Whisper Network

by Chandler Baker

“I’ll circulate a memo that will be easier to digest,”

Katherine was pretty in the way that meant Sloane had to remind herself to like her.

She was the exact right type of white woman to cause an international media firestorm if she ever went missing.

younger people had an odd kind of resilience: impervious to some things, but completely open and vulnerable to virtually everything else.

In the back of her mind, she was already moving on, adding this mental reminder to the detritus of unfinished tasks to be recycled into background stress, where it would serve as fuel for her spotty and unexplained bouts of insomnia, chin acne, and stomach bloating.

a karmic effort to even the score.

The smell of grease foreshadowed client lunches, which always took place at a civilized eleven-thirty in the morning.

watching the unread emails stack up in her inbox, reproducing like fruit flies.

The fog of self-righteousness could be a powerful drug.

getting to speak to another adult person in Spanish, which was usually discouraged at work for fear that the building’s tenants would think the cleaning staff were gossiping about them (they were).

But other than that—the Tina Fey prayers and the marrying of one of her closest friends—Sloane planned to be a low-maintenance dead wife and mother. Honestly.

the social awkwardness complicated by prettiness.

(While we needed nips and tucks and filler injections to stay relevant, they needed only to age to become more dignified.

I take issue with the words “unsubstantiated” and “rumors.”

The office was an environment perfectly engineered to breed distrust. Every confidence, every request for advice was a leap of faith and we all had horror stories of times when we’d misplaced it.

“Proximate cause” means that an event is sufficiently related to an injury such that a court will consider that event to be the cause of the injury.

Thank goodness her thoughts weren’t broadcast for public consumption.

Hours passed differently in the middle of the night. The simultaneous thrill and depression that came from being awake when everyone else was asleep.

faded to background stress.

And before she stood—knees aching from sitting crossed-legged in her ergonomic chair

interview. In your deposition, I will ask you questions and you are going to answer them under oath. The court reporter is attempting to transcribe everything we say. It’s important that we don’t interrupt one another and that you answer each question verbally.

She was terrible at being divorced. But then it wasn’t exactly a life skill she’d planned to need.

She smiled the easy smile of someone one-and-a-half drinks in,

Old habits didn’t die hard. They didn’t die at all.

power over the trajectory of my career and my compensation.

liked having her mind productively occupied.

Perhaps nosiness was a biological adaptation. Survival of the most informed.

“They hear ‘no’ and reframe it as an opportunity for ‘persistence’ or ‘relentlessness’ or whatever other corporate buzzword they’ve just learned from the most recent Ted Talk they watched on YouTube.

People on the upper floors walked with speed in direct proportion to how important they believed themselves to be.

I am not trying to make light of the seriousness of the allegations.

Adobe Acrobat Pro.

while ostensibly attempting to eavesdrop.

“I hope you warmed up before performing that level of mental gymnastics.”

Ardie wasn’t in the habit of picking apart other women’s appearances, especially when it wasn’t relevant, but she could indulge from time to time when the occasion and the person warranted it.

But that was hindsight talking.

The meeting ended with all the warmth of a hostage negotiation.

It was the sort of unsubstantiated advice that she followed because it felt mildly useful and disproportionately empowering.

the sort of motif that seemed so effortless and natural that it had to be attainable, only it absolutely was not

The strange thing about delivering bad news was how it was rarely new information to the messenger.