“I have bills too,” I said.
“And you have me. But I can’t carry both households if this falls apart.”
I hadn’t asked her to. I nearly said so. Instead, I ate enough soup that she stopped watching my bowl.
The handover call with Ruth took place two mornings later. I sat beside Felix in the small meeting room, with Grant at the end of the table. Before the call, I had walked Felix through the routing rules as instructed. He had wanted a summary he could present. I had kept returning to the exceptions.
Now Ruth was on the screen, studying the diagram Felix had shared.
“You designed the routing logic?” she asked him.
“Yes,” Felix said. “With support from the team.”
Ruth leaned closer to her camera.
“Then take me through a missed delivery. The truck reaches a closed receiving dock. Where does that stop go?”
Felix moved his cursor along the green line.
“It gets added to the next available route.”
“Even if that route arrives after the receiving window?”
He stopped moving the cursor.
“We account for that.”
“How?” Ruth asked.
I kept my hands beneath the table. This was the exception I had told him not to skip.
Felix turned toward me, then back to the camera.
“Nina prepared the handover notes,” he said. “Apparently that part wasn’t included.”
Grant looked at me. Ruth did too.
“It was included,” I said. “And I explained it to Felix before this call.”
Felix pushed his notebook toward me, as if I ought to find the answer for him.
I left it where it was.
Ruth stopped sharing the diagram. For a moment, all I could see was her face.
“Before we blame the handover notes, let’s check something,” she said.
Felix pulled his notebook back. “There’s no need to turn a technical question into an argument.”
“I’m checking a technical answer.”
A video player appeared on the screen. Ruth said her company had retained the pilot-test recording on its system. I recognized the test date, then the shirt I was wearing in the small square beside the shared spreadsheet.
I had forgotten how tired I looked that afternoon.
On the recording, a delivery had failed because the receiver had closed early. I heard myself ask for the receiving windows to be displayed beside the available routes. Then I explained the change I wanted to make: reject routes that would arrive outside the window, check whether another driver could reach the stop in time, and flag the delivery for a person to resolve if neither option worked.
“Don’t quietly move it to tomorrow,” my recorded voice said. “That makes a missed delivery look like a scheduled one.”
Ruth paused the recording with my cursor still over the failed stop.
“That is the exception I asked about,” she said.
Felix shifted beside me. “Nobody’s disputing Nina helped develop it.”
Ruth pressed play again.
On the recording, Felix leaned toward his camera. “That’s Nina’s design. She worked out the exception handling. I’m coordinating the account.”
Ruth let the next few seconds run. Nobody spoke in the meeting room. I could hear the laptop fan.
I wanted to feel pleased. Instead, I felt embarrassed by how badly I had needed someone else to establish something I already knew.
Grant reached toward the speakerphone. “We’ve clearly had some confusion over presentation.”
“The presentation was quite clear,” Ruth said. “So was Felix just now when he told me he designed the logic.”
Felix stared at the table.
Ruth closed the player. She asked Grant to send an accurate account of who would be responsible for technical decisions before they discussed renewal again. Then she ended the call.
Grant waited until Felix left before telling me to come to his office.
I stayed standing while he shut the door. There were two visitor chairs. Sitting in one would have felt too much like waiting for a verdict.
“You could have helped him answer,” he said.
“I trained him. You heard me say that.”
“You knew what Ruth was asking.”
“Yes. So did Felix. He chose to blame me.”
Grant sat down and loosened his watch. “What do you want, Nina?”
“I wanted you to correct that slide. I wanted you to keep your promise to consider me for director.”
“I did consider you.”
He said it without hesitation. That hurt more than another denial would have.
“Then why him?”
“Felix has sales connections. People take his calls. We need new business, not just good delivery work.”
“Then promote him for sales. Why put his name on my design?”
“Because clients want one accountable lead. I’m not reorganizing the company around who built which part.”
