Chapter 5 — I Saw Everything I Needed To See. Now It Was Time.
Six weeks passed.
Ray had arrived before sunrise every working day and left in the early afternoon. He had cleaned forty-one sections of corridor, wiped two hundred and seven square meters of glass, and filled a notebook to page forty-one.
He sat in his car on the last morning and read back through everything from the beginning.
He organized it into three sections.
The first covered financial misreporting. Bryce Callahan's sales figures had been inflated in a consistent, deliberate pattern across four consecutive reporting periods. The commission disbursements without supporting contracts totaled a significant sum. None of it had been flagged in the internal audit presented to the board in month two — because the internal audit had been conducted by a team that reported directly to Derek.
The second section covered unauthorized external discussions. Ray had overheard two separate conversations in which Derek or his representatives had discussed the company's valuation with outside parties whose names he couldn't confirm, but whose context suggested acquisition interest. These conversations had not been disclosed to the board. He had verified this through Margaret without revealing what he knew, by asking whether the board had received any external interest notifications in the past quarter. They had not.
The third section covered the governance document he had found in Nina's discarded papers. He had since confirmed through Margaret that no such amendment had been formally tabled for board review. Which meant it was in preparation — and its existence had not been disclosed.
He scanned each page of the notebook with his phone. He organized the files. He wrote a cover summary: four paragraphs, factual and precise.
He sent everything to Margaret and to the company's chief legal counsel at nine in the morning.
Then he drove to the building, changed into his work shirt, and cleaned for the last time.
At two in the afternoon, Bryce passed him in the corridor near the stairwell.
He barely slowed down.
"You guys rotating out soon?" Bryce said, not really asking. "Feels like you've been here forever."
Ray looked at him.
"Just about done," he said.
Bryce was already walking away.
Ray returned his cart to the supply room, signed out on the contractor log, and handed back his building keycard at the facilities desk.
He walked to the exit.
He stopped.
He stood there for a moment and looked at the lobby. The tile he had chosen. The light fixtures he had argued for. The reception desk, the atrium ceiling, the company name etched into the glass wall behind the welcome area in the clean typeface he had approved in the company's second year.
His name was on the founding documents of this building.
It would be on the agenda tomorrow as well.
He pushed through the door and walked to his car.
That evening, the board received an urgent meeting notice.
The sender field read: Colton, R.
Attached: forty-one pages.
Six weeks of work.
And tomorrow, a reckoning.