I quit my job on a Tuesday because the billionaire’s daughter handed me a video on her phone and said, “You need to see this before he deletes it.”
By that afternoon my company email was shut off, my badge didn’t work at the gate, and a black SUV followed me halfway home.
Everything before that morning felt distant, like it belonged to someone else.
I’d worked for him for four years. Not his real name, not even the one the press used, but the man everyone in the office just called the boss. He was one of those people you recognize even if you’ve never met him. Tech, money, the usual story. He kept his public image clean, almost boring. Family man. Private. Quiet.
I wasn’t important. I handled scheduling for one of his smaller divisions and helped manage personal logistics when his regular staff were traveling. Flights. Calendars. Vendors. I never touched his finances, never went near anything sensitive. That’s what I told myself.
His daughter, though, was always around.
She wasn’t part of the company. She was early twenties, in school on the other side of the country, but she showed up whenever she wanted. Sometimes for a week, sometimes for a day. She’d wander through the office like she was visiting a mall, nodding at people who pretended not to stare.
I was told early on not to engage with her unless she spoke first. That rule came directly from his executive assistant. “It’s not personal,” she said. “Just… boundaries.”
The daughter didn’t care much about boundaries.
She’d ask for coffee. She’d sit on the edge of my desk. She’d complain about her dad like he was just another annoying parent. I learned to answer in half-sentences and keep my eyes on my screen.
Until the video.
It was 9:14 in the morning. I know because I checked my phone after she left. She came in without knocking, closed the door, and locked it. That never happened.
“You have to watch something,” she said. No hello. Her face was pale in a way I’d never seen before.
“I have a call in—”
“Just watch.”
She held her phone out. The clip was only thirty seconds long. It was shot from a hallway camera inside their house. I recognized it because I’d seen the same hallway in holiday photos the company shared every year. Tree in the background. Family smiling.
Except in this clip, no one was smiling.
I didn’t even get halfway through before I looked up at her and said, “What is this?”
She didn’t answer. She took the phone back, shoved it into her pocket, and said, “He’s going to delete it. He always deletes things.”
Then she unlocked the door and walked out like nothing had happened.
I sat there with my headset still on, the caller waiting on mute, my hands shaking so hard I had to press them flat against my thighs to stop them.
I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t even know what I’d just seen, not really. I only knew I couldn’t unsee it.
By lunch my manager had “urgent feedback” from HR. By two o’clock my access badge was deactivated. By three my personal phone rang from a blocked number and no one spoke on the other end.
At 4:30 I was told I was being let go “effective immediately” and escorted to the elevator.
No one used the word fired.
I didn’t tell anyone why I left. Not my husband. Not my sister. I said it was restructuring. Budget cuts. The usual.
That night I sat in my car outside my house for twenty minutes before I could bring myself to go inside. My hands kept reaching for my phone even though I didn’t want to look at it. I was half-expecting another call. Or a message from her.
Nothing came.
The next day I tried to log into my old email just to see if anything was still there. The password didn’t work. When I tried the recovery option, it said the account didn’t exist.
I spent the rest of the week doing small, quiet things. Laundry. Grocery shopping. Dishes. Anything that didn’t require thinking. I woke up in the middle of the night convinced someone was in the house. My husband asked if I was okay. I said yes too quickly.
On Friday I saw a black SUV parked down the street when I took the trash out. It was gone when I came back.
Maybe it wasn’t the same one. Maybe I imagined it. But I didn’t sleep that night.
Time does strange things after something like that. The days blur, but certain moments get sharp edges. The sound of her voice. The way she wouldn’t look at me after I watched the video. The way she said, He always deletes things.
I kept replaying the clip in my head even though I didn’t want to. It wasn’t violent in the way people expect. There was no blood. No screaming. That almost made it worse.
It was quiet.
A hallway. A door half open. Her father’s voice low and calm. Someone else answering him, out of frame. A pause that felt too long. Then movement, the door closing, the camera cutting out.
Thirty seconds.
But it didn’t feel like thirty seconds. It felt like something had shifted, like a floor giving way under your feet and you don’t hit the ground right away. You just keep falling.
Two weeks after I was fired, my severance paperwork arrived by courier. Overnight envelope. Thick. I didn’t open it for a full day.
Inside was more money than I’d ever seen in one place. More than people like me get when we’re quietly pushed out of a company.
There was also a clause that said I was prohibited from discussing my employment with anyone, including family members, under penalty of legal action.
It didn’t say why.
I signed it. I told myself it was just standard. I told myself I needed the money.
I didn’t tell myself anything about the video.
The daughter didn’t contact me. I searched her name online once and then closed the browser before anything loaded.
I tried to convince myself I was overreacting. That maybe I misunderstood. That maybe it was some kind of staged situation I wasn’t supposed to see. That I didn’t actually know anything.
But I’d worked there long enough to recognize panic when I saw it.
And I’d never seen it on her face before.
Three months after I left, my old coworker texted me.
“Weird question. Did you quit or did they fire you?”
I stared at my phone for a long time. Then I wrote back, Why?
“They moved your files into restricted access. Even HR can’t open them.”
I didn’t respond.
After that, the dreams started. Not about the video. About being locked out of rooms. About people talking behind closed doors while I stood in the hallway listening, unable to hear the words.
I went back to work eventually, a smaller company, less money, no security badges that beeped when you walked through the lobby. My husband stopped asking why I still jumped at every unknown number.
Life kept going. That’s the part no one warns you about. You don’t get a clean break. You get a series of ordinary days layered on top of something you’re not allowed to talk about.
I learned to swallow questions. I learned how to change the subject when people asked what it was like to work for someone that famous.
“It was just a job,” I’d say.
That was true in the way lies sometimes are.
Six months later I got an email from a throwaway address.
Do you still have access to anything?
No name. No context.
I deleted it.
The following week another message arrived.
He thinks he erased it.
This time I didn’t delete it. I stared at it until my eyes hurt. Then I printed it out and hid it in a box in the garage under old tax forms.
I told myself that was just being cautious. I didn’t admit that I was scared.
The anniversary of my firing came and went without me noticing. What I did notice was the way the news started mentioning him more. Interviews. Magazine covers. Charitable donations. His daughter wasn’t in any of them.
I wondered where she was. I wondered if she was okay. I wondered if she ever regretted showing me that video.
Another month passed. Then another.
Then one night my phone rang at 1:42 AM.
A blocked number.
I let it go to voicemail. Then I sat on the edge of the bed, listening to the silence afterward, waiting for the alert.
It didn’t come.
I didn’t sleep. In the morning I checked my phone again. Still no voicemail. No missed call record. Just a gap in the night where something had tried to reach me and failed.
I went to work anyway. I smiled at my coworkers. I answered emails. I lived inside the lie that nothing was wrong.
That evening, when I opened my front door, there was an envelope on the floor just inside. No stamp. No return address. My name written in block letters.
Inside was a USB drive.
And a note with only four words:
He knows about you.
I locked the door, sat down on the kitchen floor, and stared at that drive for almost an hour before I reached for my laptop.
I didn’t plug it in.
Not yet.
Because whatever was on it had already cost me my job, my peace, and maybe more than I understood.
And for the first time since that Tuesday morning, I realized this wasn’t over.
Not even close.
End of Part 1.
