Chapter 4

What followed was an agonizing, pathetic war of attrition.

After dumping all the blame on the kids in front of executive leadership, Julian shut his office door and tried to play good-cop-bad-cop with the team.

First, he gave a dramatic speech about how deeply "disappointed" he was in their lack of professionalism.

Then, he dangled promises, claiming that if they just pulled through this mess, he’d advocate for bonuses and "forgive" their mistakes.

His sleazy corporate gaslighting might have worked on naive college grads.

To my ears, it sounded like a dying clown’s final joke.

Team morale didn't just drop; it died.

Nobody believed a single syllable out of his mouth. The engineers just mechanically clicked away at his incoherent, conflicting orders.

The air in the office was thick with dread.

I, on the other hand, became a complete ghost.

Julian was drowning in his own mess, way too frantic to bother me.

I happily enjoyed the peace, clocking in and out on the dot, quietly transferring non-critical files for my exit.

I watched him dig his grave deeper every single day.

Desperate to get the servers back online, he threw spaghetti at the wall, trying untested community hotfixes.

It was like throwing gasoline on a house fire—every "fix" broke another dependent API.

I watched him lie to the client over and over.

One day he blamed AWS hardware failure; the next, an overseas DDoS attack.

Enterprise clients aren’t idiots. After being fed garbage for a week, their legal team snapped and delivered a formal notice of breach of contract, threatening an eight-figure lawsuit.

I watched his shiny halo peel away piece by piece.

He stopped sleeping. Dark, bruised circles formed under his eyes, his sleek hair turned into a rat's nest, and during one sync meeting, he completely lost his mind and shattered a ceramic mug against the whiteboard over a minor bug.

Every day confirmed I was making the right call.

A toxic leader with zero competence and zero spine, driving a doomed project into the dirt.

This place didn't deserve another hour of my life.

My resignation letter sat ready on my desktop.

I was just waiting for the exact right moment.

The moment where reality would slap him so hard he couldn't hide, and everyone would see the fraud underneath.

A week later, that moment arrived.

During a joint crisis meeting between our C-suite, legal counsel, and the client's representatives, every single lie Julian told was shredded to pieces.

The client brought independent forensic logs from a third-party cybersecurity firm. The report stated unequivocally: the sole cause of the catastrophic database corruption was unauthorized, reckless execution of an unverified script pushed directly to production from Julian's credentialed terminal.

Irrefutable, ironclad proof.

Marcus reportedly slammed the table so hard security flinched down the hall.

When the meeting wrapped, Julian was kept behind closed doors.

Nobody knew what Marcus screamed at him.

All we knew was that when Julian finally stumbled out of the boardroom, he looked like a walking corpse.

He didn't go back to his office.

Instead, he dragged his feet through the open floor, step by step, heading straight toward my cubicle.

The entire department held their breath, watching the spectacle.

He walked so slowly that those forty feet felt like an eternity.

Finally, he stopped right in front of my desk.

The room was so quiet you could hear the hum of the HVAC unit.

I didn't look up. My eyes stayed locked on my screen, my fingers tapping rhythmically across the mechanical keys without missing a beat.

I could feel his gaze—burning, humiliating, suffocating with desperate begging.

After what felt like forever, he opened his mouth.

His voice was hoarse, dry, carrying a pathetic tremor.

His eyes were bloodshot, his silk tie hanging crooked around his unbuttoned collar. Not a single trace of the hotshot director remained.

"Evelyn..."

He choked out my name.

"I know... I was wrong before."

"You're the only one who can save this project now. For the sake of the company... for the team..."

"Please. Come back and help me fix this. Please?"

He bent his back, his posture practically on his knees.

If this had happened a week ago, a tiny part of me might have felt a shred of pity.

Now? Nothing but cold, dead ice.

My fingers finally paused on the keyboard.

I didn't look at his ruined, desperate face.

I simply clicked my mouse, dragged the document titled Resignation Notice from my desktop, and sent it to the networked printer right beside him.

Then, I picked up the warm page, leaned forward, and gently slid it across the wood, stopping right against his chest.