Chapter 106: The company complications
Nobody at Voss was pretending to work anymore. They were only pretending to pretend.
The marketing floor had the particular hush of an office holding its breath. Keyboards clicked too carefully. Conversations died the moment a director walked past, then started up again in lowered voices the second the coast was clear. Someone had left one of the Moonshine launch articles open on the communal printer , nobody had bothered to close it, as if closing it would be admitting there was something worth hiding from.
Caleb Reed Revealed as Moonshine Owner in Dramatic Launch Night. Moonshine Stock Surges After Historic Reveal. Caleb Reed Engaged to Former Voss Creative Fiona Flare, Industry Earthquake.
Riley stood by the coffee machine with her arms crossed, watching two junior designers from the packaging team huddle over a phone screen for what had to be the fourth time that morning. She didn’t need to hear the words to know roughly what was on it. Everyone on the floor had more or less memorized the same three headlines by now, the way people memorize a verse they wish they could forget.
The leak accusation itself was old news. That story had broken weeks ago, back when Fiona first left, and Voss had quietly absorbed it the way companies absorbed most uncomfortable things, with a closed internal review, a few terse meetings nobody outside legal was invited to, and an unspoken agreement that the matter was settled even though nothing had ever actually been proven. People had mostly moved on from it. There were other crises. There were always other crises.
What nobody had been prepared for was this.
It wasn’t just that Fiona had landed somewhere. It was that she had landed at the very top of the one company that had apparently been gutting Voss’s market share for the better part of a year, and that the man at the top of it had been hiding in plain sight the entire time, posing as nothing more than an investor’s quiet architect friend who occasionally sat in on interviews. The reveal had detonated through the industry, and the engagement detonated through Voss specifically, because suddenly every uncomfortable question anyone had ever asked about Fiona’s sudden departure had an answer that felt, to most people on this floor, far too convenient to be coincidence.
"I’m telling you," one of the designers was saying, voice pitched low but not nearly low enough for the open layout to actually protect her, "it makes too much sense now. We always wondered why she dropped off the map so completely after she left here. Now we know. She wasn’t building some quiet new career somewhere. She was with him this whole time."
"With the owner of the company that’s been gutting our numbers for a year," the other one corrected, with the particular relish of someone enjoying being proven right about something terrible. "Think about it. She vanishes from Voss with no real explanation, nobody hears from her for weeks, and then she resurfaces on a red carpet wearing his ring. That’s not a whirlwind romance. That’s something that was already happening while she still sat two desks down from us."
"You think she was feeding him information the whole time she worked here?"
"I think it would explain a lot, wouldn’t it." The first designer lowered her voice further, leaning conspiratorially closer. "I heard from someone in product development that the timing on a couple of our formulas lined up a little too neatly with what Moonshine ended up launching. Maybe that’s all it ever was. Pillow talk."
Riley’s jaw tightened around her coffee cup. She’d heard six different versions of some variation on this story , and the details kept shifting shape every time it got retold, the way rumors always did when nobody actually had the facts and everyone needed the story to make sense regardless. Sometimes it was that Caleb had been quietly in contact with Fiona for months before the launch. Sometimes it was that he’d been the one who orchestrated her abrupt departure from Voss in the first place, which wasn’t even something anyone could actually verify, Riley happened to know, because she’d been the one helping process Fiona and there had been nothing unusual about it at the time. None of that mattered anymore. The narrative had already calcified into something far more interesting than the truth, and Riley was beginning to understand that correcting it, even with hard facts, would do absolutely nothing to slow it down.
She crossed the floor toward her desk, weaving past a cluster of people near the printer who fell quiet as she approached, then visibly relaxed and picked the conversation back up the moment they assumed she was out of earshot. She wasn’t. The open plan layout Voss prided itself on, all that talk of transparency and collaborative energy when they’d redesigned the entire floor two years ago, had become the single worst design decision in the company’s recent history this week. There was nowhere to have a private conversation. There was nowhere to hide from one either.
