Chapter Twenty-four #2
“Basically. We tried to track you down at your home, but the doorman said you hadn’t been there in months.
You aren’t working anywhere that’s withholding federal income tax, and you haven’t changed your driver’s license with a new location.
Look, I’ve been in this business long enough to know when I smell a rat, and DBG stinks of it.
But we can’t prove anything. It’s driving me nuts.
It’s personally offensive to me when people think the rules don’t apply to them.
Please think about talking to me. I won’t keep bugging you.
As I said, you aren’t in trouble. If these guys are really monkeying around, though, I want to take them down. Here’s my card. Call me anytime, okay?”
“Thank you. I’ll think about it.” Charlie took the card and willed her shaking hands to steady so he wouldn’t know that he’d gotten to her.
Mr. Woodall grabbed his hat and put it back on. He tipped it toward them and was gone without any regard to the way he’d just upended all the peace that Charlie had been working so hard on for months.
Harper let out a long, shaky breath that was as loud as the ocean crashing on the shore. “I don’t know what that was all about, but I’m guessing you do.”
Charlie nodded, unable to do much more. She was in shock that the life that had thrown her away was somehow back to fuck things up again. Just when she was finally feeling like she was getting herself and her life together.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Harper asked.
“I really want to talk about it. I think I need to understand a little more about what is going on. I can try to help. Refer you to a good lawyer.” She didn’t look upset or angry.
Her face was blank, and Charlie desperately wanted to know what she was thinking.
And she really needed someone to talk to about all this shit. “Yeah, and you deserve the whole story. And I probably do need to talk to an attorney.”
Harper was in shock. What the fuck was the SEC doing looking for Charlie? Or should she say Charlotte? She knew that was her name, but hearing her called that so formally was jarring.
The look of repressed terror on Charlie’s face when Mr. Woodall had introduced himself had pulled at her heartstrings and worried her. And yet, the longer Mr. Woodall had talked, the more Harper had thought Charlie was hiding something, so she was relieved when Charlie agreed to talk to her.
They moved upstairs wordlessly. Franky was snoozing on the couch when they arrived. “Do you want some water?”
“Sure, thank you,” Charlie said. Her voice was as small as it had been the first time she’d walked into Scissor and Gavel. Harper wanted to comfort her, yet something about the whole interaction felt off, and she just needed to know the full truth.
Harper filled two glasses from the refrigerator. As she handed one to Charlie and sat on the couch, she said, “Why did you really get fired, Charlie?”
She took a long sip of water and sighed. “I signed an NDA. I can’t talk about it.”
“For today, I’m your attorney, remember? You have attorney client privilege at the moment.”
Charlie squinted at her. “I thought you’d said you couldn’t be my attorney because of our relationship, but I need to talk about it.
I want to talk to you about it.” She sighed again.
“I found an anomaly in one of the algorithms for a new series of securities the team was working on. I thought it was an honest mistake, so I took it to my boss. I don’t have any proof, but the way he reacted, I’m sure he was hiding something. ”
“So what happened after that?”
“He told me he’d look into it. But twenty-three minutes later, he showed up in my office with our general counsel, HR, and an NDA.
Oh, and security standing outside the closed door to my office.
They said my position was being eliminated, and I could either sign the NDA, take the payout, and get out quietly, or I would regret it because I’d never be free of them.
Even though I wasn’t entirely sure of what I’d found. ”
Harper was shocked. “So you just took the payout and signed the NDA?”
“I was blindsided. I didn’t start my morning thinking about what I was going to look into.
I found an inconsistency in a normal review that was present everywhere in every file that I checked from this year and last year.
I popped into my boss’s office to discuss it.
He said he wasn’t aware of anything but would look into it. Then, they showed me the door.”
“But why’d you sign the NDA? Did you really need the money that badly that you just went along with whatever shit they were trying to cover up?
Were you really that afraid of them?” Harper was trying to give Charlie the benefit of the doubt, but how could she have just rolled over like that?
Didn’t she have any principles? Harper was getting a sickening feeling that maybe Charlie wasn’t the person she’d thought she was.
Maybe she was like the people who didn’t stand up for what was right and had been responsible for Kelly’s death.
“It all just happened so fast. And D. B. Graves has a lot of weight behind it, and it was all so intimidating…I just didn’t know what to do. And it was so high pressure, I didn’t have time to think.”
At the name D. B. Graves, Harper’s blood turned to ice. Maybe she was one of the people responsible for Kelly’s death. “So you just took the easy way out and covered up whatever shady shit they were doing? How could you do that? People could have gotten hurt, and you were fine with that?”
“What people? I didn’t know then and still don’t know the extent of any of it. I have no real idea what was going on.”
Anger turned the ice in Harper’s veins into lava, and she had to move, work off some of her feelings.
She started to pace. “So because you didn’t know exactly what they were doing wrong, you were just going to let those fuckers get away with it?
That company is disgusting. I can’t believe you took blood money and walked away.
” Harper rested her hands on the windowsill and looked out on the street, wondering how the world just kept going, people just kept walking by.
Somehow, their lives were continuing to go on even as hers was tilting off its axis.
“But I didn’t keep it. I donated it weeks ago.”