5. Celebrity
CELEbrITY
File not found.
I click again.
File not found.
My stomach drops straight through the floor.
I navigate to the shared server, to the project folder I've organized with obsessive, borderline pathological precision—subfolders color-coded, version histories backed up, every structural calculation cross-referenced and timestamped.
The folder is there. The label is there.
The contents are gone.
Not corrupted. Not moved to a subfolder by accident.
Gone. Deleted with the kind of deliberate, surgical precision that doesn't happen by mistake.
Ninety-six hours of work. My lobby redesign.
My structural load calculations. My custom parametric facade scripts that took me eleven straight hours to code.
Every single file, scraped clean from the server like they never existed.
My jaw locks so tight my molars creak.
I click the server's access log. My fingers fly across the keyboard—I've been managing the backend architecture of this firm's digital infrastructure since I was a second-year associate because none of the partners can figure out how to reset their own passwords, let alone navigate the admin panel.
The irony of that is about to bite someone very, very hard.
The access log populates. Timestamped entries cascade down my screen, and there it is—2:34 a.m., 2:37 a.m., 2:41 a.m. Three separate deletion events. One login credential.
Porter Hargrove.
I push back from my desk. The wheels of my drafting chair bark against the concrete floor.
Richard. Richard with his Yale diploma and his mediocre cantilever designs and his twenty-three years of seniority that he wields like a broadsword anytime someone under forty has an original thought.
Richard, who sat three chairs down from me in that boardroom and as Torrance Elkwood fired his golf buddy and handed the biggest contract in the firm's history to a twenty-six-year-old black woman he'd never bothered to learn the name of.
I grab my phone. Photograph the access logs.
Screenshot the deletion timestamps. Bring up the recycle bin on the server backup—because of course Richard doesn't know there's a redundant backup system, because I built it myself eighteen months ago when his partner Craig accidentally deleted an entire permit submission and blamed it on an intern.
Every file is sitting in the backup, pristine. Untouched.
I restore them to a private folder under my personal credentials, lock the permissions, and change the admin password on the entire server. Then I print the access logs—all six pages—and I walk upstairs.
The seniors' suite occupies the eighth floor.
Glass offices, walnut millwork, those absurd Eames chairs they love to recline in during three-hour lunches.
Richard's door is open. He's already here, which confirms everything I need confirmed, because Porter Hargrove hasn't arrived before 9 a.m. in the entire four years I've worked at this firm.
He's sitting at his desk with a coffee, reading the Financial Times like a man who slept well.
His reading glasses are perched on the tip of his nose.
He glances up when I walk in, and his face arranges itself into something that's supposed to read as casual surprise but lands closer to a dog caught chewing the couch.
"Celebrity. You're in early."
I drop the printouts on his desk. They fan across the Financial Times, covering the stock futures.
"You logged into the project server at 2:34 this morning and deleted ninety-six hours of my design files for The Elkwood."
His coffee cup pauses halfway to his mouth.
"I don't know what you're?—"
"Your credentials. Your login. Your IP address, which I traced to the VPN you access from your home office in Westchester." I tap the top page. "Timestamped. Logged. Printed."
The color drains from his face in stages—forehead first, then cheeks, then lips. He sets the coffee down. His hand is steady, but his jaw isn't.
"Those files are the intellectual property of this firm?—"
"Those files are my intellectual property.
I designed them on personal time using my own parametric scripts, which are not covered under my employment agreement because I specifically negotiated that clause when I was hired.
" I lean forward, both palms flat on his desk.
"Which you would know if you had ever read my contract.
Or acknowledged my existence before Torrance Elkwood made it impossible to ignore. "
His mouth opens. Closes. Opens again.
"I could have you?—"
"You could have me what, Richard?" I straighten up.
"Fired? For catching you destroying proprietary project files for a billion-dollar client?
Go ahead. Call legal. I already CC'd the managing partner, the IT director, and Torrance Elkwood's project liaison on an email with every screenshot attached. "
His face is the color of old cement.
"So here's what happens next." I pluck up the printouts. "You don't touch my files. You don't touch my project. You don't walk onto my drafting floor."
