A Flight Ticket, a Lost Bid

I was ready to go to war with the finance department over a $300 plane ticket.

Rules are rules. Not a single penny over budget, the finance manager declared, her voice dripping with condescension.

As a result, our company lost an eight-and-a-half-million-dollar contract.

At the debriefing, the CEO was incandescent with rage. "Will someone please explain to me what the hell happened?"

I stood up, met the eyes of everyone in the room, and said calmly, "It happened because I couldn't afford the plane ticket to deliver the proposal to the client."

01

The conference room was suffocatingly silent. The massive, polished mahogany table reflected every twisted and humiliated face around it. The echoes of CEO Mark Harrisons roar still vibrated in the air.

"Eight and a half million dollars!" He slammed the file in his hand onto the table. The thud was like a sledgehammer to the chest of everyone present. "A project we've been working on for six months, gone, right at the finish line!"

"Can anyone give me an explanation?"

No one dared to speak. The executives sat bolt upright, their eyes fixed on nothing, as if theyd all turned to stone.

I sat at the very end of the table, in a corner that was almost always overlooked. I could feel the eyes of my direct supervisor, Sales Director John Miller, boring into me. His gaze was a frantic cocktail of anxiety, warning, and a kind of pathetic pleading.

He mouthed the words silently: Stick to the plan.

The "plan" was the story he had cornered me with in the breakroom just before the meeting, delivering it not as a request, but as an order.

"Amber, you're going to take the fall for this one. Just say you were careless and forgot to send the proposal before the deadline. The company won't fire you. At worst, you'll get a reprimand and lose your bonus. It's okay for young people to make mistakes. It's the attitude that counts."

I had just stared at his greasy face and his shifty, shameless eyes, and said nothing.

Now, his eyes were flashing that same message again, a desperate urging that made my stomach turn.

I lowered my gaze, my fingers tracing the cold edge of my phone under the table. My heart was a drum against my ribs, heavy and loud.

I knew this was my only chance.

Either I could continue to be the doormat I'd been for the past two years, the disposable pawn they pushed out to take the blame, or I could flip this whole goddamn table over.

"Is no one going to speak?" The CEO's voice was ice. His eyes, like a hawk's, scanned each face. "John, you're the sales director. You led this project. You tell me!"

John flinched as if hed been struck. He shot to his feet, beads of sweat instantly dotting his forehead. "Sir, the... the ultimate responsibility is mine. I failed to properly supervise."

He started by shouldering a meaningless sliver of blame, then pivoted. "However, there was a... a small hiccup in the execution. The employee responsible for delivering the proposal, Amber Lin, she..."

He pointed at me.

In an instant, every executive in the room swiveled their head, their gazes like searchlights, all fixed on me. There was scrutiny, contempt, a little bit of schadenfreude, and a whole lot of cold indifference.

I was the eye of the storm.

A flicker of relief crossed Johns face. He thought he'd successfully diverted the fire to the "temp." He looked at me, his voice dripping with fake sympathy and a "magnanimous" boss's tone. "Amber, why don't you explain to the CEO what happened."

Under the weight of all those stares, I slowly got to my feet. My body was stiff from sitting for so long, but I straightened my spine. I pushed my black-framed glasses up the bridge of my nose, the lenses hiding the emotion in my eyes.

"Mr. Harrison." My voice wasn't loud, but in the dead silence of the room, it was terrifyingly clear. I ignored John and looked directly at the man at the head of the table. I saw his brow furrowed in impatience and suspicion.

"I can explain."

Then, I said the words I had practiced in my head a thousand times.

"It happened because I couldn't afford the plane ticket to deliver the proposal to the client."

One second.

Two seconds.

You could have heard a pin drop.

Then, a wave of suppressed gasps and murmurs.

I saw Johns face drain of all color, then flush a deep, mottled purple. He clearly hadn't expected me, the quiet, head-down workhorse, to say something like that in this setting.

Across from me, the finance manager, Susan Hayes, her face a mask of perfect makeup, went from shocked to crimson.

"What nonsense are you spouting!" Her sharp voice shattered the room's bizarre tension. She shot up, her finger with its perfectly manicured red nail practically jabbing me in the face. "Amber Lin, don't you dare make baseless accusations! You messed up, and now you're trying to blame the finance department?"

