Chapter 196

“It started four years ago,” Jacobs explained. He’d gotten control of himself now and he looked more exhausted than anything else. Garrison had pulled him out of the IT office and down the hall to an open meeting room and you, Sabrina and Gemma had just sort of followed along since you hadn’t been sent away. “At first I thought it was innocent stuff. I had a girlfriend. Joy was just kind of flirty whenever she had to come by the IT office. I thought it wasn’t anything, and sort of took it as a compliment. Then the next year, when she was back, she went right back to it and this time she went harder. And I- God, I was such an idiot, but it felt good to be wanted. I’ve been with my wife for seven years now, four by that second summer.”

“You slept with an intern?” Garrison asked bluntly.

“No!” Jacobs said. “God, no. But I flirted back, and Joy got my number from my email signature and started texting me. At first, I thought it was just friendly stuff, but then I realized I was hiding it from Jenny and knew it was wrong so I tried to stop it. Then Joy sent me a nude picture, and ... I was weak and didn’t tell her to stop. When I finally did she got pissed at me and threatened to tell my girlfriend and get me fired, and I panicked. I could erase everything from my phone, but I couldn’t do anything about hers since she was using a personal phone and not a company one.

“Then she came to me about halfway through that summer and said I had to pay up. She made me search for an email and delete it. She’d been the one to send it so I assumed it was something embarrassing and this would be the end of it, but then she came back twice more for me to do it again. Then another few times last year.”

Garrison sighed loudly through his nose, a long sound that spoke of irritation and annoyance. “And there’s no way to get those emails back?”

Jacobs shook his head. “I scraped every trace of them from the servers, accounts and devices. Unless someone saw them right when they got sent, it was like they were never there.”

“Alright,” Garrison sighed and stood. “Go back to work. Obviously this is a major problem, but I’m not going to just lash out and fire you. If you want any shot at keeping your job you’re going to stay silent about this until I say otherwise, got it?”

“Yes, sir,” Jacobs nodded.

“Then don’t screw it up,” he said. Then he turned to you and the girls as if he’d forgotten you were even there. “You three go back down to the conference room. Don’t say anything to anyone about this. I’m going to need to call in a Partners meeting and it might take some time to get that together. Breathe a word of it and everything else goes away.”

“Understood, sir,” you nodded.

“Yes, sir,” Gemma and Sabrina both answered.

He dismissed you, and the three of you wound your way back through the halls towards the elevators, but you tugged the girls over to the heavy door to the stairs. Despite the nice furnishings of the legal offices, the stairs to the building were hard concrete and steel girders and little else, so as the door shut behind you with a massive clang and echo you were going to have to keep your voices down.