Page 80 of The Grumpy Defenseman
I pushed back from the desk slowly enough that my chair wheels barely complained.
“How?”
“One of the interns was pulling alternates for the sponsor deck. Your folders synced to the shared review queue when they mirrored the drive last night.”
That hit me half a beat late.
A workflow.
Routine, plausible, and somehow worse than theft because there was no clean villain in it. Just one bad choice meeting one ordinary system.
I rubbed a hand over my mouth.
“Did hesay anything?”
Sandra gave a small breath through her nose. “Walsh doesn’t really say things in the ordinary sense.”
That was true. David Walsh communicated mostly through temperatures in rooms and decisions that got made elsewhere but somehow always seemed to be his.
“He wants to use it,” she said.
The words should have surprised me.
Of course he did.
Because the image was good. Good enough to survive people who had no business touching it.
“No.”
Sandra’s eyes flicked to mine. “That was my first response, too.”
I stood fully now, which helped absolutely nothing except the illusion that I was still in possession of my own spine.
“He didn’t ask for a first response,” Sandra said. “He asked whether the rights are clean and whether it can anchor the fall campaign.”
I laughed once.
Nothing was funny. Sometimes, if you did not laugh, you had to set something on fire, and this building frowned on that unless it was metaphorical.
“Anchor the fall campaign,” I repeated. “Sure. Why not. While we’re at it, let’s skin him alive and call it community engagement.”
Sandra’s mouth twitched despite herself.
“I told him it wasn’t intended for the campaign,” she said. “He asked why it was in the review environment if it wasn’t intended for review.”
I looked at my monitor.
The question, really, was why it had been there at all.
Because I kept it.
Because I named the folder Hold instead of Delete, and some weak, hungry part of me wanted more time.
“This cannot run,” I said.
Sandra crossed the room and set the tablet on the deskbetween us.
Walsh had already marked up a mock campaign sheet.
