They gave me five minutes to erase six years of my life.

“Four minutes, thirty seconds,” my husband’s father said, like he was announcing a stock price. Nicholas Harrington tapped the face of his Rolex, the gold catching the fluorescent light in the Seattle high-rise conference room, and smiled the practiced smile of a man who thought time itself worked for him.

Twelve executives stared at me across the long glass table. Twenty-two employees watched from their desks outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, faces framed by the city skyline and Puget Sound beyond. My cardboard box sat on the polished table beside the presentation clicker, flaps already open like a tiny coffin.

I didn’t cry.

I didn’t beg.

I slid open my desk drawer at the end of the conference room, the one they’d graciously allowed me to move in when I was promoted to Director of Systems Architecture at Vertex Solutions, and began to pack.

One by one, I lifted the artifacts of my professional life in corporate America. The backup drive that held every system design I’d ever built for them. The worn leather notebook filled with sketches and diagrams—the skeletal blueprint of their cloud infrastructure. A stack of laminated project charts from the Henderson and Morrison accounts, corners bent from overuse. The framed photo of my team at last year’s holiday party, our faces tired but proud under cheap string lights.

Behind me, Nicholas’ voice cut through the room.

“Four minutes.” The amusement in his tone was thinly veiled. “Let’s not drag this out, Olivia.”

I placed each item into the box with surgical care. If this was going to be my execution, I’d at least perform it with precision.

On the opposite side of the glass wall, seated in the row of desks directly outside the conference room, Logan Mitchell stood up.

He moved quietly—no dramatic scrape of chair, no thrown objects. He simply rose, slid his laptop into his bag, and put on his coat.

Nia Blackwood, perched in my usual chair at the head of the table, crossed one leg over the other. Her heels gleamed red under the table. She studied her manicure with bored satisfaction, as if she’d spent the morning planning this moment instead of reviewing quarterly metrics.

She thought she’d won.

And maybe she had—for exactly four minutes and thirty seconds.

But to understand how we got to this scene—a CEO in Seattle counting down my professional death like a microwave timer while my husband sat frozen three chairs down—you have to go back three weeks.

Back to Sunday dinner at the Harrington estate.

The Harrington house sat on a hill outside Bellevue, Washington, the kind of gated property real estate magazines described as “old money Pacific Northwest.” It wasn’t technically old; Nicholas had made his fortune in the last twenty-five years, selling his first company right before the dot-com crash and riding that wave all the way into a second empire: Vertex Solutions.

But the house tried very hard to look like it had always been there.

The driveway wound up through manicured fir trees and perfectly trimmed hedges. The front door was heavy oak imported from somewhere in Europe that Eleanor liked to name-drop. Inside, everything was marble, dark wood, and the faint scent of expensive candles.

Sunday dinners at Harrington House weren’t dinners. They were productions. Scripts none of us had written but all of us were obligated to perform.

That night, I arrived exactly seven minutes early, balancing a still-warm apple pie in my hands. I’d made it that afternoon in our small kitchen in Ballard, weaving the lattice crust while my laptop hummed on the counter beside me, busy processing server logs.

“Smells divine,” Eleanor said when she opened the door, voice smooth as cream and twice as rich. Her diamond bracelets chimed when she gestured toward the kitchen, each stone sparkling under the foyer chandelier.

She didn’t take the pie from me.

She never did.

I carried it through the gleaming hallway myself, past framed photos of Taylor through the years: baby in a yacht-print onesie, toddler on a private ski slope, teenager in a rowing uniform, graduate in cap and gown with Nicholas’ hand clamped proudly on his shoulder.

Eleanor liked my pie. She requested it specifically for these dinners. But somehow, she never managed to connect the dessert with the person who spent two hours making it in a modest city apartment after working fifty-hour weeks keeping her husband’s company from setting itself on fire.

In the dining room, the table stretched almost the full length of the room, twenty chairs lined up like soldiers. Only four were set: one at the head for Nicholas, one on his right for Taylor, one on his left for Eleanor, and one midway down the side for me.

Like I was a guest they hadn’t fully decided whether to promote to family.

Nicholas stood when I entered, crystal tumbler of whiskey raised, the city lights of Seattle shimmering through the tall windows behind him.

“To another record quarter for Vertex Solutions,” he declared, his voice filling the room with that particular blend of ego and charm that made investors open their wallets. “We’re crushing the competition because I have an eye for talent—and I know exactly where to position it.”