"Company policy is company policy. Your flight was over budget. I was following the rules. What did I do wrong?" Her voice was high and shrill, filled with righteous indignation and the arrogance of someone who believes they are untouchable. She saw herself as the embodiment of "the rules."

I looked at her coldly, as if she were a clown. "Susan," I said, my calm voice cutting through her tirade. "You want to talk about the rules? Fine. Let's talk about the rules."

I pulled my phone from my pocket, opened the photo gallery, and walked to the center of the table. I held up the screen for everyone to see.

"This is an expense report from three months ago, for entertaining clients from the Sterling Group. Total: four hundred and thirty-two dollars. I paid out of pocket. According to company policy, reimbursement should be processed within ten business days. It has now been over seventy days. I haven't seen a dime."

"I followed up with your department three times. Each time, your assistant told me you were busy, that you didn't have time to sign off on it."

I swiped to the next picture. "This is a stack of taxi receipts. Over the past six months, I worked overtime one hundred and twenty times to keep this project on track. I took a taxi home one hundred and twenty times. Total: one hundred and ninety-six dollars. All paid out of pocket. I submitted the collated receipts to you last week. Your response was that the company does not reimburse for any single trip under five dollars. Susan, is that actually a company policy?"

My gaze was ice. Her lips trembled. She couldn't get a word out. She'd clearly never imagined that a nobody like me would have kept all the evidence.

I put my phone away and looked back at the CEO. "So, Mr. Harrison," my voice was laced with a barely suppressed sneer, "when an employee has fronted over six hundred dollars of their own money and can't get it back for months, why on earth would you expect her to have the capacity to front another three hundred dollars for a plane ticket?"

"I didn't have the money. That's my explanation."

"A company that can't even reimburse its employees in a timely manner expects them to have unlimited dedication and financial resources in a crisis. Don't you think that's a little... ridiculous?"

I was finished. The room was deathly silent.

I saw the sweat soaking the collar of Johns white shirt. I saw Susan's face go from red to a ghastly white, her body swaying.

And I saw the CEO, Mark Harrison, his face so dark it looked like it was about to storm. His gaze was no longer on me. It was fixed on Susan and John.

He looked at them like they were already dead.

02

The meeting was adjourned. Or rather, it was adjourned for everyone but me. The executives filed out as if granted a pardon, none of them daring to look at me. John and Susan were pinned to their seats by Harrison's parting shot"You two, wait for me"their faces ashen.

Only I was politely escorted to a smaller conference room by the CEO's assistant, a sharp, capable woman.

"Ms. Lin, please wait here. The CEO will be with you shortly."

Her form of address had shifted from "Amber" to "Ms. Lin," her tone from business-like to respectful.

I nodded and sat alone in the empty room. Outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, the sky was a dreary gray. I looked at my own blurry reflection in the glass: a pale girl with black-framed glasses, her expression unnervingly calm.

I'd won the first round. But I knew this was just the beginning.

The door was shoved open violently. John stormed in, locking the door behind him. His mask of civility was gone, replaced by a snarling, furious desperation.

"Amber! Are you insane?" he hissed, spittle flying from his lips. "Who told you to say that? We had a deal!"

I leaned back, disgusted, putting some distance between us. "Let me correct you, John. It wasn't 'we' who had a deal. It was 'you' who unilaterally informed me that I was to be the scapegoat. When did I ever agree to that?"

He was speechless for a moment, his face growing even uglier. "You! Do you have any idea what you've done? What good does it do you to drag this in front of the CEO? Do you want to get fired?" He had moved on to naked threats.

I looked at him and, to my own surprise, felt a small, bitter laugh bubble up. "Fired?" I repeated the word softly. "Fine. Go tell the CEO right now. Tell him that because I, Amber Lin, refused to be your scapegoat, you're going to fire me. Go on. Say it."

John's breath hitched. This was not the reaction he'd expected.

I took off my glasses and slowly began to polish the lenses with a tissue, my movements deliberate and calm. "John, the proposal for this project had three core technical sections. The two most critical parts, the 'Cloud-Based Dynamic Data Matching' and the 'User Behavior Prediction Model,' you took from my email at eleven o'clock on Tuesday night, didn't you? You said you needed to 'polish' them yourself to present to the CEO, to give the project a final review."

