My company was hit by a massive PR crisis. I didn’t sleep for seventy-two hours straight. I personally drafted eight different versions of the official statement, coordinated with twenty-three major media outlets, and successfully pushed the trending hashtag down from the number one spot until it vanished completely. At the victory party, our Vice President, Raymond Miller, raised his glass and walked toward Chloe Sterling, our intern. “Chloe did an outstanding job this time! Her full-time contract starts next month, and her salary will be set at the manager level.” Nobody looked at me. After the party, Raymond sent me a private message on WhatsApp: “Claire, you’re highly experienced. Make sure to mentor Chloe more in the future. She’s the daughter of a close friend of our Chairman.” At the exact same time, a recruiter from our biggest rival sent me a message: “Ms. Vance, your company’s recent PR strategy was brilliant. Do you have time for a quick chat?” I took screenshots of both messages and saved them to the same folder on my phone. Then, I replied to the recruiter with just two words: “Anytime.” One month later, the company made the trending topics again. This time, nobody could suppress it.
“The resource database, the media contact list, and the approval authority for the crisis relief fund—all of them must be handed over to Chloe before you clock out today.” Raymond stood in front of the projector screen during our morning meeting. His voice wasn’t loud, but every word felt like a heavy stamp crushing my ID badge. Chloe was sitting at the other end of the long conference table. Just yesterday, she was standing in that exact spot, pouring water for everyone. Today, her chair had been upgraded to one with an ergonomic cushion. “Additionally, after a review by the management team, the original fifteen-thousand-dollar crisis performance bonus for the PR department has been renamed the ‘Bold Innovation Award’ and is hereby awarded to Chloe.” My hands rested flat on my knees. I didn’t move. Twelve colleagues sat on both sides of the table, their eyes fixed on the brand-new Chanel earrings Chloe was wearing. “Raymond,” I spoke up, keeping my voice perfectly steady. “That bonus is clearly written into my contract—” “If you have an issue with your contract, take it up with Legal,” he waved his hand dismissively, not even bother to look at me. “Think of the big picture, Claire. The company needs iron-fisted, aggressive PR right now, not your old-school, emotional-pleading style of begging for forgiveness. Chloe’s bold statement went viral, and the public loved it. That’s what I call professional.” I was the one who wrote all eight versions of that statement. He had rejected versions one through seven. He took the eighth version, put Chloe’s name on it, and published it. Chloe’s sole contribution was changing the very last sentence from “We sincerely apologize and ask for your understanding” to “If you’re not happy, bring it on.” After the meeting, I blocked Raymond at his office door. I opened my phone and showed him the unpaid ICU bill. The red hospital stamp looked like a glaring eye. “My dad has acute pancreatitis. The ICU costs twelve thousand dollars a day. The next round of medication requires an upfront payment of eighty thousand dollars. Raymond, I don’t care about the award anymore. I just want what is rightfully mine under my contract.” He leaned back in his leather chair, picked up my phone with two fingers, and glanced at the screen. “Claire, this company is not a charity.” He pushed the phone back to me, almost sliding it off the desk. “If you’re having financial difficulties, I can have HR approve a hardship grant for you. Three thousand dollars.” Three thousand. The ICU cost twelve thousand a day. “Is that enough?” When he asked that, his eyes were already back on his phone. I folded the medical bill and shoved it into my pocket. During my lunch break, I sat at a folding table in the breakroom, staring at my father’s name on the bill. I had already listened to the doctor’s voicemail three times: “His condition is deteriorating. The family needs to get here as soon as possible.” The door was pushed open. Chloe walked in first, followed by Lily and two other junior specialists. She was playing with a stack of Amazon gift cards in her hand, the diamonds on her nails glittering. “Claire, I ran an audit on these gift cards you bought to maintain our micro-influencers. It’s about forty-eight hundred dollars. Did you pay for all of this out of your own pocket?” “Yes.” “Great. That means these influencers aren’t company assets. I’m going to rebuild the network from scratch anyway.” She began handing the cards out one by one. “One for Lily, one for Ashley, one for Dylan. From now on, we aren’t going to beg anyone to promote us. That’s too pathetic. My strategy is to target top-tier celebrities. The mid-tier ones will come crawling to us on their own.” Lily took the card faster than anyone else. I looked at Lily. “Last year during Marcus’s scandal, who stayed with you at the police station until two in the morning to make sure you were okay?” Lily lowered her eyes, her voice sounding incredibly detached. “Claire, don’t guilt-trip us. If you’re really tight on cash…” Chloe cut in, her voice dripping with a fake, sweet smile, like she was handing me an iced Americano. “I can personally Venmo you two hundred bucks to buy some coffee and soothe your throat. After all, you’ve spent so many years kissing up to the media. Your vocal cords must be exhausted.” The three of them burst into laughter. The sound bounced off the tiled walls of the breakroom. I didn’t say a word. I went back to my desk, opened my resignation checklist on my computer, and checked the boxes one by one. I paused at the very last item. “The