Chapter 267

“I think those should go over there, and then these ones can stack in numerical order here,” Sabrina directed you as the two of you were shifting boxes around.

You were on the last few files and Gemma was quickly going through them, so you and Sabrina had shifted to trying to make the entire system understandable for Garrison and the Associates in the morning. The entire outside of the conference room was now ringed with the file boxes, and you were doing the muscle work of lifting and moving things while Sabrina was writing out labels on sticky notes to make it all as easy as possible.

“That’s a good point,” you said. “But if we’re doing it numerically we should shift the dated tax boxes over there to make some more room.”

“Fuck, true,” Sabrina sighed. “OK.”

You got to work but then stopped when Gemma let out a loud, long sigh. When you looked over she was leaning back in her chair with her palms over her eyes.

“Something wrong?” you asked.

“Nope,” she shook her head, still with her hands over her eyes. “I just finished the last file.”

“Sweet!” Sabrina said, skipping around the table and hugging her.

“Why am I hearing a ‘but’ coming?” you asked.

“I thought we agreed no anal,” Sabrina smirked.

“Harrharr,” you rolled your eyes.

“It’s not a ‘but,’” Gemma said, dropping her hands and blinking a few times before gesturing to the file in front of her. “More like an ‘and.’”

“So, and what?” Sabrina asked, picking up the file and starting to skim through it.

“And I think I found something that Garrison is going to want,” Gemma said. “Maybe something that they were hiding on purpose.”

“In the last file of the last box?” you asked.

Gemma shrugged. “It’s just as likely as the first box, or any of the ones in the middle.”

“Holy shit,” Sabrina said, still reading.

“What is it?” you asked.

“A memo about health and safety issues,” Gemma said. “The way it reads, someone asked for something someone said to be in writing, and some middle manager somewhere actually put it in writing. It’s ... I mean, it’s a lawsuit waiting to happen. Or maybe there already is one.”

“Shiiiiiit,” you said, pursing your lips as you thought it through. Garrison handled a lot of different corporate business and this entire time you’d been assuming that these files were for some sort of merger situation. He’d purposefully not told you what you were supposed to be looking for, and now you understood why. If this was for a merger, you might have skimmed over a memo like that since it wasn’t fiducial.

If it was for something else, finding any sort of fishy memo was like a smoking gun.

“Do we tell Garrison now, or...?” Sabrina hedged.

“It’s almost midnight,” you said. “Him and the Associates are starting on this first thing tomorrow. I say we leave it out with a note, otherwise he might start wondering why we were here so late.”

“So what you’re saying is we maybe should have finished work before fucking in the office,” Gemma said, looking over at Sabrina.

“Well, if we did it that way, we may not have been able to fuck in here at all!” Sabrina pointed out.

“She’s not wrong,” Gemma said, turning back to you like a tennis referee watching a match.

“Hey, I’m not complaining here,” you said, holding up your hands. “I’m just stating the facts.”