…Greg. Greg from accounting. The man who’d been passed over for my job in April, the week after Tom’s funeral. He saw me looking. He didn’t move. He just raised one hand slowly, like a wave, and closed the laptop lid.
The IT guy was already on the phone with security. By the time two officers reached the fourth floor, Greg was walking calmly toward the elevator with his laptop bag. They stopped him at the doors. He didn’t argue. He asked if he could finish his coffee.
The investigation took three weeks. Greg had Tom’s password from a sticky note in Tom’s desk drawer. He’d been logging in every day since March, using my webcam, my microphone, my screen. He’d recorded my calls with clients, my conversations with HR about the promotion, and hours of me just working. Crying once, after a bad meeting. Eating lunch at my desk.
“He was building a case,” the security director told me. “Waiting for you to say something he could use to get you fired. So he’d get your job.” She slid a printout across the table. He’d made a spreadsheet. Every mistake I’d made, every time I’d been late, timestamped and organized. Two hundred and eleven rows.
He was fired that day. The company pressed charges for unauthorized access. My lawyer filed a separate claim. And every dormant account in the entire company, three hundred and forty of them, was finally shut down the same afternoon.
The strangest part came a month later. Tom’s widow sent me a card. She’d heard what happened. Inside, she’d written: “Tom always said you were the best hire he ever made. He’d hate that someone used his name to hurt you.”
I put a small piece of tape over my webcam now. Everyone in my department has one. We call it “the Greg sticker.” It’s the first thing we give new hires on their first day, right before the password training.