"She used to eat lunch right there," someone said, gesturing toward the empty seat by the window that had once been Fiona’s, now claimed by a new hire who clearly had no idea why people kept glancing at it. "Every single day. Smiling. Asking about everyone’s weekend like she actually cared. And this whole time she was probably already planning her exit into his arms."
"Imagine being that good at hiding something. None of us had a clue."
"I always thought there was something a little too composed about her, honestly. Looking back."
Riley set her coffee down harder than she meant to, the sound sharp enough that a few heads turned briefly before returning to their screens. She wanted to say something. She wanted to remind them that she had worked beside Fiona that she had seen her stay three hours past everyone else more nights than she could count, that the version of Fiona currently being assembled out of speculation and recycled headlines bore almost no resemblance to the woman who had cried quietly in the supply closet the week Marcus called off their engagement, who had looked hollowed out and frightened rather than calculating, who had asked Riley, more than once, whether she thought she was a bad person for feeling so lost. But Riley also understood, with the particular clarity that came from working in corporate offices long enough to know how these things spread, that defending Fiona too loudly right now would only mark her as suspicious by association. She is awfully quick to take her side, isn’t she. Maybe she knew something too. Maybe she helped.
So Riley said nothing. She sat down at her desk, opened her laptop, and stared at a spreadsheet she had absolutely no intention of actually reading.
Fiona hadn’t simply moved on after a painful breakup. She had been quietly entangled with one of the industry’s most powerful and most secretive men while she still sat among them every day, allowing the entire office to believe she was grieving while she was, in some still unspecified but widely assumed way, already connected to the person who would soon be revealed as their biggest competitor. The timeline fit too neatly for most people to resist, even though nobody could actually point to a single date or document that proved any of it. She had vanished from Voss without much warning. She had stayed out of public view for weeks afterward, no new job announced anywhere, no explanation offered. And now there was a ring on her finger and a stunned industry watching the woman everyone thought they knew step into a life none of them had seen coming.
In the legal department, two analysts quietly pulled old project files, just in case anyone needed a paper trail later, the leak investigation suddenly feeling unfinished in a way it hadn’t a week ago. In HR, someone drafted, then deleted, an internal memo about reviewing exit interview protocols and tightening NDA enforcement going forward, deleted not because it was unnecessary but because nobody wanted to be the first person whose name appeared on an official acknowledgment that something might have gone wrong on their watch and nobody had caught it in time.
Katherine had been fielding versions of the question all day from her own assistant, delivered in the careful, padded language people used when they were handing someone unwelcome news and trying not to be blamed for the shape of it. There is a great deal of speculation circulating on the lower floors regarding Ms. Flare’s departure and her current relationship to Moonshine’s leadership. Morale appears to be affected. Several senior staff have asked for guidance on how to address it if clients raise the subject.
Katherine sat with that for a long moment behind her closed office door, the city spread out gray and indifferent through the window behind her desk. She thought back to the night of the launch, the stunned silence in the room when Caleb Reed had stepped forward and announced himself as Moonshine’s owner after years of carefully maintained anonymity, and then, barely a breath later, announced his engagement to a woman half the room had assumed was simply another guest. She thought of Fiona’s face in that emerald gown, composed and luminous under the cameras, nothing in her expression giving away whatever had truly been happening behind it for however long this had actually been building. She thought of Martin afterward, the careful, unreadable blankness he had carried through the two days since, which she had assumed at the time was simply professional composure holding under pressure. She was no longer entirely sure that was all it had been.
She had already raised the leak question with him once before, weeks ago, in the immediate aftermath of Fiona’s departure, when the abrupt and unexplained nature of her exit had first struck Katherine as worth a second look. Martin had been dismissive then, deflecting with the kind of brisk authority that usually ended a conversation before it properly started. She had let it go at the time, partly because there had been no hard proof, and partly because pushing harder against Martin when he closed a subject rarely accomplished anything productive.
This was different now. This was no longer a quiet internal suspicion contained to a handful of executives reviewing files behind closed doors. This was the entire company, top to bottom, treating the connection as settled fact, and Katherine understood enough about reputational damage to know that consensus, even unproven consensus, had a way of becoming its own kind of truth if it went unaddressed for too long.
