#Chapter 28- Lies

Cora The office smelled like coffee, paper, and tension. I sat at my desk, hands steady even though everything inside me felt like it had been hollowed out. I tried to lose myself in the work before me, but it was hard when so many people around me were openly staring. Emails pinged, meetings buzzed in and out of the floor around me, and every now and then, I caught someone looking—quick, sharp flicks of the eyes that slid off me like raindrops off glass. Let them glance. Let them whisper. I wasn’t going anywhere. The flash drive sat heavy in my pocket. I’d found it shoved into my desk drawer that morning with a short note from Ethan. You might want to see this, it ominously said in his fine script. I knew what it contained even before I plugged it into my laptop, the screen’s pale glow stark against the early gray morning. Fabrications. Lies. And Amy's smiling fingerprints were all over it. There were photoshopped screenshots of me "leaking" classifie