All because I'd listed programming as a skill on my resume, I got loaned out to the Engineering Department the day I started.

For over a month I worked myself half to death, staying late at the office every single night.

Finally, I helped them crack the project.

The boss was thrilled and announced a two-million-dollar bonus pool.

Manager Lambert, who hadn't lifted a finger, took the biggest cut.

Even the lowest-paid engineer walked away with fifty grand.

And me? I got sent back to my old department.

With nothing.

It sat wrong in my chest, so I went to find Manager Lambert and ask for an explanation.

Instead, I overheard him chatting with his people.

"Manager Lambert, Susannah helped us out big time, but she didn't get a single dollar of the bonus. Aren't you worried she'll have something to say about it?"

Lambert let out a cold laugh.

"Something to say? She's a little girl. What's she going to say?"

"Besides, she's Finance's problem, not mine."

"You know the saying, the capable ones get the extra work. It's her own fault for being gullible enough to come running the second someone sweet-talked her."

——

I stood outside the door. The laughter that kept spilling out felt like needles pressing into my chest.

One of the engineers spoke up. "Manager Lambert, you might want to keep that kind of talk behind closed doors."

"So what if someone hears?" Lambert's tone was breezy, careless. "She's a fresh grad. What kind of waves is she going to make?"

"You think she'd actually have the nerve to go up against me?"

I drew a long breath and turned away.

Passing the main bullpen on my way out, I caught a glimpse through the glass door of a few engineers huddled together, talking.

On the desk sat their freshly issued bonus envelopes, fat and stuffed.

One of them spotted me walking by. His eyes flickered, and he dropped his gaze without a word.

I didn't slow down. I just kept walking.

Back in the Finance Department, my workstation sat in the corner.

Two desks shoved together, piled with leftover file boxes and a printer nobody else wanted.

I'd been borrowed out my very first day on the job. Marilyn Lawrence, the woman at the next desk over, had cleared the space for me as a favor.

She came over now with her mug, giving me a once-over. "Susannah, you don't look so good."

"I'm fine, Marilyn."

I sat down and turned on my computer.

"I heard Engineering got their bonuses?" She dropped her voice. "Two million!"

"How much did you get?"

I shook my head. "Not a cent."

Marilyn didn't press. She took her mug and walked away.

She'd been at the company long enough to have seen this kind of thing before.

I stared at the monitor, Lambert's words looping through my head on repeat.

She's a little girl. What's she going to say?

She's not mine.

Gullible enough to come running the second someone sweet-talked her.

My mind drifted back to my first day, when I'd barely set foot in Finance before my phone rang.

"Susannah Simmons? This is Paul Lambert, Engineering Department Manager. I need you up on the third floor. Now."

I'd hesitated. "Manager Lambert, I haven't even—"

"I know. I already cleared it with your Director Finch."

"Get up here. The project's urgent."

I didn't think twice. I put down my bag and went.

When I pushed open the Engineering Department door, the smell hit me first: stale cigarette smoke layered over instant noodles.

Blueprints covered every surface. Half a dozen people crowded around the tables, eyes bloodshot.

Lambert sat in the private office at the far end.

He saw me through the glass partition and waved me in.

I stepped inside. He was leaning back in his swivel chair, legs crossed, a cup of hot tea steaming in front of him.

"Simmons, right? I saw on your resume you've got a programming background. Won some award in college?"

I answered honestly. "Yes, second prize at the state competition. I taught myself to code. It's more of a hobby, really."

"Good enough." He jerked his chin toward the bullpen. "This project's worth a hundred million. The client's breathing down our necks. We've been grinding for a week straight and the progress is still stuck."

"See if you can lend a hand."

I glanced through the glass at the engineers slumped over their desks and asked, "Where exactly are you stuck?"

Manager Lambert stood, walked to the door, and called out:

"Whitney, come brief Simmons on the problem."

Finn Whitney was in his early thirties, unshaven, with dark circles stamped under his eyes.

He looked me up and down, shoved the proposal across the table, and didn't bother hiding his irritation. "You're a girl. What do you know about programming?"

"This project runs on a cutting-edge automated control system. You sure you can handle it?"

I flipped through the proposal for a few minutes. The further I read, the more wrong it looked.

"Engineer Whitney, your control logic has a problem." I pointed to one of the modules. "This feedback loop is wired wrong. It's not a coding issue. The algorithm framework itself was built on a flawed foundation."

Finn frowned. "No way. We followed the standard methodology."

"Look here."

I took his pen and drew a few lines across the schematic.

"The feedback signal should route through this path. You've got it running in parallel, but it needs to be serial with a bypass."

"Any program built on this framework will stall at step three, because the signal never completes the loop."

Finn went still. He stared at the lines I'd drawn for a long time, and the color drained from his face.

"Son of a… she's right."

Two other engineers crowded in behind him, studied the schematic, and said nothing.

Finn looked up at me. His expression was hard to read.

That afternoon, I rebuilt the corrected framework from the ground up.

The program ran clean.

Manager Lambert beamed. "Simmons, you're something else. I knew I picked the right person."

