My father sent me to my husband's company to test him. A surprise inspection, he’d called it.

I thought it would be a formality.

I wasn’t even five steps inside the office when I saw her: a woman dressed in a look of curated innocence, staring at an industrial shredder as if it were magic.

“Wow, this thing is so cool,” she breathed, and then, without a second thought, she picked up a contract from a nearby desk and started to feed it in.

A colleague next to her went pale. “Lexi, for God’s sake, stop!” he yelped, diving to snatch it back. “Weren’t you in Carter’s office playing video games? Why are you out here?”

She just giggled. “Hehe, I got thirsty.”

As if on cue, her hand, holding a full cup of water, jerked. The entire contents splashed directly onto the main power switch on the wall. The office went dark, followed by a collective cry of despair from every cubicle.

I grabbed the arm of a young intern. “Who in the hell hired that woman?”

He immediately put a finger to his lips. “Keep your voice down,” he whispered, his eyes wide with fear. “That’s our boss’s wife. Mr. Hayes’s wife. I heard this whole division is technically hers.” He gave me a weary look. “Are you new? You get used to it. She usually just stays in his office and doesn’t bother anyone.”

A sharp, pulsing pain started in my temples.

If she was Carter’s wife… then what was I?

I pulled out my phone and dialed my father.

“Dad,” I said, my voice cold and clear. “Cancel the evaluation.

Just tell Carter to bring the divorce papers to the office.”

1

The official story was a routine divisional review. A surprise audit, my father had called it, telling me not to feel any pressure, to just consider it a chance to get familiar with the assets.

The real story? He was sending me to test my husband.

I figured it would be a simple in-and-out. A formality.

I badged in with the credentials the front desk provided, the frosted glass doors to the main office floor hissing open before me. The first thing I saw was a woman.

She was dressed in a white sundress that screamed calculated innocence, crouched in front of a heavy-duty office shredder, her expression one of childlike wonder.

“Wow, this machine is so cool,” she murmured, her voice a breathy whisper. “Does it just… eat anything?”

Before anyone could answer, she reached over to a nearby desk and picked up a thick, bound document. From my angle, I could clearly see the cover sheet, stamped in bold red letters: ACQUISITION AGREEMENT. Without a moment’s hesitation, she started feeding it into the machine’s hungry maw.

A man in glasses nearby went white as a sheet. “Lexi, no!”

He launched himself across the short distance between them, a desperate dive that was more of a controlled fall, snatching the contract from the shredder’s teeth just in time. He collided with her, but she barely seemed to notice.

“My God, Lexi, what are you doing?” he gasped, his voice thin with terror. “I thought you were in Carter’s office playing on your Switch. This contract has to be signed this afternoon!”

The woman—Lexi—didn’t seem the least bit offended by the collision. She just giggled, a light, airy sound, and held up an empty tumbler. “Got bored. And thirsty.”

The man with the glasses clutched the rescued document to his chest like it was a newborn baby. He let out a shaky breath, forcing a pained smile onto his face. “Right. Thirsty,” he said, his voice dropping to a near-beg. “Please, can you just… go back to his office to get a drink? He has that filtered water cooler in there, remember?”

She pouted. “The water in there tastes weird. I like the water out here better.”

Ignoring the man’s look of pure, unadulterated despair, she skipped off toward the break room.

I watched the whole insane spectacle, a sharp, pulsing pain starting in my right temple. I caught the sleeve of a young guy who looked like an intern, his ID badge still shiny and new.

“Who is she?” I asked, keeping my voice low.

The intern’s eyes flickered from me to the woman’s retreating back, a flicker of raw fear in them. He brought a finger to his lips in a universal sign to be quiet. “Keep it down, ma’am.” He leaned in, his voice barely a whisper. “That’s Lexi. She’s… she’s Mr. Hayes’s wife. Carter’s wife.”

The floor seemed to tilt beneath my feet. In that single moment, all of Carter’s recent strangeness—the late nights he claimed were spent at the office, the way his phone was always face down on the nightstand, the vague, distant look in his eyes—it all clicked into place with a sickening finality.

The intern, oblivious, kept whispering. “The rumor is, this whole division is technically hers, so she’s the real boss, you know? You must be new. You’ll get used to it.” He sighed, a sound of weary resignation that didn’t belong on someone so young. “She usually just stays in his office, watches Netflix or whatever. Doesn’t bother us. Carter must be out for that summit today, so there’s no one to babysit her. That’s when she… explores.”

His words faded into a dull roar in my ears.

She’s Carter’s wife.

Then what in God’s name was I?