I turn for the door.
"And Richard?" I look back over my shoulder. "Learn to clear the server logs next time."
The backup files restored clean, but clean isn't the same as complete.
Richard's deletion wiped my active working files, which means the parametric scripts I'd been refining in real-time—the ones calculating the lobby atrium's load distribution across a curved glass curtain wall—reverted to a version from forty-eight hours ago.
Two days of iterative refinement, gone. The bones are intact.
The muscle memory of the design lives in my fingertips.
But I have to rebuild every modification by hand, line by painstaking line, and the deadline for the final structural submission is still ticking.
By 6 p.m., the drafting floor empties. By 8, the cleaning crew cycles through with their vacuums and their earbuds, working around me like I'm furniture. By 10, even the security guard on the ground floor stops making his rounds past the glass doors and settles into his desk with his phone.
I'm alone.
The overhead fluorescents clicked off on their automatic timer two hours ago.
My workstation glows in the dark like a cockpit—three monitors throwing blue-white light across my face, across the scattered remnants of a bodega sandwich I bought at lunch and only half-finished.
My loc extensions are pulled up and secured with a claw clip to keep them off my neck.
I kicked off my loafers somewhere around 9.
My stockinged feet are tucked under me in the drafting chair, and I'm hunched forward with my chin almost touching the desk, squinting at a stress distribution model that keeps throwing errors in the northeast quadrant of the atrium.
The numbers aren't wrong. I know they're not wrong because I ran them three separate ways—finite element analysis, hand calculations on graph paper like a first-year student, and a cross-check against the geotechnical report from the soil survey I corrected on-site.
The glass panels along the curved wall need to bear lateral wind loads at the sixty-third floor, and my original design used a diagrid support system that distributes force along diagonal steel members instead of a traditional column grid.
It's elegant. It's efficient. It's also maddeningly complex to model in software that was designed for rectangular buildings by people who lack imagination.
I retype a string of code. Run the simulation. The northeast quadrant throws the same error.
"Come on," I mutter. "Come on, come on, come?—"
The elevator chimes.
The sound is so foreign in the dead silence that my fingers freeze over the keyboard. Nobody comes to this floor after hours. The cleaning crew uses the freight elevator on the opposite side of the building. Security doesn't come up past the lobby.
Footsteps. Measured. Heavy. The particular cadence of hard-soled dress shoes on polished concrete—not rushed, not casual. Deliberate. Each step placed with the kind of authority that doesn't need to announce itself because every surface in the room already knows who's coming.
Torrance rounds the corner of the drafting floor and reaches my light.
He's still in his suit. Charcoal three-piece, the vest buttoned tight across his body, the jacket slung over one arm.
His tie is loosened—just the top button of his shirt undone, a triangle of skin at his throat that I have no business noticing.
His sleeves are rolled to the forearm. He looks like he came straight from a dinner he didn't enjoy, because his jaw carries that particular tension I've started cataloging—the one that says someone wasted his time and he hasn't fully decided what to do about it yet.
His gaze sweeps the darkened floor. The empty desks. The dead monitors. Then it lands on me—barefoot, hunched, half-feral in the glow of my screens.
"Tell me why you're sitting in the dark rebuilding files I already approved."
My pulse kicks up. Not fear. Something worse.
"Sabotage." I keep my voice level. "Porter Hargrove deleted my working files from the server at 2 a.m. I caught it this morning, recovered from backup, and reported it to the managing partner."
He doesn't react. Doesn't blink. Just observes me with that sharp, surgical gaze that takes apart everything it touches.
"The backup files are forty-eight hours old," I continue.
"I'm rebuilding the modifications I made to the curtain's diagrid system.
" I point at my screen. "The stress model keeps erroring in the northeast quadrant, and I can't tell if it's a software limitation or if I'm miscalculating the lateral displacement coefficient for the wind loads above the sixtieth floor. "
He drops his jacket on the nearest desk. Steps closer. The blue light from my monitors catches the angles of his face—the hard line of his jaw, the deep-set eyes, the silver threading through his temples.
"Show me."