The email had my name at the bottom, my company signature beneath it, and my address in the sender line. There was only one problem: I had never written a single word of it.
Chapter 2
I did not confront Patricia.
Everything in me wanted to wait by her desk until she returned and demand an explanation, but anger would not protect me. Evidence might.
I took photographs of the screen with my phone and captured the list of sent messages. Then I went directly to Robert.
He was talking to another manager when I entered.
“Can this wait?” he asked.
“No.”
Something in my face must have convinced him because he immediately dismissed the other manager and closed the door.
I placed my phone on his desk.
Robert looked at the first photograph, then the second. By the fourth, his face had gone pale.
“What am I looking at?”
“Emails sent from my account that I didn’t write.”
He kept scrolling.
“Where did you find these?”
“Patricia’s computer.”
His eyes lifted sharply. “You accessed her workstation?”
“It was unlocked, and my account was open on it. Karen showed me an email I supposedly sent blaming her for the hospital delays. I knew I hadn’t written it. Patricia is the only employee with authority to send messages as me.”
Robert leaned back.
For a moment, I thought he was going to tell me I had violated policy and made everything worse.
Instead, he picked up his phone.
“Don’t touch anything else,” he said. “And don’t speak to Patricia.”
He called Human Resources and information security.
Within twenty minutes, Patricia’s computer had been removed from her desk.
She returned from lunch carrying a salad and an iced tea.
I will never forget the moment she saw the empty space where her computer had been.
She stopped walking.
Her eyes moved from the desk to my office.
We looked at each other through the glass.
For one second, the friendly, composed woman I had worked beside for almost a year disappeared. Her face hardened into something I had never seen before.
Then she smiled.
Not warmly.
Just carefully.
Robert appeared from the conference room and asked her to come with him.
She was inside for almost two hours.
I spent that time sitting at my desk while my mind replayed every strange interaction of the previous six weeks. Every client who had seemed unexpectedly irritated. Every coworker who had answered me with clipped sentences. Every apology I had made for things I did not remember doing.
Information security recovered far more than I had found.
Patricia had been sending messages under my identity for nearly four months.
She had deleted replies before I could see them. She had created inbox rules that automatically moved certain responses into an obscure archive folder. She had altered calendar invitations so I appeared to miss meetings. She had even emailed one client an outdated cost estimate, then sent another message suggesting I had personally approved it.
Each act was small enough to look like incompetence.
Together, they formed a pattern.
A deliberate one.
At five fifteen, Robert called me into the conference room.
Patricia was gone.
So was the framed photograph of her two sons that had sat beside her monitor for years.
Angela Morris, our HR director, sat across from me with a legal pad.
“Patricia’s employment has been terminated effective immediately,” she said.
I expected relief.
Instead, I felt hollow.
“Did she admit it?”
Angela glanced at Robert.
“She admitted sending some messages. She claimed she was trying to ‘correct’ decisions she disagreed with.”
“By pretending to be me?”
“She had no authorization to use your identity for those communications.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
Robert sighed. “Eventually, yes. She admitted she knew the messages could damage your standing.”
I stared at the table.
“Why?”
Neither of them answered immediately.
Finally Angela said, “She believes the promotion process was unfair.”
I almost laughed, though nothing was funny.
“So she decided to prove I didn’t deserve the job.”
“That appears to be part of it.”
Part of it.
Those words stayed with me.
Robert folded his hands. “Daniel, there’s another matter we need to discuss.”
Of course there was.
He explained that several employees had already heard Patricia had been terminated. Some were angry. She had worked at Whitmore much longer than I had, and she had close friendships throughout the company.
Worse, no one yet knew the full story.
By the following morning, whispers had spread across two floors.
Daniel went through Patricia’s computer.
Daniel got Patricia fired.
Daniel violated her privacy.
By lunch, someone added the detail that Patricia was raising two teenage boys by herself.
I heard the comment in the break room.
“She’s a single mother,” a woman from accounting whispered. “What is she supposed to do now?”
I stood behind the half-open door with a coffee cup in my hand.
Another voice answered, “I heard Daniel searched through her emails.”
“They worked together for less than a year. Patricia has given fourteen years to this company.”
I stepped inside.
Both women stopped talking.
I could have defended myself. I could have told them Patricia had spent months trying to destroy my reputation.
Instead, I poured my coffee and left.
That evening, I told Lisa everything.
She listened from the other side of our living room while our old Labrador slept between us.
When I finished, she said, “Do you think you did something wrong?”
“I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do.”
“I went through someone else’s computer.”
“You found your own email account open on it after learning someone was impersonating you.”
“That doesn’t make every choice I made automatically right.”
“No,” Lisa said. “But neither does Patricia having children make what she did harmless.”
I rubbed my forehead.
“I keep thinking about those boys.”
“That means you have a conscience.”
“She lost her health insurance. Her paycheck. Everything.”
Lisa leaned forward.
“And what was supposed to happen to us if you lost your job?”
I looked at her.
Our daughter was halfway through college. My mother lived in an assisted-living apartment that I helped pay for. Lisa had reduced her hours at the library after surgery on her knee.
We were not wealthy people playing office politics for entertainment.
My job mattered too.
“She knew what she was risking,” Lisa said gently. “She just expected you to be the one who paid for it.”
The next morning, Robert called an emergency department meeting for three o’clock.
Every employee whose work had been affected was required to attend.
At two forty-five, Angela stopped beside my desk.
“You should know something before we go in,” she said.
“What?”
“We recovered the deleted email history.”
I waited.
Her expression was grim.
“Patricia wasn’t just trying to make you look incompetent.”
“What else was she doing?”
Angela lowered her voice.
“She had already contacted senior leadership about replacing you.”