“Ma’am? Are you okay?” the intern asked, his brow furrowed with concern. “You look really pale.”

I forced a smile that felt like cracking glass. “Fine. Just… surprised.” I looked out at the open-plan office. “I’m just surprised a place like this would have someone like that on staff. It’s… an eye-opener.”

The intern gave a bitter little shrug. “Like I said, you get used to it. As long as she doesn’t actually break anything, we just try to survive until she gets bored and goes back in his office.”

I didn’t say anything else.

Doesn’t actually break anything?

If that contract had been shredded, a multi-million-dollar acquisition would have imploded. The fallout, the financial loss… who would have answered for that?

I watched Lexi’s silhouette in the break room. She was humming to herself, her body swaying to a rhythm only she could hear. My hand went to my phone, my thumb hovering over my father’s contact.

But then I stopped.

Just leaving now would be letting Carter off too easy.

My father sent me here to evaluate his performance. And from what I’d just seen, it wasn’t just his performance that was in question. It was his judgment. His character. His integrity.

I needed to see just how deep the rot went.

I smoothed down the front of my blazer and walked back to the reception desk.

“Hi, my name is Audrey Sterling. I’m from the corporate headquarters, here for the divisional review.” My voice was calm, even. “I’ll need a temporary workstation, preferably somewhere quiet. And one more thing—this is an internal audit. I don’t want Mr. Hayes to be aware of my presence.”

The receptionist nodded, her professional smile unwavering.

I found a quiet desk in a far corner of the office, settling in behind the monitor. My eyes, however, were fixed on Lexi. She had emerged from the break room and was now staring intently at the fire alarm pull station on the wall, a dangerous curiosity gleaming in her eyes.

2

With Carter out for the day, Lexi’s boredom quickly reached its peak.

She drifted out of the general manager’s office again, a ghost of chaos haunting the cubicles. She floated through the office, a walking, talking disruption. One moment she was poking at a designer’s freshly rendered graphic, leaving a smudge on the monitor. The next, she was leaning on a programmer’s keyboard, inserting a string of gibberish into a line of code.

You could feel the collective tension rise wherever she went. People held their breath as she approached, only to exhale in a rush of relief and frantic damage control after she’d passed.

Her tour eventually led her back to the break room kitchenette. She was apparently thirsty again. She picked up a disposable cup and held it under the water cooler spigot.

I don’t know if her hand slipped or if it was intentional.

But she jerked.

A full cup of water flew sideways, arcing through the air in a perfect, shimmering wave. It crashed directly against the wall beside the cooler.

Right where the main circuit breaker for the entire floor was housed.

There was a loud, wet CRACKLE, a flash of angry blue sparks, and then… nothing.

The overhead lights died. Every computer monitor went black.

For a few seconds, there was absolute silence. Then, the silence was shattered by a tidal wave of anguish and despair.

“MY CODE! I’ve been working on that script all morning! I hadn’t saved!”

“The pitch deck! The client presentation is in two hours! It’s gone!”

“The quarterly reports… they’re due at two… Oh my God, it’s all gone!”

The head of IT, a perpetually stressed man named David, was the first one out of his office. He saw Lexi standing there, a look of pure, unblemished innocence on her face, and his own face turned a shade of mottled purple. His lips moved, but no sound came out. He clenched and unclenched his fists, a silent, internal battle against screaming.

Lexi, of course, spoke first, her voice dripping with wronged fragility.

“What happened? Is the power out?” She gestured at the smoking, blackened panel. “That switch must be really cheap. It shouldn’t break just from a little water, right? Why is our equipment so terrible?”

The sheer audacity of it, the masterful way she shifted blame, was almost breathtaking.

The office manager, a man named Paul, came scurrying over. He took one look at the smoldering breaker, one look at Lexi, and immediately pasted a sycophantic smile on his face.

“Lexi, are you hurt? Did it scare you?” he asked, his voice oozing false concern. “Don’t you worry about a thing. It’s not your fault. It was probably just some old wiring. We’ll get it fixed right away. I’ll call maintenance, have them put in a new one, a waterproof one! You just go back to the office and relax. We’ll handle this.”

Lexi pouted, clearly not entirely satisfied, but she turned and sauntered back toward Carter’s office without another word.

As soon as she was gone, Paul wiped a sleeve across his sweating forehead and started barking orders at the IT department. As he passed my desk, I stopped him.

“Excuse me,” I said quietly. “Does this kind of thing happen often?”

He looked at me, recognized the visitor’s badge, and a look of profound bitterness crossed his face. He motioned for me to follow him into the fire-exit stairwell. The heavy door clicked shut behind us.