I looked up, my eyes behind the lenses like scalpels, slicing through his facade. "I just have one question for you. Those two sections... did you even understand them?"

His pupils contracted. His mouth opened and closed, but no sound came out. I saw the panic in his eyes. Of course he didn't understand them. He was a fraud who had climbed the ladder by sucking up and stealing credit. He probably couldn't even grasp the basic algorithms. His "polishing" consisted of deleting my name and typing his own.

I continued, each word a nail in his coffin. "The final version submitted to the client was the one you edited. You deleted the two key appendices on risk mitigation from my original draft. You probably thought they were just fluff, too wordy, not befitting your 'visionary' leadership. If I'm not mistaken, the real reason the client rejected our bid wasn't because we were late. It was because they saw a castrated, deeply flawed proposal.

"John, you took something you didn't even understand and used it to compete for an eight-and-a-half-million-dollar project. You tell me, who is really responsible for this failure?"

John's face shifted between shades of green and white. He pointed a trembling finger at me, shaking with rage and fear. "You... you..." He couldn't form a coherent sentence.

Threats? He had no leverage. Anger? He had no ground to stand on.

For the first time, he was seeing that the subordinate he had pushed around and exploited at will had a strength he couldn't control. She wasn't a sheep. She was a wolf in waiting.

"Fine... fine..." he finally managed to choke out, his eyes filled with venom. "Amber Lin, you just wait!"

He turned and fled, practically stumbling over his own feet.

Watching him go, I felt no thrill of victory, only a cold, bone-deep exhaustion. Fighting with people like him was draining.

I sat there for a long time, until the tension in my body and mind began to ease.

There was another knock on the door. It was the CEO's assistant again. She handed me a document, her expression unreadable.

"Ms. Lin, this is your temporary suspension notice. The CEO asks that you go home and rest while the company reaches a final decision."

I took the thin piece of paper. The cold, printed words announced another crisis in my career. But strangely, I felt calm.

I knew this chess game wasn't over yet.

03

The days of my suspension were harder than I'd expected. My apartment was small, with a single north-facing window that required the lights to be on even during the day. I cut off most contact with the outside world, leaving all the company group chats. But the rumors still seeped in like greasy sludge through the cracks of the internet.

Someone sent me a screenshot from a private chat.

"Did you hear? Amber in sales screwed up big time, lost that eight-mil project."

"That's not all. I heard she talked back to the CEO in the debriefing. She's crazy."

"People like her should just be fired. She's a menace."

The most active person spreading these rumors had an unfamiliar profile picture. Someone told me it was the finance manager Susan's nephew, who had just been hired.

Susan herself was busy poisoning the well at the office. She was telling everyone I was incompetent, that I'd gotten by on luck and my true colors were finally showing. She claimed I had been trying to falsify my expense reports to cheat the company, and she, with her "eagle eyes," had caught me. She painted herself as a dedicated hero, protecting the company from a corrupt employee. I was the villain.

I stared at the screen, at the black-and-white lies, and felt no anger. Just a coldness that went to my bones. This was the corporate world. When you fall, there will always be people eager to tear at your flesh and spit on your bones.

I turned off my phone. I didn't want to see any more of it.

Just then, the screen lit up. A new message.

From David in the tech department.

"Amber, don't listen to the gossip. Get some rest. We all know what you're capable of. The truth will come out."

David was one of the company's few veteran engineers, a man in his forties with salt-and-pepper hair. He was quiet, a true tech expert, and one of the few people in the company I genuinely respected. When I first started, he had patiently helped me with a few technical problems. After I was moved under John's supervision, we didn't interact as much. But I knew he had always appreciated my work.

At a time when I was being isolated and slandered by everyone, his simple words of encouragement were like a faint but warm beam of light in my dark room. My eyes started to burn.

I replied, "Thank you, David."

He messaged back quickly. "Susan is acting so high and mighty because she just got her useless nephew a job in procurement. She's trying to assert her authority, and you're the example she's making. She wants to show everyone she's not to be trifled with. Be careful. She holds a grudge."