Sunflower Support Group.” Five hundred and three members. Three years ago, the company had a major quality control disaster with a line of baby cream, causing severe skin ulcerations in dozens of infants. I had personally handled every single victim, paying out of my own pocket, comforting them, and accompanying them to clinics to bury the scandal. The announcement pinned at the top of the group was written by me on New Year’s Eve: “If you have any issues, tag me. Claire is here. I will always be here.” My finger hovered over the “Leave Group” button. I hesitated for five seconds. Suddenly, two notifications popped up simultaneously. One was an automated text from the hospital: “Your account balance has fallen below the critical limit. Please pay the outstanding balance within forty-eight hours.” The other was from the recruiter: “Claire, our CEO is offering to double your current salary. When are you free for an interview?” I clicked to leave the Snapchat group. A prompt popped up asking me to confirm deleting my admin status. I clicked confirm. Then, I replied to the recruiter with one word: “Tomorrow.”
“Claire, here are your badge and the team roster.” The HR representative at my new company handed me a folder. The badge had our rival brand’s logo on it, with my name and new title printed underneath: “PR Director”. “CEO Ethan Hayes said you have full authority over the team setup. You can report the budget directly to him.” I took the badge and hung it around my neck. The protective film on the back was still intact, shiny and brand new. On my third day, I had my father transferred to the ICU at the top-tier pediatric and general hospital in the city. My signing bonus and my first month’s salary were just enough to cover the deposit. I still had to figure out how to pay for the rest of his treatment. On Monday, the attending physician called me. “Claire, the CT results are back. The tissue necrosis is larger than last time. I highly recommend surgery, but the cost will be around two hundred thousand dollars.” “Let’s proceed with conservative treatment for now,” I said. “I’ll find a way to get the money.” After hanging up, I sat in my new office, staring at a blank Excel sheet. On my fifth day, an intern from the PR department peeked over the cubicle wall. “Claire, did you check YouTube? There’s a video trending right now. It looks like it’s in our industry.” I clicked open YouTube. An account named “Kiki’s Mom Braving the Storm” had posted a series of photos. The baby’s face was covered in horrific red rashes and open sores. The caption was short: “My daughter’s face was ruined three days after using a certain brand’s baby cream. I’m a single mother, and I can’t afford a lawyer. I just want an explanation.” The corner of the cream packaging was visible in the photo. I zoomed in on the image, focusing on the color code and the batch number. It was my old company’s product. The comment section already had over two thousand entries. Some were cursing the brand, some claimed the photos were photoshopped, and others were posting links to my old company’s past scandals. I scrolled down. When I reached the fourth image, my heart skipped a beat. The mother’s profile picture was a sunflower. I knew her. Sarah Jenkins, thirty-one, living in a cramped apartment in a run-down suburb. Three years ago, she was the very first person to stand up and demand justice. I had paid nine thousand dollars of her medical bills out of my own pocket and stayed with her in the pediatric ICU for three nights before she finally agreed not to sue. That five-hundred-member support group had been built around her. Those victims didn’t trust my old company. They didn’t even trust the compensation package. They trusted me. And just a week ago, I had abandoned them. My phone buzzed again. My former colleague Ashley had shared the video on Instagram with the caption: “Chloe said we crush these extortionists on sight.” I put my phone down and closed my eyes for three seconds. Then, I opened my old company’s official website. There was no response yet. But Chloe’s personal Instagram had just been updated with an aesthetic office photo. Her caption read: “Justice will not be silent.” I picked up my phone and dialed Lily’s number. It rang five times before she picked up. “Claire?” Her voice sounded noticeably cold and distant. “Lily, did you see the YouTube video about the baby?” “Yeah. Chloe is already handling it. She says the woman is just trying to scam us—” “She’s not a scammer,” I lowered my voice. “Her name is Sarah Jenkins. She’s the leader of the Sunflower Support Group. Tell Chloe to take down her Instagram post immediately, contact Sarah privately, apologize, and pay her. This is not someone you want to mess with.” The line went silent for a second. Then, I heard a soft, arrogant chuckle. It wasn’t Lily’s. She had me on speakerphone. “Claire, are you so bored at your new job that you have time to monitor our social media?” Chloe’s voice came through the speaker, sounding incredibly smug and lazy. “I’m warning you, Sarah is—” “A single mother living in the slums?” Chloe interrupted me. “Keep your ‘victim worship’ to yourself, Claire. I just came out of a meeting with Legal. We’re going to publicly expose her—” “You can’t do that!” Raymond’s cold sneer came from the background: “Claire, trying to sabotage us just because you got fired? How pathetic.” Then, the line went dead. I stared at the call ended screen and took a deep breath. The new intern poked his head through my door. “Claire, CEO Ethan Hayes wants to know if you’re free for a pitch meeting at three p.m.” “Tell him I’ll be there.” I closed YouTube and flipped my phone face down on the desk. But Chloe’s words kept ringing in my head: “We’re going to publicly expose her.”
