Absolute Silence

27

An email from the club had outlined the special Valentine's event they were having. Would Filip participate without me? The possibility alone made me want to crawl under my desk and cry. I made a mental note to grab more cookie dough on my way home that evening. “Camiiiiillaaaa.” Trent sang my name from the hallway before poking his head inside my office. “You have a delivery.” He stepped back and made room for a man carrying a striking arrangement of roses in varying shades of pink. “For me?” “You Camilla Genovese?” the delivery guy asked, reading from a small clipboard. “Yeah.” “Then these are for you. Just sign here, please.” I scribbled my name, hardly taking my eyes from the bouquet, then thanked the man before he left. Trent buried his nose in one of the roses. “So, are they from Filip?” His question was loaded with a ridiculous amount of innuendo. Filip? Flowers were awfully romantic. Surely, they weren’t from him. But if not, then who? Maybe they were his way of apologizing. Warmth radiated from my chest, heating me down to my toes. The mere possibility of contact from Filip thawed the frost-filled emptiness I’d lived with for the past week. “I have no clue who they’re from.” I rotated the vase a full three hundred and sixty degrees in search of a card but came up empty. “No card? How mysterious!” Trent grinned. “Someone has a secret admirer.” I rolled my eyes. “With my luck, it’s probably a stalker.” Trent raised a brow. “As cute as you are, I’m not sure I could blame him. Or her. You never know.” I chuckled and shooed him out. “Go on, before we start to draw attention.” “Good call.” His eyes cut to the door before he lifted his chin, his face falling in a dramatic rendition of professionalism. “Keep me informed of your progress on the investigation. That is all.” He strolled from my office, bringing a smile to my face, as always. We hadn’t garnered our boss’s attention, but that didn’t mean my afternoon was free of Donald’s vile presence. An hour after lunch, he stalked into my office and closed the door behind him. He rarely took measures for privacy. I got the sense he liked people to know his business to impress his importance upon others. His sudden interest in confidentiality had me instantly on guard. “Camilla, you’ve gotten the bank into an embarrassing situation. The auditors have got it in their pea-sized brains that they’ve found some minor discrepancy with those accounts. They’ve frozen all of them until the matter can be sorted, which could take weeks. Valuable customers are unable to access their money because you decided to send out documents to any old person who asked.” Donald’s face was an angry shade of crimson, and his blood pressure had popped out a throbbing vein on his forehead. “I need you to sign these affidavits to resolve the issue.” He tossed a stack of papers onto my desk. It didn’t surprise me that I was being blamed for something that wasn’t my fault. If there was a problem with the accounts, that was on someone else. I was obligated to be transparent with the FDIC, and he wasn’t going to bully me into believing otherwise. I skimmed the top document, my lunch growing rancid in my stomach. “Donald, this statement claims I met with people I’ve never heard of. I can’t sign these.” “The hell you can’t. You’re the reason I have customers breathing down my neck. How would you like it if a bank held hundreds of thousands of your dollars hostage?” He pointed a finger at me and glared. “If you have any aspirations of running a bank someday, you have to work to protect your customers. If you’re not willing to make things happen, maybe you’re in the wrong field. Money involves power and influence. If you can’t handle the associated pressures, maybe you should find a husband and just stay home.” An eerie calm settled over me as Donald’s tornadic tantrum raged around me. As if I were safely in the eye of the storm, impervious to its battering winds. I rose to my feet and handed Donald his papers. “Take these and get the hell out of my office.” One of the few perks of hating your job was being able to stand up to the boss and not give two shits if he fired you. I was done. If Donald wanted to fire me, my integrity was a sword I would happily die upon. His purple lips thinned, and I could almost see cartoon clouds of steam billow from his ears, but he didn’t say a word. Yanking open my office door and throwing it back against the wall where the doorknob gouged a hole in the sheetrock, he simply left. That was it. Whether he fired me or not, I was looking for a new job, starting today. I slumped back into my chair, my legs growing more unsteady by the second. What the hell was that? Donald was an ass, but he’d never verbally assaulted me in such a way or asked me to do anything illegal. What the hell had come over him? Was I supposed to report him? Why the hell was he willing to break the law for a customer? None of it made any sense. “You okay in here?” Trevor whispered, poking his head into my office. I sucked in a lungful of air. “Yeah, I think so, but I need a soda.” Sugar. I needed lots of sugar. “I bet. That was intense.” “God, did the whole office hear?” “Only that he was yelling. What got him so upset?” “I can’t talk about it here.” I shook my head, eyes glancing in the direction of Donald’s office. “Maybe later, okay?” I grabbed my purse out of a desk drawer. “If anyone comes looking for me, tell them I’ll be back in five.”