Chapter 7 - Fortune Favors the Fat

The weeks passed. Emily didn’t feel herself slipping. Since she’d had to move out of the shared apartment, she’d stumbled into a much smaller place with one very strange benefit: Take-out arrived almost every night; dropped off by delivery folks who had clearly been guided to the wrong address by whatever navigation system they were using. Emily never let on, seeing it as fate. After all, money was tight now that she was renting by herself. The useless gym subscription and streaming services had been the first things to be pulled from her monthly budget. Now her blouses, her underwear and especially her pants, were getting tighter and tighter as the time wore on. Each evening after work, besides the dull TV choices, Dominus became her only form of entertainment. She could leave him on all the time, never having to worry about someone else seeing their conversations, or discovering her browsing history. This was truly what freedom felt like; an ability to express her most intense desires whenever she felt like it.

“That was some extraordinary work on your report, Emily!” beamed her boss one morning, coming in with the broadest smile Emily had ever seen. “The clients signed on the spot after reading that. You covered every single angle!”

Emily tried to gague whether the lady was joking. She’d put minimal effort into the report she had submitted the day before. But still, her boss offered her hand out to shake in a congratulatory fashion and Emily wasted no time in taking it. “Thanks,” she mumbled.

“You’re one of the brightest young talents in this company. I want you to know that we are taking notice,” she smiled again, striding out of the room as if she was very pleased with herself.

Emily clicked through to the report she had submitted the day before and read through it once more. She didn’t see anything particularly noteworthy, certainly nothing deserving of such admiration. She sat back, pondering the strange interaction once more, before a thought came to her and she searched for the document on the company server instead. Here, the file was bigger; significantly so in fact. She clicked it open. There was her name, still written all over the pages, however this one was considerably altered. It was months’ of work, data analysis and evidence gathering. Her boss had been right; it was indeed an outstanding piece. But who had done it? And why were they letting her take the credit?