He clapped one heavy hand on Taylor’s shoulder.

“My son has really stepped up,” he added, squeezing. “He’s learning what leadership looks like. That’s what matters in this business.”

My husband practically glowed under the praise.

Taylor’s actual contribution to Vertex’s record quarter? Sitting as “Vice President of Strategic Initiatives,” a title that could mean everything or nothing. In practice, it meant attending meetings, nodding at buzzwords, and forwarding me emails that began with, “Can you take a look at this?”

Nobody at that table mentioned the Henderson account I’d salvaged forty-eight hours earlier.

They didn’t talk about how Henderson Manufacturing had been hours away from canceling their multimillion-dollar contract after a systems failure left half their factories offline. They didn’t talk about how I’d stayed at the office until three in the morning rewriting scripts from scratch, then returned at six to walk their panicked executives through a recovery plan so calm it sounded like we’d always meant to do it that way.

No one thanked me for the Morrison Industries contract I’d rescued by giving up three consecutive weekends, quietly rewriting disaster after disaster in the background while Nicholas enjoyed “work-life balance” at his country club whiskey tastings. He would sip rare bourbon with board members, swirling it under his nose, talking about hints of oak and leather while I sat alone in a cold server room under flickering fluorescent lights, hands moving over a keyboard fast enough to keep millions of dollars from bleeding out.

“You look tired, dear,” Eleanor observed now, cutting into her salmon—always a little too dry, no matter which private chef she hired. Her rings flashed under the chandelier, enough carats to fund my entire department’s salary for a year. “You should prioritize your work-life balance better. Appearance matters tremendously, especially for women in leadership positions.”

I took a sip of water to wash down the overcooked fish and the words I wanted to say.

Yes, I looked tired. That’s what thirty-six hours awake will do to you when your infrastructure is hanging by a thread.

But if I admitted that, it would only feed the story they were already writing in their heads:

Olivia Harrington is stretched too thin. Olivia is overwhelmed. Olivia is fraying at the edges.

Perfect setup for what came next.

Mornings with Taylor had become their own kind of performance—a study in modern marriage under corporate capitalism in the United States.

Every weekday, the alarm went off at 6:15 a.m. in our condo overlooking the shipyards. Taylor would roll out of bed and stumble to the kitchen, where the espresso machine Nicholas had gifted us as a wedding present sat on the counter like a metallic monument to privilege.

He never did figure out how to use it properly.

On that Tuesday morning, two weeks before my world detonated, he frothed the milk until it screamed and poured coffee that tasted like burnt rubber into one of his college mugs, eyes locked on his phone as ESPN’s game recaps lit up the screen.

“Big week coming up?” he asked without looking up.

“I should hear about the promotion today,” I said, closing my laptop just long enough to look at him.

I’d been working on the promotion presentation for weeks, my slides documenting how my department had increased system efficiency by 340 percent, cut downtime by 80 percent, and quietly saved Vertex from at least three catastrophes that could have made national tech news.

In my head, I’d practiced the moment Nicholas announced it in front of the leadership team. How he’d say words like “indispensable” and “visionary.” How Taylor would squeeze my hand under the table. How, just maybe, Eleanor would look at me like I’d finally earned my place at that endless mahogany table.

Taylor’s reflection stiffened in the microwave door.

“Right,” he said. “The promotion.”

He took a sip of his coffee and winced, then kept drinking anyway.

“Dad mentioned Nia’s really been impressing people lately,” he added. “Apparently she’s been staying late, volunteering for extra projects. Really showing initiative.”

My fingers stilled over my keyboard.

Nia Blackwood.

Twenty-eight. MBA from a tier-two school. Hired six months ago as my “associate” in the Systems Architecture department at Nicholas’ specific insistence.

“She just needs mentoring,” he’d said, one hand on my shoulder. “Someone to show her how we operate here. You’re good at people, Olivia.”

So I’d done what women like me are always told to do in corporate America: I’d leaned in and lifted someone else as I climbed.

I’d opened my playbook to her completely.

I walked her through strategies I’d built over years of trial and error, explaining our clients, our fail points, our hidden workarounds. I sat with her in conference rooms after hours, diagramming system flows on whiteboards while she nodded earnestly and took notes in her leather portfolio.

She asked questions. So many questions. At the time, I thought it was a good thing.

“How do you handle system failures?”

“What’s your backup protocol?”

“Who has administrative access?”