“You’re from corporate, right? The auditor?” he asked, his voice low and conspiratorial. “Look, I probably shouldn’t be saying this, but after today…” He sighed, the sound echoing in the concrete well. “She’s Carter’s… well, you know. She’s his whole world. We can’t touch her.”

“Carter’s out of town today, so the queen has the run of the castle,” he continued, his face a mask of helpless frustration. “When he’s here, at least he keeps her contained in his office…”

He leaned against the railing. “Last month? She ‘accidentally’ spilled a Venti latte. A very large, very hot latte. Right on top of our primary server rack.”

My stomach clenched.

“The entire company’s data was corrupted. It took the IT guys a week of working around the clock just to restore it from backups. An entire week of productivity for the whole division, just… gone.”

“And the consequences?” I asked.

A humorless laugh escaped his lips. “The consequences? Carter said our IT department was negligent. That the servers were in an unsecured location. He docked the entire department’s quarterly bonus. Said it was an ‘object lesson’ in data security.”

My heart, which had been sinking all morning, finally hit the floor.

This was Carter’s management style. Let a walking disaster area run wild, and then punish the hardworking employees who had to clean up her mess.

Bravo, Carter. Just bravo.

Just then, the door to the GM’s office opened again, and Lexi poked her head out.

“Ugh, it’s so boring in here! Is the power back on yet? My phone is about to die! Are there any good snacks in the break room?”

No one answered. The only response was the deep, oppressive silence of a hundred people pushed beyond their breaking point.

3

Just as the engineering team finally restored power, my phone rang. It was my father.

He needed a hard copy of the latest core data from the marketing department. It was for the main board meeting that afternoon, he said, and it was critical. He told me to handle it personally and ensure there were no mistakes.

I got the data on a flash drive from the head of marketing and went to the copy room.

I had just finished printing the last page, compiling the thick stack of paper and clamping it neatly in a binder clip, when the door swung open.

It was Lexi, holding a large bubble tea. Her eyes immediately landed on the heavy-duty stapler on the counter beside me.

“Ooh, can I borrow that? My bag of chips opened up in my purse.”

Without waiting for an answer, she reached for it, her movements careless and entitled.

Instinctively, I shifted the stack of documents and the stapler away from her grasp. These papers were confidential.

Her hand closed on empty air. Thrown off balance, her foot caught on a power cord snaking across the floor. She stumbled forward, and the bubble tea flew from her hand.

The milky brown liquid sailed through the air in a perfect, tragic arc, landing squarely on my freshly printed, absolutely critical, confidential report. The thick stack of A4 paper absorbed the sugary drink instantly, the dark stain spreading through the pages, warping them into a useless, sticky brick.

For a moment, I just stared at the ruined report. The calm, detached observer I had been all morning finally evaporated.

I lifted my head and met Lexi’s eyes.

There was no apology in them. Not a shred of remorse. Just a flash of annoyance that I hadn’t given her the stapler.

My voice, when it came out, was dangerously quiet. “Do you have any idea what you’ve just done? Can you possibly afford to take responsibility for this?”

Lexi was clearly unaccustomed to being addressed with anything other than deference. She blinked, momentarily stunned. Then, her shock curdled into indignation.

“How dare you talk to me like that?” she snapped. “Do you have any idea who I am?”

She drew herself up, her chest puffing out. “I am Mr. Hayes’s wife!”

I looked at her, my expression flat. A small, cold laugh almost escaped my lips.

“Oh?” I asked, my voice still level. “And does being Mr. Hayes’s wife give you the right to destroy company property? Does it exempt you from every rule of professional conduct?”

My challenge seemed to ignite a fuse. Her face flushed with rage. She jabbed a finger at my nose.

“Of course it does! This company belongs to Carter, which means it belongs to me! I can do whatever I want!” Her voice rose, becoming shrill. “Who the hell do you think you are, anyway? Some new girl, trying to lecture me?”

A few people had drifted over, drawn by the noise. They saw the scene—the ruined documents, my cold fury, Lexi’s tantrum—and froze, their eyes wide with fear. A couple of women from the admin team tugged gently at my sleeve, their expressions pleading with me to just apologize and de-escalate.

I didn’t move. I just held her gaze.

Seeing my refusal to back down, Lexi’s rage morphed into a smug, triumphant cruelty. She pulled out her phone.

“Okay. You want to be tough?” she sneered. “You think I can’t handle you?” A malicious smile spread across her face. “I’m going to let Carter tell you exactly who I am. And who you are.”

She stabbed at the screen and initiated a video call.