Whisper Network by Chandler Baker

Author:Chandler Baker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Flatiron Books

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

3-APR

She was flirting. She was trying to sleep her way up the corporate ladder. We had known someone in college who had known her in law school who had said she’d done this sort of thing before. What type of thing was she doing, again?

She was in over her head. She was being preyed upon. She was a lamb in a lion’s den. She was a femme fatale. Affairs were a fact of life. We shouldn’t be so moralistic. We were being naïve. Plenty of legitimate relationships started at work. Couldn’t we have friends of the opposite sex? She was talented. She was compensating for a lack of talent. She was a slut. She was a tease. We liked her. We liked her professionally. Probably wouldn’t be friends with her personally. She was one of us.

Through all this, we’d heard that those who lived in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. But no one had told us anything about how to conduct ourselves within the display cases of crystal conference rooms and buildings constructed out of thousands of soulless glass eyes. Poised between our fingertips, not rocks, but the sleek weight of a brick-shaped smartphone. See and be seen. That was the nature of our particular glass house. And so accustomed were we to the glass cages that we distrusted anything that happened beyond the scope of our peripheral vision. Perhaps nosiness was a biological adaptation. Survival of the most informed.

Who were we to judge? More like, who were we not to?

Sloane judged her appearance in the foggy metal of the elevator doors on her way to her personal training appointment with Oksana. She’d thought to cancel more than once. But Oksana didn’t exactly do cancellations and there was a chance the workout would help. She felt terrible. Mainly because of the thing with Ardie, but that wasn’t all.

The movement of the chamber eased to a stop. The steel mouth opened and in walked Chrissy Ladner, a senior accountant at Truviv, holding a company-issued water bottle. They greeted each other good-naturedly and Chrissy took her spot next to Sloane, shoulder-to-shoulder.

“How are things in Accounting?”

Chrissy, small of stature, large of chutzpah, shrugged. “Same. Legal?”

Sloane shifted her weight. “Same.” Which was true only in all the worst ways.

Chrissy gave a soft snort. “I don’t know how you work for that guy,” she said, glancing up at the red, digital numbers reconfiguring at the top of the elevator.

“Who?” asked Sloane, already knowing. How do you work for that guy? It felt more like accusation than commiseration.

“Ames. We were all wondering when you were going to add him to that list.”

The corners of Sloane’s mouth pulled down. “Who said that I did?”

Chrissy raised her bottle as though in surrender. She’d always been no bullshit and Sloane liked running into her at Truviv events. If they worked in the same section, Sloane imagined, they’d be good friends. “Anyway, I guess we all might be working for him soon enough.”

“You believe that?”

Chrissy lifted her penciled eyebrows and sipped.

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