“How long would it take to rebuild if someone… I mean, if something catastrophic happened?”

I chalked it up to curiosity. To ambition.

I didn’t recognize, then, that she was quietly mapping the architecture of my professional existence—not so she could protect it, but so she’d know exactly which beams to kick out from under me when the time came.

The server migration crisis hit exactly seven days before Nicholas would slam his palm on the conference table and tell me I had five minutes to vanish.

It was the kind of disaster every systems architect in America has nightmares about.

Forty terabytes of critical client data needed to be shifted overnight to a new infrastructure. We’d negotiated the timeline aggressively; eight hours was all we had if we wanted to avoid interrupting business for clients in three time zones. I’d pushed for weeks of testing. We’d had days.

Murphy’s Law took that as a challenge.

The first alert came in at 6:42 p.m., right as I was packing up to maybe, possibly, get home in time to eat actual dinner with my husband for the first time in over a week.

Corrupted file warnings.

At 7:03 p.m., the backup system that had passed every test that morning started throwing errors. By 7:28 p.m., a power surge that should have been physically impossible—“That’s not how our grid is configured,” Logan swore later—took out half our redundancy.

By 10 p.m., my heart had settled into a steady, unpleasant thud. This wasn’t a minor glitch. This was a cascade failure.

I triggered emergency protocol.

My team came, one by one, answering their phones in homes scattered across the greater Seattle area, dropping what they were doing and driving into downtown because I asked.

Logan was first through the door, still wearing the program from his daughter Emma’s dance recital pinned crookedly to his shirt.

“I’m so sorry,” I said as he shrugged out of his jacket.

“She understood,” he said, but I saw him glance at his phone every few minutes all night, watching the videos his wife sent of their eight-year-old twirling under stage lights he wasn’t there to see.

Priya arrived next, eyeliner smudged from wiping under her eyes with the back of her hand.

“I know, I know,” she said into her phone as she crossed the room, “I’ll make it up to you somehow, I promise. Happy anniversary.” She hung up, squared her shoulders, and dove into code like she was defusing a bomb.

Marcus showed up with his hoodie half-zipped, hair damp. Sarah Kim charged in dragging a backpack that looked like it weighed more than she did. The Morrison twins appeared, identical brows furrowed in identical expressions of focus.

They came because I called. They stayed because we were thrown into a war, and nobody abandons their team in a war.

By midnight, the conference room had transformed into our bunker. Laptop chargers snaked across the floor like vines. Screens glowed against the dark glass windows. Cans of energy drinks and half-eaten Chinese takeout containers lined the table, forgotten as soon as we opened them. The city outside went to sleep; we didn’t.

“We’re like some weird dysfunctional family,” Marcus joked at two in the morning, trying to eat lo mein with one hand while typing with the other.

“Yeah,” Sarah replied, not looking up from her terminal. “But at least we chose each other.”

At four-thirty a.m., we finally stabilized the last process.

We didn’t lose a single file.

Our clients woke up to an email from Nicholas’ office thanking them for “being part of Vertex’s seamless infrastructure upgrade,” as if nothing remotely dangerous had occurred.

That’s what I did for this company: I prevented disasters so quietly that no one ever knew how close we’d come to ruin.

Nicholas was at his monthly whiskey tasting at the country club that night, swirling amber liquid in a glass and talking about vanilla notes while my team and I kept his empire from collapsing.

The day after the crisis, my inbox filled with the usual noise: ticket updates, meeting invites, a newsletter from HR about wellness. At 11:47 p.m., while I was reviewing Henderson account documents for my upcoming promotion presentation, another email slid into my Vertex inbox.

From: Nia Blackwood
To: Nicholas Harrington
Cc: (none)
Subject: Henderson account & departmental structure

Except it wasn’t sent to Nicholas.

It was sent to me.

The universe has a dark sense of humor.

Nicholas, as we discussed, the email read, I’ve successfully salvaged the Henderson situation. The client expressed thorough satisfaction with my crisis management approach. I believe it’s time we discuss departmental restructuring. She seems overwhelmed—arrives looking exhausted most mornings. Perhaps fresh leadership would benefit the entire department.

I stared at the screen.

Once.

Twice.

Three times.

The words didn’t change.

She’d taken my work, my crisis, my sleepless nights, and wrapped them around herself like a coat. She’d rewritten reality in three sentences: Nia, the savior. Olivia, the burnout.