"Keep this up. Once the project wraps, I promise you'll be well taken care of."

He sounded so sincere there was no room for doubt.

From that day on, I lived inside the Engineering Department.

In by eight every morning, out past eleven or twelve at night, weekends included.

The project timeline was razor-tight. The client called every other day pushing for updates, and the bosses pushed just as hard.

Over the next month and a half, I wrote tens of thousands of lines of code and revised the plan more times than I could count.

Whenever the client had a change request, I was the first person they contacted.

Lambert couldn't even be bothered to relay messages. He just handed them my number directly: "Talk to her. It's faster."

At first, the engineers in the department weren't exactly welcoming.

Because I was a woman, and because I didn't have a formal engineering degree.

Finn was the worst. He barely acknowledged me when I spoke to him, and dragged his feet every time I asked for files.

Once I went to him for the raw dataset and he didn't even lift his head. "Find it yourself. It's on the desk somewhere."

The desk was buried under a stack of documents half a meter tall. It took me thirty minutes to dig it out.

The others weren't much better.

In meetings, whenever I raised a point, they either ignored it or said, "You wouldn't understand. This is how we've always done it."

But I didn't have the luxury of caring about any of that.

The project wouldn't wait.

By the end of the first week, I had the first module running.

Finn saw the results, paused, and asked, "How'd you pull that off?"

I walked him through it.

He listened without a word. The next day, his attitude shifted noticeably.

He started handing over files without being asked and came to me with questions on his own.

In the third week, another module hit a bug. The engineers spent two days trying to fix it and got nowhere.

I stayed up all night tracking down the issue, changed seven lines of code, and by the next morning it finally ran clean.

After that, every one of them was polite when they saw me.

Finn took me to lunch one day and rubbed the back of his neck. "Simmons, I was a jerk to you before. Don't hold it against me."

I just said it was nothing.

Deep down, I knew they hadn't been trying to make things difficult for me on purpose.

They were simply used to coasting.

The project was worth a hundred million dollars. Company policy tied bonuses directly to the project's value.

For them, as long as the project got delivered, the money was theirs.

Who actually did the work? Irrelevant.

During that month and change, Manager Lambert treated me unreasonably well.

Every morning he'd greet me with a smile, ask if I'd eaten breakfast.

When I stayed late, he'd have Finn order takeout for me.

Once I was running a hundred-and-one-degree fever and still fixing code. When he found out, he sent his assistant over with a box of medicine.

"Susannah, take care of yourself. No project is more important than your health."

At the time, I actually thought he was a decent person.

Looking back now, those words were nothing more than insurance against me walking off the job.

The day the project wrapped, the client signed off on the final review in one pass.

Lambert cracked open a bottle of wine in his office and had everyone raise a glass.

He walked over to me holding his glass, all smiles. "Susannah, you're the real MVP of this project. Paul Lambert does not forget."

I was naive enough to believe that if I just did good work, people would treat me fairly.

Naive enough to believe all those smiles and kind words were sincere.

Naive enough to believe the world actually ran on "hard work gets rewarded."

Now I understood. I'd been nothing but a tool.

I didn't cry. I didn't make a scene.

I didn't go to Director Finch to pour my heart out, and I didn't file a complaint with HR.

Because none of that would have changed a thing.

Report a department manager?

I'd been at the company barely over a month. What leverage did I have?

I made myself one promise, silently.

Starting today, I would never be fooled again.

After I went back to the Finance Department, life got quiet.

Nobody came looking for me, and nobody assigned me any work.

My desk was tucked in a corner where people rarely passed.

Once in a while a colleague would come by to use the printer, grab their pages, and leave without so much as a glance in my direction.

Director Finch didn't call me in for a talk either.

I figured he already knew what had happened over in Engineering. He just didn't want to get involved.

After all, I was nobody. Just the lowest person on the ladder.

The work in Finance wasn't complicated.

Mostly auditing expense reports, organizing vouchers, helping pull together financial statements.

I spent three days clearing the entire two-month backlog of receipts, then re-sorted the previous year's vouchers chronologically from scratch.

Marilyn, at the desk next to mine, watched me hustling back and forth and finally said, "Susannah, slow down. The work's not going anywhere."

I smiled and kept going.

Slow down for what?

If I slowed down, my mind would circle back to all of it. Better to stay busy.

But I wasn't the one looking for trouble. Trouble came and found me.

One day at lunch I went to the cafeteria.

I'd just sat down when two women from Marketing took the seats across from me.

They didn't know who I was. They ate and talked.

"Did you hear? The Engineering project bonus was two million. Lambert pocketed several hundred thousand all by himself."

"Yeah, and the people under him got a nice cut too. Even the intern who just started walked away with fifty grand."

"Apparently the project was stuck from the start. Then some woman from Finance went over and cracked the whole thing."

"No way. Finance? A woman who knows how to code?"

"Who knows if it's even true. Probably just dumb luck. Right place, right time."

"So how much did she get?"

"Not a cent. Worked for free like an idiot."

They both laughed.

I kept my head down and kept eating.

I heard similar things a few more times after that.