Whatever came next, she had a sick feeling it was going to be so much worse. Haley Albert barely slept. She spent most of the night scrolling through her phone, watching the numbers climb. A few thousand views turned into tens of thousands. By the time she pulled into the Halbrook Foods parking garage the next morning, the video had passed half a million.
Her hands shook as she gripped the steering wheel. Inside the building, the whispers started before she even reached her office. Co-workers who usually greeted her in the hallway suddenly found reasons to look at their phones instead. A junior assistant near the elevator quickly covered her screen when Haley walked by, but not fast enough to hide the headline glowing across it. Halbrook Executive Caught Demanding Black Farmer Leave First Class Seat.
Hayley's stomach twisted into a hard, sick knot. She'd barely dropped her bag at her desk when Milo Danes appeared in her doorway. Phone in hand, tie slightly loosened, looking like a man who hadn't slept much, either. "We need to talk," he said. "Now? " She followed him into a small conference room.
And the second the door shut, he turned on her. "Do you have any idea what's happening right now? " he snapped. "This isn't some little local story anymore. It's national. Reporters are calling.
Our social media team is drowning in comments. Somebody tagged the CEO's personal account. " "I know," Hayley said, voice tight. "Then you know we need a statement. Today. Something that shows accountability.
Something that makes this go away fast. " "Accountability? " Hayley repeated, the word bitter in her mouth. "You mean an apology? " "I mean whatever gets the cameras pointed somewhere else," Milo said flatly. "This is a PR fire, Hayley. Right now, it's a fire. Give it 2 more days without a response, and it's an inferno. " Hayley rubbed her temples, feeling the walls close in.
An apology meant admitting fault. Admitting fault meant opening the door to questions about the contract, about section 12, about numbers she desperately needed to stay buried. "Let me handle it," she said. "I'll talk to a few people. Smooth things over quietly before we go making some big public statement that just fans the flames. " Milo frowned, clearly unconvinced, but he didn't push back.
Not yet. Hayley spent the rest of the morning working the phones, calling colleagues, planting careful little seeds of doubt. "You know how these things get blown out of proportion online? " She told one director, forcing a light, breezy tone into her voice. "The farmer's probably using this whole thing to push for a better deal. Wouldn't be the first supplier to play the sympathy card during a renegotiation. " She said some version of that same lie four or five times that morning, each time a little more convincing than the last, each time making herself believe it a little more, too.
Down on the third floor, Kenneth Pelham sat at his desk, staring at his screen, the audit report open in front of him. Two years of underpayment laid out in careful columns and clean numbers. He'd worked on it late into the night, cross-checking every figure twice, making sure there wasn't a single mistake that could be picked apart. He was drafting an email to send the report up the chain when a knock sounded at his cubicle wall. He looked up.