“It blew up.” At nine o’clock the next morning, my intern rushed into my office, his face pale. “Claire, your old company’s official account just released a statement. They literally doxxed the single mom—they posted her social security number and her home address.” I stood up instantly and grabbed the tablet from his hands. The statement was long, written in Chloe’s signature condescending tone. Every sentence sounded like a judge handing down a sentence: “Official Statement: The so-called ‘injured baby’ post circulating online is a coordinated extortion attempt by professional scammers. The user ‘Kiki’s Mom’ is Sarah Jenkins, currently unemployed, with a history of extortion. See her detailed identity verification and past police reports below. Our brand will never negotiate with professional scammers—your script is trash!” My fingers clamped tightly around the edges of the tablet. The so-called “history of extortion” was actually from three years ago, when Sarah had protested outside the company headquarters. Security had called the police, and a report was filed. I was the one who went to the station to bail her out back then. The comment section had turned into an absolute bloodbath. Half the people were calling Sarah a liar, while the other half were blasting the company for violating her privacy. The hashtag was sitting at number four on the trending charts, with views climbing past two hundred million. But Chloe didn’t care about justice. She just wanted to look like a winner. The company’s official account immediately posted a second update—a photo of Chloe standing in the office with her hands on her hips, smiling confidently. The caption read: “Protecting the brand with an iron fist. No exceptions.” The post received over twenty thousand retweets in fifteen minutes. “And look at this,” the intern handed me his phone. It was Raymond’s Instagram. A long-form post, over a thousand words, titled: “Weakness is the Cancer of the PR Industry—To My Former Colleagues.” He didn’t mention my name, but every single paragraph was a direct attack on my working style: “There is a type of PR professional whose first instinct during a crisis is to kneel. They kneel to clients, they kneel to the media, and they kneel to so-called ‘victims.’ They treat the company’s dignity like a doormat, only to invite more greedy extortionists.” “Real PR should be like Chloe Sterling—fearless and uncompromising. Let the world know we aren’t afraid.” At the bottom of the post was a screenshot of the company’s live stream: one hundred and eighty thousand concurrent viewers, with real-time sales exceeding three million dollars. Chloe’s personal account was also updated with the hashtag #TheFearlessPRQueen. Her comment section was flooded with hundreds of fans chanting, “You’re so badass, queen!” My old company’s stock rose by two percent that afternoon. At two p.m., I called Lily again. This time, she didn’t pick up. I sent her a text message: “Lily, releasing Sarah’s private information is illegal. More importantly, the five hundred mothers in the Sunflower group are watching. You have no idea what that group represents.” It was marked as read. No reply. Five minutes later, Lily posted a photo on Instagram from the company lobby. It was a picture of Chloe posing with her hands on her hips, captioned: “Following the right leader, doing the right thing.” Chloe liked the post instantly. I leaned back in my chair. I was doing a simple math equation in my head—five hundred and three angry mothers, whose rage I had personally pacified for three long years. Who was going to block them now? The answer was nobody. Chloe was standing on top of the dam I had built with my blood, sweat, and tears, taking selfies for Instagram. She had absolutely no idea what was beneath her feet. At eight p.m., Ethan Hayes invited me to dinner. Halfway through the meal, he looked at my expression and asked: “Your old company’s statement is causing quite a stir. What do you think?” “They are going to crash,” I said. “How bad?” I set my fork down. “Bad enough to watch their stock dive off a cliff.”
