Chapter 7

Chapter 7

Early the next morning, Xu Nianchu called in sick.

The sick leave note was sent to my email, but the hospital name at the bottom had the wrong department listed.

I forwarded it to Legal.

Zhou Yan couldn’t sit still anymore.

He stormed into my office. “How far are you going to push her? She didn’t sleep all night, and her heart doesn’t feel right.”

I was reviewing the comparison report on the leaked bid documents and didn’t even look up. “If she’s unwell, she can see a doctor. If company materials have been leaked, that has to be investigated too.”

“Are you dead set on sending her to prison?”

I lifted my eyes. “If the evidence holds up, I won’t be sending her anywhere. She’ll have walked herself there.”

Zhou Yan gritted his teeth. “Lin Jianwei, when did you become so ruthless?”

I pushed the report toward him.

Everything was laid out clearly inside: the Qingqiong Project quotation Xu Nianchu had downloaded was uploaded to a private cloud drive at 3:26 a.m. The next morning, our competitor, Qiming Technology, updated their bid-just two points lower than Xinglan’s.

Not by much, but enough to be fatal.

The anger on Zhou Yan’s face faded little by little.

It wasn’t that he couldn’t understand.

It was that he had once chosen not to.

“It might not have been her,” he said, his voice dropping. “Someone could have stolen her account.”

I asked, “Who?”

He fell silent.

I went on, “On her first day, you were the only one who took her on a tour of the server room. You were the only one who told her Qingqiong was the company’s last chance to turn things around. And you were the one who had Admin create an account for her in advance, with permissions higher than an intern’s.”

Zhou Yan’s expression changed sharply. “You investigated me?”

“I’m the person in charge of the handover.”

“I’m your husband!”

“Which is why I investigated even more carefully.”

That choked him into silence.

A commotion suddenly rose outside the door.

Chen Cheng pushed the door open. “President Lin, Xu Nianchu is here. She says she wants to explain in person.”

Xu Nianchu was not so sickly that she couldn’t leave the house.

She wore a plain white dress and clutched a few sheets of paper in her hand. The moment she came in, she dropped to her knees at the entrance of my office.

“Director Lin, I was wrong. I really only wanted to prove myself. I didn’t know it would cause such serious consequences.”

The corridor quickly filled with people.

Through her tears, she said, “I’ve never had any sense of security since I was little. Zhou Yan was only encouraging me. I know you mind our past, but you can’t destroy me like this.”

Again with the past.

Again with the tears.

I picked up my phone and called Legal.

“Call the police.”

Xu Nianchu’s sobs stopped dead.