Chapter 3

Chloe rolled her eyes and pulled a document from her designer bag, tossing it onto my desk.

"Fine. Let's lay all the cards on the table."

"This is a petition signed by every unmarried, child-free employee in our department."

"Our demands are simple."

"Either calculate the operating cost of the daycare and pay it out to us as a cash bonus,"

"Or shut down this 'privileged' institution that only serves a select few."

I picked up the petition. I saw several familiar names.

I even saw the name of our lead engineer, who just last week had thanked me profusely with tears in her eyes when her child was enrolled.

Near the end of the day, I saw Brenda Higgins, a notorious corporate parasite, leaning over Chloe’s desk.

Brenda was in her late forties and excelled at nothing except starting drama.

"Chloe, you are literally our hero! You said what we were all thinking!"

Chloe smirked proudly.

"Of course. Don't worry, Brenda. I’m going to fight this to the end for all of us."

Brenda lowered her voice, darting a glance toward my office.

"Keep making noise. If the sky falls, us senior staff have your back."

"I know Eleanor. She folds if you play the victim, but she pushes back if you're aggressive. The more noise you make, the weaker she gets."

Watching them play off each other made me sick.

As the company grew, it had accumulated a lot of dead weight.

I had wanted to introduce a new performance-based point system to tie benefits to actual contributions and break this culture of entitlement.

But every time I brought it up, senior managers like Brenda and Arthur Ward would push back, claiming it would "harm team stability."

Now I realized they weren't afraid of instability. They were just afraid I’d touch their free ride.

That night, as soon as I got home, a new notification popped up on my phone.

This time, Chloe had exposed our company name and posted my photo.

[Exposing the toxic female CEO who uses a 'free daycare' to discriminate!]

In the video, she sobbed again, claiming I was bullying her at work because she stood up for "equality."

"She called me into her office today and threatened to fire me before my probation ended if I didn't delete the video!"

"She even said single people are 'liabilities' to the company!"

What chilled me to the bone, though, was a screenshot of the daycare’s internal budget sheet shown in the video.

Even though the critical numbers were blurred, that specific spreadsheet format was something only two people had access to.

Me, and Arthur Ward, our COO.

Arthur had been with me for five years. He was always incredibly respectful, constantly calling me "a visionary leader."

I treated him as my right hand, and he was stabbing me in the back?

Suddenly, things clicked. How did Chloe, a fresh graduate, get the courage and resources to pull this off?

Her talk of "self-wellness" and "fairness" was just a shield.

The real puppeteer was Arthur!

He must have been unhappy with me pouring funds into a "non-profitable" daycare for a long time.

Or perhaps, he wanted my job.