Reading that, my gratitude slowly hardened into something else. I understood. Susan's cruelty wasn't just her personality; it was a power play. I was just the chicken she was sacrificing to scare the monkeys.

I replied, "I understand, David. Thank you for telling me."

I put down my phone and went to my desk, opening my laptop. The screen's glow reflected on my expressionless face.

I wasn't here to be a sacrifice. If they wanted me dead, I was going to take a few of them down with me.

I started to compile every digital trace I had left at that company over the past two years. The draft proposals John had taken with a casual "Let me see that." The late-night emails with his commands to revise the plans. The meeting minutes where I had proposed Plan A, only to have him shoot it down and then present it as his own idea in another meeting. The personal projects and performance bonuses I had to give up to complete his last-minute "urgent" tasks.

Emails, chat logs, file revision histories, server access logs... I was a detective, methodically gathering evidence of my own existence. I had once thought this evidence would rot on my hard drive forever. I had told myself so many times to just let it go, to endure it. But I realized now that endurance doesn't earn you respect. It only earns you more exploitation.

When they pushed me to the edge of the cliff, it was no longer a dead end. It was my battlefield.

This crisis was, perhaps, truly an opportunity. An opportunity to settle all the old scores, with interest.

04

The days dragged on. The third day of my suspension, the fifth, the seventh. Silence from the company. It was as if they had forgotten I existed. The waiting was like being slowly cut with a dull knife.

Sometimes I wondered if the CEO had already bought John and Susan's story and was just planning to quietly let me go. If so, would I even have a chance to present my evidence? Anxiety grew like a weed in my solitude.

But I forced myself to stay calm. I reviewed the files I had compiled, refining my narrative over and over. Whatever the outcome, I had to be prepared.

On the afternoon of the eighth day, my phone rang. An unknown number. I hesitated, then answered.

"Hello, is this Ms. Amber Lin?" A polite, controlled female voice. I recognized it. The CEO's assistant.

My heart skipped a beat. "Yes, this is she."

"Ms. Lin, hello. The CEO would like you to submit a detailed written report regarding the loss of the eight-and-a-half-million-dollar project."

My fingers tightened around the phone. "A written report?"

"Yes. Please be completely factual and provide a detailed account of everything that happened, from the project's inception until your suspension, including your personal analysis and perspective on the matter. Once the report is complete, please encrypt it and send it directly to the CEO's private email. I will text you the address shortly. Also," she paused, then added, "the CEO has stipulated that this report will not be seen by anyone else. Please feel free to speak your mind without any reservations."

After hanging up, I stood there, my heart pounding. I hadn't received a termination letter. I had received this. A direct line to the top.

Mark Harrison hadn't fired me immediately. He hadn't completely believed John and Susan. He was investigating.

My mind raced. Why would the CEO of a company with over a thousand employees go to such trouble for a low-level employee? Was it because my "I can't afford a plane ticket" line had struck a nerve? Or was the loss of eight and a half million dollars so significant that he had to get to the bottom of it?

Probably a bit of both. But more likely, he had sensed something was off from my unusual behavior. A normally quiet employee suddenly launching a kamikaze attack on two mid-level managers in a high-level meeting. There had to be a deeper reason.

A man like Harrison was suspicious and controlling. He would not tolerate an undercurrent in his company that he couldn't control.

He would have pulled my personnel file, my performance reviews. He would have seen that every project I was a part of became a success, and that the project lead was, without exception, John Miller. He would have seen that my performance ratings were always consistently averagenever outstanding, never pooras if carefully managed. He would have seen the stark contrast between the person who could write those brilliant proposals and the person who was quibbling over a plane ticket.

He was suspicious.

So, he needed a report from me, the person at the center of the storm. The raw, unfiltered version. He wanted to hear my side of the story.

My chance had come.

I took a deep breath, calming the excitement and nerves. I went to my computer and sat down. The sky outside had darkened, and the city lights were beginning to twinkle. I hadn't turned on the lights in my room. Only the screen illuminated my face.

I knew this report would decide my fate. And it would decide the fates of John and Susan as well.

I cracked my knuckles. Then, I placed my hands on the keyboard.

The battle had begun.