POV: Jasmine
I throw myself into work with desperate intensity. If I can't control the whispers, I can control my output.
Every pending contract lands on my desk for review. Every potential issue gets flagged, documented, escalated. I'm the first one through the doors at six-thirty and the last one out after nine. The cleaning crew knows my name now. They bring me coffee sometimes, silent solidarity from people who understand what it means to be invisible.
The whispers don't stop, but they fade into background noise when I'm buried in paperwork. Numbers don't judge. Contracts don't gossip. Work is the only thing that makes sense anymore.
Two weeks into my self-imposed redemption campaign, I get pulled into a contract review meeting for the Davison deal. Major artist. Seven figures. The kind of contract that makes or breaks quarterly earnings and determines whether executives get their bonuses or start updating their resumes.
Legal, A&R, and half the executive team cram into the conference room. I take a seat near the back, laptop open, ready to take notes because that's what the disgraced assistant does—she takes notes and keeps her mouth shut and prays nobody remembers she exists.
They go through it page by page. Standard terms. Royalty splits. Distribution rights. Everyone nods along, pens hovering over signature lines, ready to close the deal and move on to the next crisis.
Then I see it.
A clause buried in section seven, subsection C. Written in that legal jargon designed to make your eyes glaze over—the kind of language that assumes nobody will actually read it because nobody ever does.
But I read everything now. Every word. Every subsection. Every footnote.
Because I have something to prove.
I run the numbers in my head. Once. Twice. Three times. Each calculation confirms what I'm seeing—a loophole that shifts backend percentage points in a way that looks standard but isn't. A tiny adjustment that compounds over time, bleeding money so slowly nobody would notice until it was too late.
"Wait." My voice cuts through the room before I can second-guess myself.
Everyone turns. The senior legal counsel—a gray-haired man named Patterson who's been with the company since before I was born—looks annoyed that I'd interrupted his moment of triumph.
"Miss Harlow," he says, the condescension dripping from every syllable, "I'm sure whatever concern you have can wait until after we've completed the signing."
"It really can't." I stand, moving toward the projection on the wall, my heart hammering against my ribs. "Section seven, subsection C. This clause—the way it's written, it compounds the percentage calculation against our backend instead of the artist's. The language looks standard, but there's an embedded modifier that flips the attribution."
Patterson's eyebrows climb toward his receding hairline. "I've reviewed this contract thoroughly. I assure you—"
"If the album performs the way we're projecting," I continue, pointing to the specific paragraph, "we'd lose approximately two hundred thousand in royalty payments over the contract term. Maybe more if it goes platinum."
Silence crashes through the room like a wave.
Patterson's face drains of color. He snatches the contract from the table, scanning the section I'd indicated with increasingly frantic eyes. His lips move as he reads, and I watch the realization hit him—the moment he sees what I saw.
"Fuck." The word escapes him before he can stop it. "She's right. Jesus Christ, she's right."
Asher leans forward from his position at the head of the table, that intense focus sharpening his features as his brain calculates the damage. "How did we miss this? We have an entire legal department for exactly this purpose."
"I don't know." Patterson looks physically ill, sweat beading on his forehead. "The language is deliberately obfuscated. Someone on their side knew exactly what they were doing when they drafted this."
"But if we'd signed this as-is—" someone from A&R starts.
"We'd have been locked into a deal that would've bled money for the next five years," Asher finishes, his voice cold as steel. His eyes find mine across the table—not warm, not personal, just pure business assessment. "Good catch, Harlow."
Three words. That's all. But I feel the room shift around me like tectonic plates grinding into new positions.
The way people look at me changes. Not completely. Not forgiveness—that would require them to admit they'd been wrong about me, and nobody likes admitting that. But something closer to grudging acknowledgment. The realization that maybe, just maybe, I'm here for reasons beyond my bedroom activities.
A woman from legal—Martinez, I think her name is—nods slowly, studying me with new eyes. "That's... that's actually impressive. Most people wouldn't have caught that even if they'd read it twice."
"I read it four times," I admit. "I read everything four times now."
The meeting pivots from signing to damage control. Patterson scrambles to redraft the clause while the rest of the team debates how to approach Davison's people without torpedoing the deal entirely.
An hour later, I'm back at my desk when the lawyers call me in to discuss strategy—not for Davison, but for Adelyn.
"We're preparing for a protracted legal battle," the lead attorney explains, spreading documents across the conference table. "Adelyn's claiming hostile work environment and defamation. Our defense will focus on three pillars: denying the hostile environment claims with documentation, establishing your qualifications independent of any personal relationships, and demonstrating that her termination followed proper protocols."
"How long are we looking at?" I ask.
"Months of depositions. Discovery will be brutal—they'll dig into everything. Your employment history, your relationship timeline, every email you've ever sent from a company device." He pauses, letting that sink in. "I won't lie to you, Miss Harlow. This is going to get uglier before it gets better."
"And if we lose?"
"We're not going to lose," Asher cuts in from the doorway, his voice leaving no room for doubt. "We have the resources to bury her in legal fees alone. She'll settle eventually."
"Unless she's being funded by someone with deeper pockets than spite," the attorney counters. "We're looking into that angle."
The meeting drags on—timelines, witness lists, documentation requests. My head spins with legal terminology and worst-case scenarios. By the time we finish, I'm exhausted in a way that has nothing to do with physical labor.
I'm gathering my things when my office door slams open.
Nora stands in the doorway, phone clutched in her hand, face pale beneath her dark skin. She's breathing hard, like she ran here from wherever she was.
"What's wrong?" I'm on my feet immediately, alarm spiking through my exhaustion.
"Adelyn gave another interview." Nora's voice is tight, controlled, but I can see the fear underneath. "This one's worse. Much worse."