“Claire, are you just jealous of Chloe?” Lily’s voice note finally came through the next morning. Her tone carried that distinct, arrogant snobbishness of someone who had just secured a powerful new backer. “Ever since you left, our livestream sales have tripled. Chloe was even interviewed on local TV last night. Did you see it at your new company? Haha.” I opened my old company’s official page. The pinned video was indeed Chloe’s TV interview. Dressed in a sharp white suit, she spoke confidently to the camera: “Our brand’s stance can be summed up in two words: no compromise. People who think they can extort hundreds of thousands of dollars from us with a fake social media post won’t get a single cent.” The host nodded in agreement. The top comment with forty-three thousand likes read: “This is what brand backbone looks like! The old PR director only knew how to kneel and beg. Now that we have new talent, we finally see real strength.” The second comment: “Chloe is so cool! I just ordered three skincare sets.” I closed the video. The post was tagged with #ZeroToleranceForScammers. Sarah’s original YouTube video had been shadowbanned by the platform, with only a few hundred comments left fighting for her. People were telling her to “go back to the slums” and threatening to report her for fraud. Her profile picture had gone gray. Her last update from eleven o’clock last night read: “I just wanted justice for my daughter.” Zero shares. Three comments, all of them abusive. I turned off my phone, sat in my office, and watched the second hand of the clock spin. Our intern knocked on the door again. “Claire, their livestream just hit number one in the beauty category. Our marketing department is asking if we should launch a counter-campaign.” “No need.” “But—” “Just wait.” He left, looking thoroughly confused. Wait for what? Wait for those five hundred and three mothers to realize their group admin was no longer there to hold them back. Wait for Chloe to realize that what she had thrown into the fire wasn’t a “professional scammer,” but a live grenade. On the third day after the statement, everything seemed peaceful. The company’s daily livestream sales broke five million dollars. Chloe signed two major endorsement deals, and Raymond sent out a massive bonus in the company group chat with the caption: “A New Era.” Then came the fourth day, at two in the morning. I was awakened by my phone buzzing furiously. It was a message from Ashley. No greeting, no introduction, just a link and four words: “We’re done for, Claire.” I clicked the link. It was a live stream. The viewer count was jumping by hundreds of people per second, already hitting four hundred thousand. A woman was sitting in front of the camera. Her hair was cut short, and the dark circles under her eyes looked like they had been painted on with ink. The wall behind her was plastered with printed medical certificates, diagnostic reports, and photos of her daughter’s face. She was holding a little girl in her arms, whose face was wrapped in thick medical gauze, leaving only her eyes visible. It was Sarah Jenkins. Her voice was raspy, sounding far older than I remembered. “They said I’m a liar. They said my baby is an actor.” She held up a thick stack of papers. “These are hospital records. Eight hospitalizations, fourteen outpatient visits. All with the exact same diagnosis—extensive skin ulceration caused by severe contact dermatitis from their baby cream.” The camera zoomed in. The official seals on the medical reports were crystal clear. The live chat exploded. “If I’m a scammer, are these official hospital records fake too?” She picked up an old leather folder and opened it. Inside were page after page of bank transfer records. — Recipient: Sarah Jenkins. Sender: Claire Vance. — Memo: Kiki’s Medical Subsidies. — Timeframe: Three years. Amounts ranging from two thousand to twenty thousand dollars. The chat was moving so fast it became a blur: “Who the hell is Claire Vance?!” “I think she’s the former PR Director—the one they accused of ‘kneeling to work’!” “The company refused to pay, so she paid out of her own pocket?!” Sarah closed the folder and stared at the camera for a long, silent moment. “The only person who actually helped us was forced out of the company. Her replacement doxxed me, leaked my social security number, and let the internet tear me apart.” She looked down at the child in her arms, her voice breaking for a second. When she spoke again, she sounded like she was addressing five hundred invisible allies: “Mothers, it’s time.” I stared at the screen, my palms sweating. In that single second, the viewer count jumped from four hundred thousand to nearly a million. Because five hundred and three mothers had shared the link at the exact same moment.
🌟 Continue the story here 👉🏻 📲 Download the “NovelMaster” app 🔍 search for “460905”, and watch the full series ✨! #NovelMaster
Leave a Reply