I Was Fired From My Own Company, So I Took It Back

The accusation had been in the air for nine minutes before I understood they weren't asking me anything.

They were telling me.

"File transfer initiated at 11:47 p.m. on March 14th." The board's legal rep read from the printed page without looking up. Gray suit. Generic face. The kind of man you hire to say things so other people don't have to. "Source code. The Companion's full architecture. Transferred from the company server to an external drive registered to..." He looked up. He looked at me. "Naya Smith."

I looked at Cameron.

He was staring at the table.

I looked at the table too. Mahogany. Expensive. I remembered the day we ordered it. Cameron made a joke about it being the most grown-up thing we'd ever bought. Lana laughed so hard she knocked over her coffee.

That was fourteen months ago.

"Miss Smith." Gray suit again. "Do you have a statement?"

I had about forty. I picked the quietest one.

"Those timestamps correspond to a period I was in the lab," I said. "There's a key card log. Security footage. You'd be able to see—"

"We reviewed the security footage." Lana's voice cut across mine. Calm. Measured. That specific tone she saved for investor calls when she wanted to sound like she'd already won.

She sat two seats to my left. Back perfectly straight. Blond hair pulled into something polished and deliberate. She was dressed like a CEO today. She'd been dressed like a CEO all week. I hadn't noticed that until right now.

Of course she had.

"The footage shows the access was made using your credentials," she said. "Your credentials. Your access pattern. You work late, Naya. You're always the last one in the building." She glanced around the table. "Everyone here knows that."

"My pattern," I repeated.

"Yes."

She didn't blink.

I looked at Cameron again. Still staring at the table. Three years. I knew every single version of that man. I knew his lying face. I knew his scared face. Right now, both were sitting on him at once, and he was wearing the shirt I bought him for his birthday, and he would not look at me.

My hand curled into a fist in my lap.

"The timestamps can be spoofed," I said. Louder. Steadier. "Someone in this room needs to check the underlying metadata. Not just the surface logs. If those timestamps were created artificially, there'll be a lag in the packet headers. There will be a trace. Someone just has to look."

Silence.

From the far end of the table, the silver-haired board member, the one who had never once doubted himself in his life, looked over his reading glasses and said:

"We’ve had the logs independently reviewed. The evidence is very clear, Miss Smith."

That was the moment I stopped searching for the crack.

I sat back in my chair. Pressed my back teeth together. Made sure my face stayed completely still.

This wasn't a conversation. It wasn't even a hearing. The verdict had been signed before I walked through that door. Lana had planned this room. These documents. These people. Every single thing, except the part where I stopped looking scared.

I ground my teeth slowly under the table. I watched Lana click her pen. Once. Twice. She wasn't looking at me. She didn't need to.

"Effective immediately," gray suit continued, "the board is removing you from your position as Chief Engineer. Your building access will be revoked by end of day. All company assets—"

I stopped listening.

I watched the mouths move. I watched Cameron's hand lying flat on the table, completely still. I watched Lana not look relieved, because she was too smart to look relieved.

She looked like she was already thinking about the next meeting.

They talked for several more minutes.

Then it was over.

The hallway was white and very quiet. My sneakers squeaked on the polished floor. I stopped walking.

Turned around.

They were already coming out. Cameron first. Then Lana.

"Naya—" Cameron started.

"Why," I said.

Just the one word.

He exhaled. Long and slow. "It was best for the company. You have to understand, sometimes you make hard calls for the good of—"

"Why," I said again.

He finally looked at me.

I glared at him for two full seconds. He looked away first. Then he closed his mouth.

I looked at Lana.

She looked back at me, and for one second, one small terrible second, I thought she might say something real. Something that sounded like the girl I knew. The one who cried in my bathroom in ninth grade when her parents split up. The one who called me at 2 a.m. the night before our first pitch because she was terrified we'd fail.

Instead, she tilted her head slightly and said:

"We both know I was always the reason this company was going to make it."

Not cruel. Not sharp. She said it like something she'd been carrying for years and had finally decided to set down.

"So it was never a misunderstanding," I said.

Quiet. Not a question.

She held my gaze. Steady. Clear-eyed.

She didn't look guilty.

She looked relieved.

I nodded once. Turned toward the elevator. Hit the button. Didn't look back. The doors slid open. I stepped inside. The metal walls closed around me.

In the four seconds before I reached the ground floor, I did something they couldn't see.

I started counting.