Chapter 2: Damage Control
1060 Words
POV: Cara Mills
By morning, it was everywhere.
I woke up at six, reached for my phone out of habit, and Damien Cole's name was the first thing I saw. Not in one place. In all of them.
Twitter. i********:. LinkedIn. The New York Times business page. A live segment on morning news that I caught for thirty seconds before my coffee finished brewing.
The ticker at the bottom of the screen read: Hartwell Properties EVP faces backlash after viral resignation video.
I stood in my kitchen in my socks and watched the news anchor deliver the update with the kind of carefully neutral face that meant the story was big.
"Maya Chen's video, which has now surpassed four million views overnight, is putting significant pressure on Hartwell Properties and its executive vice president, Damien Cole. Industry insiders are calling for the company to respond. Several prominent business voices have weighed in, questioning Cole's fitness for the Managing Director position he is widely expected to receive later this year—"
I turned the TV off.
Made my coffee.
Sat down at my small kitchen table and opened my laptop.
I told myself I was just checking my email. Seeing if the application had gone through properly. That was all.
But I ended up on the Hartwell Properties website instead, reading everything I could find about the company. About Damien Cole.
His official bio was short and precise. No warmth in it at all.
Damien Cole, Executive Vice President, joined Hartwell Properties twelve years ago as a junior acquisitions analyst. He has since overseen the company's most significant portfolio expansions, including the landmark Meridian Tower development and the 2021 Northeast Corridor acquisition. He holds an MBA from Columbia University.
That was it. No personal details. No quote. No photograph that showed anything other than a man in a dark suit looking at something just past the camera.
I studied the photo for a moment.
He was younger than I expected. Maybe mid-thirties. Sharp jaw. Dark eyes. The kind of face that was handsome in a way that felt almost accidental — like he hadn't tried for it and wouldn't have cared either way. What struck me most was his expression. Or the lack of one.
He looked completely unreachable.
I closed the laptop.
---
The news cycle got louder as the day went on.
I was on a shift at the café by eight, and even there — between coffee orders and wiping down the counter — I kept catching pieces of it. Two women at the corner table were watching the video on one of their phones. A guy in a suit waiting for his order was reading something on his phone with a look on his face like he was watching a car accident.
By my lunch break, the story had a new development.
I read it on my phone in the back room, eating a sandwich I had brought from home.
Hartwell Properties had released a statement. Short, corporate, saying almost nothing — that they were aware of the situation and committed to fostering a respectful workplace and that they would be reviewing internal processes. The kind of statement that a PR team writes in twenty minutes when they are panicking but cannot show it.
The internet was not impressed.
"Reviewing internal processes" is corporate for "please stop looking at us."
They didn't even apologize. Not once.
Maya Chen deserves better than this statement.
I scrolled through the reactions for longer than I should have.
Then I saw something that made me sit up straighter.
A business journalist had posted a thread. She had clearly done her research fast. She laid it out cleanly — the MD appointment, the board dynamics, the fact that Richard Hartwell, the company's majority shareholder, had been quietly grooming Damien Cole for the top position for years. She wrote that sources inside the company were saying the board was rattled. That the viral video had come at the worst possible time. That Damien Cole's path to Managing Director, which had seemed certain just forty-eight hours ago, was now suddenly uncertain.
I read the thread twice.
So he wasn't just embarrassed.
He was under real pressure. Career-level pressure. The kind that didn't go away with a statement about reviewing internal processes.
I thought about that as I finished my sandwich.
I thought about a man sitting somewhere in that glass building right now, watching his carefully built world start to shake. Watching the thing he had worked toward for years suddenly feel unsteady beneath him.
I didn't feel sorry for him exactly.
But I understood something about the ground shifting under your feet when you couldn't afford for it to.
The confirmation email was still in my inbox when I got home that evening.
Thank you for your application. We will be in touch.
I read it again. Then I opened a new tab and went back to the job listing.
It had been updated.
A single line had been added at the bottom, in plain text, no formatting.
Interview slots available this Thursday. Serious applicants only.
Serious applicants only.
I almost laughed.
I wondered how many people had seen that update and immediately closed the tab. I wondered how many had started an application and stopped halfway through. I wondered how many had decided that no salary was worth it, no benefits package was worth it, no opportunity was worth walking into that building and sitting across from that man.
I looked at the hospital bill on my desk.
The one I had finally opened this morning.
The number at the bottom hadn't changed.
I looked back at my phone.
Serious applicants only.
I thought about my mother's voice on the phone. I thought about six weeks in a hospital bed. I thought about the leaking tap in my kitchen that I couldn't afford to fix and the laptop I had sold and the fourteen applications that had led nowhere.
I thought about what serious actually meant.
Not to them.
To me.
I put my phone down and started ironing my best blouse for Thursday.
Because there was something they didn't know yet — something Damien Cole and his PR team and his rattled board didn't know.
The one person brave enough to walk through those doors was already on her way.
- Writer