My hand moved almost of its own accord, forwarding the email to my personal Gmail, fingers entering the address with the muscle memory of someone who had never needed to cover herself before but suddenly understood why people did.

Then I sat there in my tiny home office, the glow from the monitor painting my face ghost-white in the reflection of the window. I was still wearing the coffee-stained blouse I’d put on eighteen hours earlier. My shoulders ached. My eyes burned. And for the first time in six years at Vertex, I understood something with absolute clarity:

In families like the Harringtons—and companies like Vertex—competence doesn’t protect you.

Dedication doesn’t protect you.

Being “the one who fixes everything” doesn’t protect you.

Being related to the CEO by marriage definitely doesn’t protect you.

It just makes for a cleaner story when they decide you’re in the way.

The morning of my execution was wrong from the first second.

I badged into the building at 6:45 a.m. The security guard, Tom—a fifty-something father of three who usually greeted me with a joke and asked about the Mariners—nodded without making eye contact.

“Morning,” he said to his shoes.

The elevator ride to the fifteenth floor felt unusually long. The usual Monday morning sounds—someone talking too loudly into a headset, printers humming, the clink of mugs at the coffee station—were missing. It was like the entire floor was pretending not to exist.

When I reached the glass-walled conference room to set up my promotion presentation, Nia was already inside.

She was sitting in my seat.

My seat, at the head of the table near the monitor, the one I’d picked three years earlier because it faced away from the piercing morning sun that came through the east windows.

Her laptop was open, spreadsheets spread out across the screen.

I only needed a glance to recognize what I was seeing.

My department’s budget projections.

Salary allocations.

Vendor contracts.

Six years of carefully calibrated financial structure—the quiet backbone that had kept us competitive when larger firms tried to undercut us—flashed before my eyes.

All of it on a secured server she shouldn’t have had the clearance to access.

“Oh,” she said, as if I’d surprised her in the bathroom instead of in my own workspace. “Good morning, Olivia. Nicholas asked me to review these before the meeting. You don’t mind, do you?”

The question hung in the air, meaningless. We both knew it wasn’t really a question.

I set my bag down without answering and started connecting my laptop to the projector.

One by one, the twelve executives filed in.

David Park from finance came first, clutching his tablet to his chest like a life jacket. He usually greeted me with quiet nods and the occasional dry joke about numbers. Today, he mumbled something that might have been “morning” and stared very hard at his shoes.

Then Margaret Lawson, our legal director, walked in.

Margaret was the kind of woman you wanted in your corner—a calm presence in tight suits and sensible heels, with a mind like a scalpel. She usually projected unshakeable control.

Today, her knuckles were white on her leather portfolio. She kept checking her phone like she was waiting for a message that might stop a train.

Others followed. HR. Operations. Sales. A few board observers I only saw at important meetings.

Nobody started the coffee machine.

Nicholas liked his coffee strong and fresh, ground from imported beans. Normally, one of the assistants would have set up the machine by now, flooding the room with the smell of dark roast and corporate pretense.

Today, there was only the faint scent of stale air and nerves.

I started my presentation anyway.

If I was going to go down, I was at least going to show them exactly how much they’d be losing.

“As you can see,” I said, clicking to a slide that showed a graph climbing steadily, “our department has increased efficiency by 340 percent over the last six quarters. System downtime is down eighty percent. Client satisfaction scores are at an all-time high. These results were achieved despite budget constraints and—”

The door didn’t open.

It slammed inward.

The handle hit the wall hard enough to leave a dent in the drywall. Every head jerked toward the sound.

Nicholas filled the doorway, his six-foot-two frame tense, face flushed that particular shade of red I’d seen only twice before—once when a board member questioned his judgment, once when his beloved golf club raised membership rates.

His tie was askew. His silver hair was slightly mussed. For a man who treated appearances like a currency, it was like seeing a skyscraper with a crack down the middle.

He didn’t look at the slide behind me. He didn’t look at the numbers. He marched straight to the head of the table, stopped two feet away from me, and slammed his palm down hard enough to make Margaret’s coffee cup rattle.

“You have five minutes to clear your desk,” he said.

Silence.

I stared at him, the clicker still in my hand, Slide 17—Cost Savings from System Optimization—glowing behind me. For a second, my brain refused to attach meaning to his words.

Five minutes.

Clear your desk.

