She Humiliated the New Hire for Using the Executive Elevator — Then Saw the Watch on Her Own Wrist.
The elevator doors had barely closed behind her when Delia's open palms slammed into the woman's shoulders, driving her back against the cold steel frame. "The service lift is for interns," she snapped, loud enough for the whole 68th floor to hear.
The quiet woman in the teal blazer didn't flinch. She didn't argue. She just stood there, hands loose at her sides, eyes patient and watchful, while a few nearby employees silently warned each other not to get involved.
Delia didn't know she was pushing the company's new CEO. Evelyn Marsh had arrived without an assistant, without a title, wearing plain clothes because she wanted to see the real culture before she changed it. Instead, she got a front-row seat to who really ran things — or thought they did.
Then Evelyn's gaze drifted down. Not at Delia's smug face. At her wrist.
The white ceramic watch with the mother-of-pearl face. The limited edition that wasn't sold anywhere. The one Evelyn had spent weeks sourcing and had engraved as a birthday gift for her mother-in-law.
Everyone knew that watch. Delia wore it like a trophy, flipping her platinum bob as she kept going. "Mr. Wren trusts me with everything," she announced. "He has very particular taste."
Evelyn let her eyes rise slowly from the watch to the secretary's face. Her voice was calm, almost kind, as she asked the question that cracked the afternoon wide open:
"That watch was for his mother."
Delia's smile froze. Her ice-blue eyes dropped to her own left wrist, then came back up, searching for a joke that clearly wasn't there. The cogs were turning behind her penciled brows as she tried to make sense of a sentence that felt like the floor dropping out from under her stilettos.
Before she could recover, a voice from the conference-room doorway cut through the silence. Thomas's voice, warm and uncertain and unmistakably intimate: "Evelyn?"
Delia's head whipped toward the sound. All the color drained from her face. The new hire — the intern — the woman she'd just shoved and mocked — didn't move. She just stood there, looking at Delia with something almost like pity, as her husband's voice confirmed exactly who was standing in the lobby.
What will Evelyn ask for when she calls in Delia's expense records? Comment "OK" to receive Part 2.
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