. Regardless, I had to take an Uber home and arrange for a garage to deal with the tires.”
“I’m sorry. I’ll talk to Brandon, believe me.”
“Please don’t. I can’t prove any of this is on him, and I won’t. He’ll be shocked, appalled. Why, he’s moved on. Isn’t he dating other women?”
She shrugged. “But it won’t stop as long as we both work here.”
“Sonya, I can’t fire Brandon over the possibility—I’m going to make that probability—he had some part in this.”
“I’m not asking you to. I don’t expect you to. I know he does exceptional work.”
“He does. So do you. It’s time for a full staff meeting.”
