Chapter 114: You Didn't Show Up

It was a regular Tuesday in the office—or as “regular” as a place like Goldberg & Associates could ever be. Phones shrilled like toddlers throwing tantrums, coffee fumes clung to the air like a curse, and the endless shuffle of files sounded less like productivity and more like an off-key orchestra of my pure misery. If someone bottled this chaos and sold it, it’d be labeled Corporate Hell No. 5. And as if the universe thought we didn’t already hate ourselves enough, my boss—Mr. Goldberg himself—had apparently woken up with a vendetta against humanity. He’d been on a yelling spree since nine a.m., tearing through staff like he was auditioning for the role of Satan’s secretary. Well…everyone except me. I know, I know—suspicious. Normally, I would’ve been his favorite punching bag. Not because I was bad at my job, far from it—I was diligent, organized, borderline obsessive about my deadlines, but because that’s just office hierarchy. Someone always gets sacrificed. Today, though, it wasn