keys and drove to the office early, and I did not wake him to say goodbye. On the drive in, Deborah texted me three names she had pulled from her own review of the calendar: the CFO, the general counsel, and one more. The third name was a director in HR I had never heard of before. And beneath the name, in the notes field, was the meeting location: “Rm. 412, Thursday, 7:00 p.m., closed.” I sat at a red light on Poydras and read those words twice. Room 412 was the small conference room on the executive floor, the one with the blinds that pull all the way down. The last time I had been inside it, I had been sitting in a chair with a lawyer’s card in my pocket and a promotion announcement in my hand. I put the phone down on the passenger seat and watched the light turn green. Then I drove the rest of the way to work and parked in my usual spot and walked in through the lobby, and signed my name on the visitor log for the last time as a person who still believed she was the only one with a plan for that Thursday.
CHAPTER 7: THE FILES I KEPT SIGNING
I did not sleep that night. I sat at my kitchen table with the succession agenda printed out in front of me and I read item one over and over. My exit interview. My husband had scheduled my exit interview three weeks before it could happen, and he had written it down, and he had forgotten to delete the calendar entry. That is the thing about Rafferty. He is very careful until he is sure he has already won. At four in the morning I got up and made coffee and pulled the plastic bin out of my home office closet. Eleven years of vendor agreements. I have kept a paper copy of every contract I have ever signed, because my signature goes on them and I have always wanted to be able to put my hand on the exact page if anybody ever asked me why.
I started with the current fiscal year and worked backward. By six o’clock I had found the first one. A facilities contract for the south campus loading docks, awarded to a company called Merrell Bay Services. I had approved it in the fall. The registered agent on the filing was a man named Dennis Kroft. I knew that name. Dennis Kroft was Rafferty’s roommate at Michigan State. He had been at our wedding. He had given a speech that went on too long and made everybody laugh, including me. I set that contract on the left side of the table and kept going. By nine I had two more. A janitorial supply agreement in February and an IT equipment lease in April. All three through Merrell Bay, all three with Dennis Kroft’s name on the incorporation filing.
And two of the three had crossed my desk during the week I was in Cincinnati. I pulled my travel records to be sure. I had been out of state from Monday morning until Friday night. My badge never touched a reader in this building that week. I know that because I pulled the badge log too, before I could talk myself out of it. Then I opened the invoice approvals in the finance system and followed the electronic trail. Every one of the three invoices had been approved from Rafferty’s login. Not mine. His. I ran the pricing against two competitors who had bid on the same scopes of work, and I ran it again because I did not believe the number the first time. Merrell Bay had charged us at least two hundred and thirty thousand dollars above what the market said those jobs were worth.
I sat back in my chair and looked at my own kitchen and I felt something I had not felt since that conference room. Not grief. Anger. Cold, clear anger, the kind that does not make you cry, the kind that makes you get organized. I did not call a reporter. I did not post anything. I did not send one word to Rafferty or to HR or to anybody in that building. I have worked in operations for twenty years and I know exactly what happens to the woman who goes public first without documentation. So I made three copies of everything. Everything. The three contracts, the incorporation filings, the invoice approvals, the competitor bids, my travel records, the badge log, the succession agenda, and the screenshot Priya had sent me of the approval entered from his laptop. I put one full set in a sealed envelope and drove it to my lawyer’s office and watched her sign for it. I sent a second set to a certified document service that timestamps and stores records for litigation, and I kept the receipt. I put the third set in my home safe, in a folder I labeled with the word REFERENCE, because I did not want anybody walking through my house to know what it was. It was ten past ten in the morning when I finished. I sat down at my laptop and wrote one email. It went to the CFO, Gerald Vance, and it said I needed twenty minutes of his time on Friday to walk him through something that should not wait. I did not write what it was about. I hit send. Then I made myself eat something, because I had not eaten since the day before, and I have learned that I make bad decisions when I am hungry. His assistant answered within the hour. I read the reply twice. Mr. Vance would not wait until Friday. He wanted to meet Thursday night instead, at seven, in his office on the executive floor. And he wanted Rafferty in the room. I read that last line about six times. I had not told him a single thing about my husband. Which meant the CFO
