Mr. Greyson was standing in line for the roller coaster at a suburban amusement park with his wife and kids.
The Building Abbott second the call connected, every drop of color drained from his face. The cotton candy slipped from his fingers and hit the ground.
"Open the door! Get someone to open that door and pull the stock out NOW! It can't all be underwater!"
He was screaming into the phone.
"Sir, the warehouse security door has a high-grade lock. We don't have a key on our end. Where's your on-duty person today?"
The building manager was pacing the corridor, stomping his feet in frustration. The water had already risen past his calves.
Mr. Greyson pulled up the employee duty roster. There, in the column for Day Four, two words stared back at him: Hope Fox.
His fingers trembled as he dialed her number.
No sound. Only silence, then a single flat tone as the call dropped.
He tried voice calls, video calls. Every single one vanished into nothing.
At that moment, Hope's phone sat in a waterproof pouch outside her hotel room. She was on a jet ski, shrieking with joy as she bounced across the waves, oblivious to the barrage of calls.
10:45 a.m.
Mr. Greyson burst through the lobby doors of the office building. The sight that greeted him buckled his knees, and he collapsed into the muddy water.
The water level in the corridor was still climbing. Packing slips from the instruments floated past on the surface.
"Break it down! Break the damn door down!"
His eyes were so bloodshot they looked ready to bleed. He ripped the fire axe from the extinguisher cabinet and, together with a handful of coworkers who'd rushed over, hacked at the security door like a man possessed.
A deafening crash, and the door caved in.
Waist-deep water surged out of the warehouse, carrying a churning mess of waterlogged cardboard and shattered glass. The force knocked Mr. Greyson flat on his back.
When they waded into the depths of the warehouse, he let out a sound that barely qualified as human.
The precision instruments on the bottom three rows of shelving were completely submerged. Every last one of them, destroyed.
"Hope Fox!! Where the HELL are you, Hope Fox!!"
1:00 p.m.
Mr. Greyson sat behind a battered desk that had been dragged into the lobby, soaked head to toe, caked in grime.
Ruined cardboard boxes still leaking water littered the floor around his feet. On the desk lay the final tally: $80,000 worth of inventory, every cent of it gone.
His eyes were hollow and bloodshot. He was firing messages into the hundred-person company group chat like a man unhinged.
"@Hope Fox! @Hope Fox! Where the HELL did you go?!!"
"The warehouse was flooded for TWO HOURS! You were the on-duty employee. Why weren't you at your post!"
"Do you have any idea you just cost this company almost eighty thousand dollars! I will have you ARRESTED!"
The group chat went dead silent.
Thousands of miles away in Miami, Hope had just finished rinsing the sand off her feet at the shoreline. She was humming to herself, fishing her phone out of the waterproof pouch, ready to pick her best beach photos for a grid post.
The instant she unlocked the screen, the app froze.
Hundreds of unread messages hit her all at once.
By the time she registered Mr. Greyson's messages and the photos of the devastation, her blood ran cold.
Almost eighty thousand dollars in losses? Dereliction of duty? Jail?!
Hope dropped onto the sand, her phone nearly slipping from her grip into the surf.
She could work until her next lifetime and never pay that back.
She needed someone else to take the fall.
She dialed Mr. Greyson.
The second the call connected, before his cursing could even reach her, she erupted into a shrill, pitiful wail.
"Mr. Greyson! It wasn't me! It really wasn't my fault! Please, you have to look into this properly!"
"You weren't at your post and you're telling ME you're innocent?! Where the hell are you!"
Mr. Greyson roared from the other end.
"Mr. Greyson, I handed everything over to Hailey Chavez yesterday afternoon! We swapped shifts. Hailey was supposed to be there today!"
Hope's voice pitched higher as the lie flew out of her mouth. "I have proof! I'll send it right now!"
She hung up and, fast as her fingers could move, sent the photo she'd staged yesterday afternoon while I was away into the group chat.