This was a man who’d given entire talks about “investing in talent,” who’d told Forbes that Vertex’s success came from “nurturing innovation.” This was the man who toasted “family” at holidays with one arm around his son and the other on my shoulder, like I completed some picture.

He’d chosen to end my career with all the ceremony of deleting an email.

Around the table, the executives collectively held their breath.

Nobody spoke.

Nobody objected.

Nobody asked why.

But their faces told me everything.

This wasn’t a sudden outburst.

This was a scheduled event.

Nia leaned back in my chair, shoulders dropping in visible relief. The corners of her mouth curved in what she probably thought was a subtle smile. She flexed her fingers, admiring her manicure.

She’d gotten what she wanted.

For a moment, I almost admired the efficiency of it all.

Corporate America had taught me many things, but one lesson stood above the rest: the moment someone believes they’ve secured the win is usually the moment they’re most vulnerable.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw David’s fingers flying across his calculator with frantic speed. It wasn’t his usual calm number crunching; it was something else. Something urgent.

Margaret’s phone buzzed. She glanced down, read whatever had appeared, and went visibly paler.

“Get the lawyer now,” she whispered under her breath, too low for Nicholas to hear, but not low enough for me to miss.

In that whisper, in David’s fingers, in the tight lines around the executives’ mouths, I heard it:

This was a legal disaster in progress.

There is, it turns out, a significant difference between quietly terminating a high-level employee behind closed doors and publicly humiliating the Director of Systems Architecture—who also happens to be your daughter-in-law—in front of your entire leadership team and half the fifteenth floor at 10:17 a.m. on a Monday.

Contracts care about those things.

“Four minutes, thirty seconds,” Nicholas said, checking his watch again when I didn’t immediately move. “Don’t make this any more difficult than it needs to be, Olivia.”

My grandmother’s voice rose from somewhere deep inside me.

She’d grown up in the Midwest during the Great Depression, raised six kids alone after my grandfather died young working a factory job in Ohio, and never once let life catch her slouching.

“When they’re waiting for you to fall apart,” she’d told me once, peeling potatoes at her scarred kitchen table, “that’s when you stand up the straightest. That’s when you show them what you’re made of.”

I set the presentation clicker on the table with care and straightened my shoulders.

“Thank you,” I said.

The words surprised even me with how steady they sounded.

Nicholas blinked.

He’d been bracing for tears. For pleading. For a scene.

Gratitude wasn’t in his script.

Behind him, someone’s pen rolled off the table and hit the floor. The sound was sharp in the quiet room.

Relief washed over me, sharp and clean.

For six years I’d contorted myself into a shape that fit this world: the brilliant but humble director, the supportive wife, the polite daughter-in-law. I’d saved them from disaster again and again, each time hoping this would be the moment they finally saw me.

Being fired in that room, in that way, with that dismissive sentence, tore away the last of my illusions.

I wasn’t theirs.

I’d never been theirs.

And now I didn’t have to pretend.

I picked up the cardboard box.

The backup drive went in first.

That little black rectangle contained the architecture of Vertex’s entire digital spine. Nothing illegal, nothing stolen—they had their own copies, of course—but this drive held my designs. My work. My proof.

Next, I took the framed photo of my team from the far end of the conference room—our arms slung around each other at the holiday party, paper snowflakes taped to the walls behind us, Logan’s tie crooked, Priya’s lipstick smudged, my smile wide and exhausted.

Project binders. A chipped mug with binary code printed around the rim. A small rubber duck we used for debugging, a gag gift from the Morrison twins.

Each item went into the box with deliberate care.

“Three minutes,” Nicholas announced. The clipped authority in his tone had slipped, just slightly, replaced by something like… uncertainty.

Through the glass, movement caught my eye.

Logan stood up at his desk.

He slung his laptop bag over his shoulder, unplugged his charger, and set his badge gently on his keyboard.

Then he walked toward the conference room.

Taylor finally found his voice.

“Dad, maybe we should—”

Nicholas cut him off with a raised hand.

“This is not up for discussion,” he snapped, not taking his eyes off me. “You compromise with weakness once, you signal that you tolerate it every time.”

Weakness.

He was calling me weak in the same building where, a week earlier, I’d held our entire infrastructure together with my bare hands while he admired whiskey legs in a room full of men whose names would never know mine.

Behind him, Priya rose from her desk.

Then Marcus.

Then Sarah.

Like a wave rolling across the open-plan office, chairs pushed back. Heads lifted. People stood.

