Chapter 1

The day before the long holiday weekend, I put my resignation letter on Victor Henson’s desk. A thousand miles away, there was a resort town I’d been meaning to visit for years. This time, I was actually going.

A week earlier, my coworker Sybilla Gilbert had called me in a panic. She’d changed a setting on one of our precision machines and stopped the production line.

I drove in from home and got the machine running again.

I caught it before we lost the batch. If we’d missed that shipment, a customer worth tens of millions in orders could have walked.

We made the delivery, but only just. Under the agreement we’d made with the customer, a late shipment on the next order would cost the company a million dollars.

The next morning, I found my name on the incident report. Sybilla had told Victor I’d caused the breakdown.

“If Layla Dickerson hadn’t come back and messed with the controls, the machine would’ve been fine.”

I told Victor the machine had already stopped when she called me. The equipment log showed when the fault occurred. My call history showed when she reached me.

He didn’t ask to see either. He asked what I’d been doing at the plant on my day off.

“If we miss the next deadline because of that machine,” he said, “I’m holding you responsible for every dollar.”

I went home and wrote my resignation letter. It stayed in my bag until the day before the holiday.

Now Victor looked down at the letter. “Layla, you’re quitting?”

“You’ve told me my salary could cover five new hires,” I said.

“I figured this would save you the trouble.”

……

I knew Victor had been itching to get rid of me for a while now.

But if he fired me, the severance package alone would cost more than he could stomach.

Until Sybilla came along, I was the only person he trusted to run that machine without supervision.

Then she told him she could do it for a fraction of what he paid me.

For months, I’d told myself I couldn’t afford to walk away from the salary.

I’d spent ten years helping him build the company. I still cared what happened to it.

Then I came in on my day off, saved a shipment, and got told I might owe him a million dollars.

He could run the holiday shift without me.

“All right,” he said. “I accept your resignation.”

He answered so quickly I wondered how long he’d been waiting to say it.

He was betting the holiday run on someone who’d already shut the line down once.

“Let’s have HR sit in on the handover. I’ll leave when we’ve signed everything.”

Victor picked up the phone and called Sybilla and HR.

When Victor told her I was leaving, Sybilla blinked. Then she smiled.

She’d watched me run the machine often enough to think she knew what to do.

I’d been asking Victor to replace it for years. Every time, he’d told me to get one more production run out of it.

Sybilla had never been alone on the floor when it started acting up.