Chapter 2

"Shameless! Her son did something so disgusting, and she's actually covering for him!"

"She's always sucking up to the bosses and bullying everyone else. Turns out her son is cut from the exact same cloth!"

"Poor Olivia... Having a coworker like this, how is she supposed to feel safe at work?!"

The spectators joined in the chorus of condemnation. Yet I couldn't care less, maintaining an attitude of utter detachment.

Olivia wailed even harder.

"Morgan, your son did this terrible thing! Why won't you just admit it?!"

"How am I supposed to show my face in this office again? How am I supposed to survive this? Wahhh..."

She sobbed while hitting her own head in despair, a performance so heartbreaking that many in the room grew misty-eyed.

A colleague from the product team who was close with Olivia couldn't take it anymore. She pointed straight at my nose and snapped, "Morgan, you're a woman too! How can you be so vicious? If you were the one being stalked and harassed today, would you still sit there looking so smug and cold?!"

I sneered. "My son is being slandered. What's wrong with me defending him?"

I knew with absolute certainty that Archie could never do something so absurd.

In their eyes, however, I was just making pathetic excuses.

The chatter among the spectators grew louder and louder.

"This woman is beyond saving!"

"To protect her creep of a son, she's completely abandoned her humanity!"

"If leadership promotes her, none of us will ever feel safe working here again!"

The review room descended into chaos. The executive leading the panel frowned and rapped his knuckles on the table. "Order! Since both parties hold completely conflicting accounts, present your respective evidence."

The moment the words left his mouth, Olivia stood up, righteous and resolute. "I have full, irrefutable evidence proving that Morgan's son, Archie, harassed me."

She pulled up her phone and began describing the alleged incident.

"That night around ten, I had just finished overtime and was heading out. Facilities had sent an alert saying the elevators were down for maintenance, so I had to take the stairs. Just as I reached the third-floor fire exit, my phone chimed with a friend request. The note attached read: 'I'm Archie, Morgan's son.' Assuming he was a colleague, I accepted. Immediately, he texted 'Don't leave tonight' and sent a pinned location of my desk."

I raised an eyebrow, pressing her: "How did you verify that person was actually my son, Archie?"

Olivia met my gaze, choking back a sob as she replied:

"I... of course I knew! He said so himself! He explicitly told me he was Morgan's son, and he sent a voice memo!"

"He whispered, 'Don't leave tonight... I'm watching your desk.' I was so scared I blocked him on the spot. But the next day, he made a burner account and added me again, threatening that if I didn't accept, he'd make sure my project crashed and burned... I was terrified out of my mind! All I could do was screenshot everything for proof... Wahhh..."

By the end of her speech, she was hyperventilating, her hands clutching the hem of her jacket in a death grip.

Everyone felt boundless sympathy for her ordeal. Only I knew with absolute certainty that she was spinning a web of lies.

I called her out publicly, right then and there: "Olivia, you're lying through your teeth."