Nia twisted in my chair to see what I was looking at.

It took a second for comprehension to hit.

When it did, her smugness cracked.

“The hell are they doing?” Nicholas demanded, color creeping back into his face in a new, less healthy way.

Margaret’s phone buzzed again. She read the message, then looked up at Nicholas, eyes wide.

“We need to stop this,” she said under her breath, voice low and urgent now. “Right now. Before anyone records—”

“Time’s up,” Nicholas barked, drowning her out. The sentence didn’t land like a command.

It wobbled.

I lifted the box into my arms. It was heavier than I expected, the weight of six years condensed into cardboard and memory.

Two security guards had appeared at the doorway as if summoned. Tom and Derek—both men I knew by name, whose kids’ college plans I’d heard about during late-night system updates—shifted uncomfortably.

“I’m supposed to escort you out,” Tom said, not quite meeting my eyes.

“Just doing your job,” I replied. “I get it.”

We stepped out of the conference room.

The office fell silent.

Twenty-two pairs of eyes watched us. Some were wet. Some were blazing. Some were simply stunned.

Logan moved first.

He fell into step on my left, adjusting the strap of his bag.

Priya joined on my right, still in her heels from the morning, her expression tight but resolute.

Behind them, Marcus stood. Sarah. The Morrison twins. One after another, my team—my chosen family—rose from their desks and joined the procession.

By the time we reached the middle of the floor, we were a line.

Nicholas burst out of the conference room behind us, his voice booming.

“What do you think you’re doing?” he demanded.

Logan stopped just long enough to look back over his shoulder.

“We’re leaving,” he said simply. “All of us.”

“You walk out that door, you’re done in this town,” Nicholas snapped. “You’ll never work in Seattle tech again.”

There was a time when that threat would have terrified me.

Now, standing there with twenty-two people who trusted me enough to step into uncertainty beside me, it just sounded… small.

“Then maybe this town needs to change,” Priya said quietly.

Tom, the security guard, had stopped walking. His hand had dropped from my elbow. He looked from Nicholas to our group and back again, something like awe in his eyes.

“In fifteen years,” he said slowly, “I’ve never seen anything like this.”

We reached the elevator bank. The doors slid open with their usual chime, mundane and absurd.

Twenty-two colleagues, one forcibly terminated director, and one security guard got in. Derek stayed behind, torn, watching the numbers above the doors.

Nobody spoke during the descent.

Phones buzzed. Notifications popped. Somewhere above us, on the fifteenth floor, people were already typing messages, sending texts, quietly narrating what they’d just seen.

The doors opened into the lobby.

Midday sunlight flooded in through the floor-to-ceiling windows, making everything look too bright, like a movie shot with the exposure turned up.

Maria at reception stood so quickly her wheeled chair hit the wall behind her.

“Olivia?” she said, eyes darting from my box to the people at my back.

“Looks like we’re checking out,” I answered.

Behind her, Gerald the maintenance supervisor paused mid-mop, leaning on the handle as we walked past.

In the loading dock area, someone started clapping.

Slow. Measured.

I never did find out who it was.

The sound bounced off concrete, echoing in the cavernous space until others joined. A few at first, then more, until the applause swelled and rolled like distant thunder.

We stepped out into the parking lot.

The air smelled like exhaust and distant rain, that particular Pacific Northwest mix that always made me think of possibility and endings at the same time.

We stood there, twenty-three of us in a loose cluster, our badges deactivated, our inboxes already being locked, our futures technically uncertain.

Logan let out a breath that sounded like he’d been holding it for years.

“This is absolutely insane,” Priya said, half laughing, half on the verge of tears.

“This,” Logan corrected, “is justice.”

Phones vibrated like angry bees in pockets and bags.

Word of what had just happened was already spreading through Seattle’s tech circles, through LinkedIn messages and Slack channels and side texts between friends at competing firms.

In that moment, we didn’t know if what we’d done would be remembered as a foolish stunt or the start of something bigger.

We didn’t know who would hire us next, or how we’d pay our mortgages, or what story Nicholas would try to tell to control the fallout.

All we knew was that we had drawn a line.

We had refused to accept public humiliation as the price of a paycheck.

We had walked out of a gleaming American tech tower together.

And in a parking lot in the shadow of a downtown Seattle skyscraper, with the midday sun too bright and our cardboard boxes too full, I felt something I hadn’t felt in years.

Not fear.

Not anger.

Freedom.