The King of Emptiness

Silas Ardent has run this company for eight years and has never once given an interview. I know why. I read the file nobody asked me to read: his wife, the accident, the settlement, the story the board sold to keep him in the chair. He doesn't know I know. He just knows I'm the first person in this building who tells him the truth. That's why he keeps me past midnight. That's why he puts his hand on my back in an empty elevator and doesn't explain it. Then the board asks me to bury something worse, and I have a choice: keep the job my father's care depends on, or publish the truth and lose everything. I published it. He stood next to me and lost it too. There's no board anymore. There's just the two of us, a rented office, and a man who finally sleeps at night.