Chapter 3

The moment I stepped out of the office building, I booked a flight to a neighboring resort city.

Without my core audience database, her fancy slide deck was nothing but a pretty piece of scrap paper.

At three o'clock the following afternoon, while relaxing in a hot spring pool, I turned on my backup phone.

I opened my private chat with my former colleague, Lyndsey.

Dozens of voice messages and screenshots instantly flooded my screen.

Lyndsey’s voice trembled with uncontrollable anxiety.

"Chloe, something huge happened! Becca completely crashed and burned at the client meeting this afternoon!"

Arthur Kingsley cared about nothing but data conversion rates.

Becca had presented an empty shell of a slide deck. The moment Arthur asked her how she had calculated the regression equation for the target audience persona, she froze completely.

Arthur went ballistic. He threw the proposal right into Richard’s face, giving him a three-day ultimatum: produce the actual data, or see them in court.

Richard had screamed at Becca the entire car ride back to the office.

But Becca's inner voice echoed inside the company car once again:

[I know all the data I prepared was in there. Why did Chloe maliciously wipe the core audience database before she resigned? Even if she hates me, she shouldn't play with the company's future like this. Now Mr. Davis is going to lose the contract. I'm so stupid for not noticing sooner. I hate myself.]

Richard, completely ignorant of the truth, immediately shifted all his fury back onto me.

The moment he returned to the office, he issued a strict order.

The entire team's weekend was canceled.

They had to work day and night to help Becca reverse-engineer three months' worth of data.

This crossed a line for everyone.

By 2:00 AM on Sunday, while everyone was dying of exhaustion, Becca sat in her chair putting on a face mask. Her inner thoughts chimed in:

[It’s all my fault that everyone has to work so hard. If only I had been more guarded against Chloe. And Lyndsey too... even though she just made several mistakes in the formulas and slowed us down, I can’t blame her. After all, she's only trying to help me clean up the mess Chloe left behind.]

To Richard, this sounded like Becca was looking out for the big picture.

But to Lyndsey, who was actually living through it, it was cruder than a slap to the face.

Lyndsey was crying in her voice message:

"Chloe, I didn't get any formulas wrong! Becca did absolutely nothing but sit there and put on a face mask, and then she pinned the blame on me! Will and Jessica got so mad they shut their laptops and stormed out. But Richard is still taking her side!"