EPISODE: 2

• People started walking faster in the halls. They lowered their monitors when they weren’t at their desks. Someone wiped the whiteboard clean even though there was no meeting scheduled. All reflex. Anukica, the HR director, looked worse by the hour. She usually moved with calm efficiency, but that morning she bumped into a chair and didn’t apologize.
• At noon, she walked past me holding a manila folder with trembling fingers. I’d never seen her shake before. Someone mentioned she’d started taking lunch alone in her car. By early afternoon, the lights in conference room B were off, but the door was closed. A few of the younger team leads gathered around it like they were standing beside a hospital room, not a meeting space.
• They didn’t knock. No one wanted to be the one to find out who was in there. From my office, I saw a group from accounts huddled near the coffee station, speaking in tight formations. One of them turned, saw me looking, and quickly straightened. I didn’t break eye contact. He looked away. My name came up, not directly, but I felt it.
• a shift. That uncomfortable awareness that comes when people start to consider who’s next. The safest assumption is always the quiet one. I kept still. That’s how you survive it. By becoming part of the background, by knowing when to offer nothing. Because the truth is, they weren’t just whispering about him.
• They were whispering about what he hadn’t done yet. And in offices like this, it’s never the action that causes panic. It’s the pause before it. the moment you realize someone has started rearranging the chessboard and you’re still trying to figure out if you’re a rook or a pawn or if you’re already off the board.
• The first one was Greg Meyers from operations. 22 years in the company, gone before the office even finished its morning coffee. No announcement, no farewell, no warning, just a blank calendar slot where his weekly sink used to be. The second was Marta Singh, finance. She trained half the department, ran the year-end clothes like muscle memory.
• Her desk was cleared by 2:15. After that, the rhythm picked up. Everyday, another empty chair. They didn’t go in groups. That was the unsettling part. There was no mass culling, no dramatic Friday bloodletting. Adrien was smarter than that. He did it like surgery, one incision at a time, clean and clinical. A few were told in person.
• Most got a quick email from HR asking for a brief chat. The phrase became radioactive. You could hear the breath catch in someone’s chest the moment it landed in their inbox. The halls went quiet after lunch. People stayed at their desks, eyes fixed on monitors barely blinking. Collaboration slowed to a crawl. No one wanted to be too visible.
• No one wanted to be overheard second-guessing any. And yet, all the gaps filled overnight. New faces began appearing. Young, unnervingly enthusiastic, always introduced with the same vague phrase from Adrienne’s previous team. No titles, no context. They moved in packs, speaking in fluent jargon, making recommendations before they’d even learned what the old processes were.
• Some of them didn’t know how to use the internal system. One mistook a board member for a vendor rep, but they carried themselves with confidence because they knew they were safe. They were his. That was all that mattered. I watched all of it from behind my glass wall. No one spoke to me directly. Maybe they assumed I was next.

EPISODE: 3

• Maybe they hoped I was invisible enough to survive the purge. Or maybe they just didn’t know how to ask why I was still standing when people with louder titles and longer resumes were vanishing over. I didn’t speak up. I didn’t warn. I didn’t intervene. I took notes, not literal ones, just mental tallies of what was being dismantled brick by brick, department by department.
• There’s a moment in every collapse when people stop resisting and start adapting. I could feel the office crossing that line. Loyalty was becoming liability. Caution became currency. People who once spoke with certainty now watched their words like someone was writing them down. Adrienne wasn’t rebuilding anything. He was clearing the ground.
• It wasn’t personal. It never is at first, but the more he tore out the roots, the more I wondered when he’d start asking about mine. The meeting was called late. Too late for it to be routine. The calendar invite came without an agenda from Adrienne’s assistant. Not HR, not ops. Just a block of time.
• Subject line efficiency forward. Q3 streamline discussion. It had that intentionally vague stink like something already decided was about to be dressed up as collaborative. I sat near the wall. Not at the table. Never at the table anymore. that was reserved for his people. They always arrived early, always with the same posture.
• Laptop open, brows furrowed, fingers poised like weapons over the keyboard. I watched one of them nod at nothing for a full 30 seconds before Adrien even entered. He didn’t sit. He stood at the front like a lecturer, palms pressed on the polished edge of the conference table. His jacket sleeves didn’t wrinkle.
• That was the first thing I noticed. The second was the tone, factual, sterile. He spoke about overlap, efficiency, blind spots, and non-core value redundancy. Every few minutes, he clicked to the next slide. No one asked questions. No one took notes. We just watched. Then came the phrase institutional bloat. The words dropped like a hammer into the room.
• I saw one of the senior tech leads flinch. A marketing manager’s pen froze halfway through a doodle. Adrien didn’t look up from the screen. We need to be leaner, nimble, flat. He didn’t look at me when he said it, but the moment after, he turned briefly, long enough. It wasn’t a mistake. It wasn’t accidental.
• I felt it land. After the meeting, people left quickly. I stayed behind a few extra seconds, waiting for the elevator traffic to thin. Just as I reached the hallway, I heard him call out, “Evelyn.” It took him a beat too long to say it, like he’d had to check. He stepped beside me, walking just a little too fast for conversation.
• I had to match his pace. Remind me again what exactly is it you do with the Taiwan team? Taipei, I corrected. I manage the strategic partnership with Apex Horizon Tech. I’ve been the primary liaison for seven years. I handle scheduling terms localization, interpretation when needed, conflict navigation, technical presentation prep, and onboarding both sides.
• He squinted like he’d missed a word in a cross word. So, mostly language stuff. I stopped walking. He didn’t. That was the moment, I think. the exact second the shape of it changed because it wasn’t the dismissal that stung. I’d seen men like Adrien reduce whole departments to bullet points and still sleep soundly. It wasn’t personal, but I realized right then I’d stopped being invisible.
• I’d become something worse. A line on his spreadsheet he didn’t understand and therefore didn’t value, which meant I was already gone. He just hadn’t made it official yet. I turned back toward my office slower now, careful because if he was going to cut me out, I wanted to know the shape of the blade first. The meeting request came in at 6:42 p.m. Friday.
• Subject line internal discussion strategic alignment. No details 30 minutes blocked. Sender Anukica from HR. Location conference room 2C. The kind of invitation that doesn’t need an explanation. You know what it means by what it doesn’t say. I stared at it for a moment. Unmoving then closed my laptop. I didn’t respond.
• There was no reason to. Strategic alignment. Might as well have red exit strategy. I spent the weekend exactly as I planned to, quietly. I didn’t talk about the meeting. I didn’t call anyone. I let my mind go still. There’s a kind of clarity that only shows up when you stop trying to make sense of thing.
• I didn’t need to prepare. I’d been preparing for years. Monday arrived, gray light, barely any wind. I dress like I always did. Clean, structured, no drama in the silhouette. I walked through the front doors like it was any other morning. Only difference, I didn’t carry my laptop. 2C is tucked down a quiet hallway behind the main meeting wing.
• It used to be the overflow conference room, but lately it had taken on a different purpose. People said if you got summoned to 2C, you didn’t come back with your badge. I opened the door at exactly 10:00. Adrienne was already inside, seated at the end of the table, angled slightly away from Anukica sat beside him, hands folded over a beige folder.
• She gave me a tight, unreadable nod. Adrienne didn’t bother standing. Evelyn, he said flatly. Thanks for coming. I sat quietly. I didn’t lean back. I didn’t speak first. He cleared his throat. Not nervously, just out of habit, like it was part of a performance he’d rehearsed. After a careful review of organizational overlaps and alignment goals, we’ve decided to make some changes to reduce redundancy and optimize preference.