Chapter 4

That night I worked until midnight. When I left the company, I found my car had been smashed.

The windshield was shattered all over the ground, and four big words had been spray-painted in red across the car body—

"Gold digger, get lost."

This was a gift from my parents when I joined the company, a three-hundred-thousand-dollar car, and I had driven it for less than three months.

I stood beside the car, shaking with anger.

After a while, the police came, and after checking the surveillance footage, they found that it was done by a woman wearing a hat.

The footage was blurry, and her face couldn’t be seen clearly, but I recognized her instantly from her height and the way she walked.

Karen.

I told the police about my discovery, and they said they needed clearer evidence.

The next day at work, I deliberately didn’t mention the car.

When Karen saw me, she was all smiles.

"Nina, did you sleep well last night?"

"Pretty well."

"That’s good. Young people need to pay attention to their health and not work too hard."

I looked at her and suddenly smiled.

"Manager Chen, did your husband rest well at home?"

She froze for a second. "What do you mean?"

"Nothing. Just asking."

She stared at me for a few seconds, then turned and left.

I didn’t alert her.

I kept collecting evidence.

For the next week, Karen kept targeting me even harder.

She canceled all my time off and made me come to the company even on weekends.

She transferred me to a position where I could only copy documents and serve other people, calling it "rotation training."

She posted a screenshot in the company chat, a photo I had uploaded to social media three years ago, with the caption: "Nina’s image back then and now is pretty different. Looks like she’s really ‘grown’ a lot."

The comments below were full of "if you know, you know."

Jordan found me in private, his eyes red.

"Nina, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to take your project. She forced me to. She said if I didn’t help her, she’d fire me..."

"It’s fine. I know."

"You... you’re not angry?"

"I only get angry at people worth it."

Jordan hesitated for a moment, then handed me a USB drive.

"These are some things she told me to save. You can look at them yourself."

I opened the drive, and inside was a backup of the chat logs between Karen and David Brooks.

I read through them one by one, and a cold sweat broke out on my back.

Karen and David had used their positions to fake project costs, pocket client rebates, and take kickbacks from suppliers. In two years, they had siphoned at least three million dollars from the company.

Part of that money was sent into accounts belonging to David’s relatives, part was laundered through procurement channels, and part was transferred directly to Karen’s personal card.

And the reason the company had never found out was because Karen’s department handled a huge number of projects, the amounts were large, and with David helping cover things up in operations, finance couldn’t trace anything.

I packed up all the evidence and saved three copies.

One was on the USB drive, one in the cloud, and one was mailed to my mom.