“Get up yourself,” he said after I fell in the rain, then pulled his lover closer beneath the umbrella and walked away without looking back. I said nothing, but the resignation letter on his desk—and the client contract missing from his portfolio—gave him an answer he would never forget........

Two weeks passed.

The news of Harrow & Finch’s dramatic departure from Westbridge Strategy sent shockwaves through the Pacific Northwest advertising and corporate consulting community.

While Lin Strategic Holdings opened its doors in a sunlit loft in Pioneer Square—hiring six brilliant, overworked junior staff members whom I knew personally from my time at Westbridge—Nolan Pierce and Camille Ward were spiraling into corporate desperation.

Westbridge had lost three more secondary accounts following Harrow’s exit. Clients were beginning to ask uncomfortable questions about who had actually authored their multi-million-dollar campaign decks.

On a rainy Tuesday morning, Camille Ward sat in Nolan’s office at Westbridge, her eyes red-rimmed, her designer suit looking rumpled.

"They frozen my corporate expense card, Nolan!" Camille cried out, pacing across his office carpet. "Arthur told me this morning that if we don't bring in a new fifteen-million-dollar account by the end of the quarter, the board is going to terminate my contract for performance failure!"

Nolan sat behind his massive mahogany desk, looking twenty pounds lighter, deep dark circles carved beneath his eyes.

"We have the Apex Tech account pitch next week," Nolan said, his voice raspy as he stared at his laptop screen. "Apex is looking for a complete corporate identity overhaul. It’s worth twelve million."

Camille stopped pacing, looking at him with sudden hope. "Apex Tech? But... Nolan, Maya was the one who had the relationship with Apex’s Chief Marketing Officer! She spent three months researching their semiconductor supply chains!"

Nolan smiled—a bitter, hollow, desperate smile. He turned his laptop screen toward Camille.

"Maya left behind a secondary cloud backup drive on the internal Westbridge server before she resigned," Nolan lied, his eyes flashing with dangerous excitement. "She forgot to wipe the archived research folders from two years ago. I found forty gigabytes of raw Apex Tech strategy files, market analysis, and slide wireframes."

Camille gasped, stepping closer to the screen. "Is it complete?"

"It’s eighty percent complete," Nolan said, leaning back in his chair, tapping his fingers together. "All we have to do is update the 2026 growth projections, slap your name on the cover page as the Lead Strategist, and present it to the Apex board on Friday. Maya won't know until the contract is signed."

"Nolan... is that legal?" Camille whispered, a sudden flicker of caution touching her face. "If Maya finds out we used her archived research..."

"Maya doesn't own those files!" Nolan shouted, slamming his hand onto the desk, his composure snapping. "She created them while she was an employee at Westbridge! Everything she touched in this building belongs to this firm! Belongs to me!"

Camille looked at the screen, saw the brilliant, intricate framework that only Maya Lin could have constructed, and swallowed her hesitation.

"Okay," Camille said, a cold, greedy smile returning to her red lips. "Let's finish the deck. We’ll show Arthur—and Maya—that Westbridge doesn't need her."