Chapter 3
"William Stein! You were slacking off during office hours? How dare you! Didn't I tell you last week that the proposal is due today? Are you disregarding my words?"
I let out a cold laugh and pulled a USB drive from my pocket. "Who said I can't submit the proposal? I was just about to send it."
"That's impossible!" Maxim let out a shrill cry. Then, when Charmaine shot him a puzzled look, he immediately started stammering, "I-I mean… How could William p-possibly have finished the task if he was slacking off the whole time?"
"The office has surveillance cameras to record whether or not I'd been slacking off. And whoever touched my computer—checking the footage will make that very clear too."
Maxim's face went deathly pale, and his lips quivered uncontrollably. "Then… Then I must have been mistaken… William was working hard the whole time. He wasn't slacking off. Surely there's no need to check the footage, right?"
But Charmaine seemed dead set on pinning me as guilty and refused to let go of things. "No! We have to get to the bottom of this. William, even if you've been an employee of the company for a long time, you will still be punished if you don't take your work seriously!"
At the end of the day, when the surveillance footage was reviewed, it showed me diligently working on the proposal at my desk. I barely even left for the restroom.
Maxim, on the other hand, was frequently scrolling through trashy short videos on his phone or playing games.
Charmaine froze, and Maxim lowered his head guiltily.
Other colleagues who reviewed the footage began grumbling.
"Seriously, the document Maxim gave me yesterday was full of typos. I spent ages fixing them."
"Yeah, and he printed the wrong thing when I asked him to help. I ended up having to do it myself."
"If he can't even handle simple tasks, what exactly is he going to be good for?"
Maxim looked like he wanted to crawl under a desk and disappear when he heard the comments around him.
But Charmaine suddenly slammed her hand on the desk, cutting off the complaints. "They're just minor mistakes! You're all colleagues, so why are you making such a big deal out of it? Maxim is still an intern. Can't you show some tolerance? It's not like none of you have ever made mistakes."
The others rolled their eyes behind her back, but since she was the manager, no one dared argue openly.
"And you!"
Charmaine turned and glared at me fiercely. "As a senior employee of the company, why didn't you take the initiative to guide Max? If he makes mistakes, aren't you partly responsible for them too?"
Honestly, if office fights weren't prohibited, I'd have happily slapped some sense into Charmaine right then and there.
When Maxim accused me of slacking off, she said I wasn't taking my work seriously. But when Maxim himself was actually slacking off, she claimed that I was responsible for it too. What absolute nonsense.
I couldn't be bothered arguing with someone so dense, and Charmaine eventually told us all to get back to work without pressing further.
As I made my way back to my seat, I overheard a few colleagues whispering.
"Isn't William dating Ms. Fitzpatrick? Why was she taking the intern's side today?"
"Who knows? Maybe they had a fight."
I smiled to myself. There was no fight. Charmaine was the one acting like she'd lost her mind or something. But I didn't care anymore. If my girlfriend wasn't right in the head, was I really supposed to treasure her like a jewel?
The first thing I did when I got back to my desk was pull out my phone and send Charmaine a text message. "We're breaking up."
Then I deleted and blocked her contact in one smooth motion. Doing that felt incredibly liberating.
The following days passed relatively smoothly, and Charmaine seemed to have accepted that we were no longer together.
The only annoyance was the bullet comments still appearing from time to time. But since I completely ignored them, they started appearing less frequently.
The day before the upper management inspection, Charmaine suddenly approached me. She blocked my path as I was about to leave work and spoke to me in a commanding tone. "Put Max's name on the project proposal you'll be presenting tomorrow."
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