Chapter 161

You were late, but not late enough that anyone noticed other than Gemma, who immediately noted that you weren’t wearing one of your usual work outfits. She raised an eyebrow and smirked at the two of you, and a few minutes later she and Sabrina stepped out of the intern conference room and came back fifteen minutes later - Sabrina’s makeup was clean and fresh.

Nothing out of the norm, or at least the new norm, happened that morning. Joy came in late, as usual. Joy was a simmering pot of bitchiness, as usual. And Joy left early for lunch, as usual.

The rest of you ended up grabbing lunches from the bodega and eating up in the office, so you didn’t get a good chance to chat with Gemma beyond the usual work jokes and teases. That actually made things feel lighter though - most of the morning you’d been thinking about the conversation with the Uber driver, and how you needed to have some heavier conversations with Gemma.

Despite the quiet morning and lunch, things started picking up in the afternoon when Garrisson stopped by right at 1 pm and summoned Sabrina to his office.

She wasn’t back by the time Joy returned from her long lunch, and after ten minutes of Joy futzing around with her ‘obsolete piece of shit’ laptop she seemed to finally notice that Sabrina was missing. “Where’s Twiggy?” she asked, gesturing at Sabrina’s usual seat.

“In a meeting,” you said without looking up from your work. “And her name is Sabrina.”

“Ugh. What do you mean, in a meeting?” Joy asked. “What possible reason does she have to be in a meeting?”

“We didn’t ask,” Gemma said, staring down the length of the conference table at her.

“Well, she better be able to explain herself,” Joy muttered. She pounded a finger on her laptop keyboard a few times, then closed it. “John, there’s a cleanup job in the basement my mother just emailed me about. We need to go take care of it.”

“I’ll go with him,” Gemma said, standing up.

“No, you won’t,” Joy said. “There are sensitive documents, so I’m supposed to take care of them.”

“Then why is John going?” Eric asked. “And why not me, or Andy? John always gets to do these other jobs. I could use a break from document scanning.”

“Because I said so,” Joy sneered at him. “Come on, John.”

“One second,” you said, typing quickly on your laptop as if you were finishing something off. You weren’t actually on any screen and just used it as a reason to let Joy finish at her seat and grab her purse and start towards the door. That gave you the time to pull out your phone and turn on the recording app without her being able to see it.

You stood and went around the table, Gemma touching her fingers to yours for a split second as you moved past her. Enough to try and reassure you, but not give you away to the others. You followed Joy out of the conference room and towards the elevators.

“So, which room are we cleaning?” you asked her.

“It’s down in the basement,” she said. “One of the storage rooms.”

“Yeah, but which one?” you asked again.

“I’ll show you,” she said, pursing her lips disapprovingly. The problem was that you couldn’t tell if she was doing it because she thought you should have been eager to do what you thought she had planned, or if this really was a job sent to her by her mother and she just didn’t like being questioned.

Once you were in the elevator, you cleared your throat and shuffled your feet and didn’t really want to even get down to the basement alone with her. “So, Joy,” you said. “About the last time we, ah, talked...”