Keeping the Boat Afloat

Helena Roberts had always believed that running a tight ship required a good crew. You could have the best strategy in the industry, the most impressive technology, and a budget that made your competitors weep with envy, but none of it mattered if the people responsible for keeping everything moving couldn't do their jobs. A company was only as good as the people who showed up when things went wrong.

Fortunately, Helena had a very good crew.

For the most part.

Mondays were always prone to chaos. People returned from the weekend with forgotten tasks, unanswered emails, and problems they'd somehow managed to convince themselves would resolve spontaneously if ignored for forty-eight hours. Usually, Helena could get things back under control with a few sharp words and a carefully directed glare.

This Monday, however, had arrived with an enthusiasm for disaster that even she found impressive.

The network had gone down in one department, several critical reports had seemingly vanished into thin air, and two teams were waiting for instructions from managers who appeared to have misplaced both their calendars and their common sense. Helena had spent the morning striding through the office in her heels, firing questions at anyone unfortunate enough to cross her path. Answers were slow to arrive, tempers were fraying, and the company's usual hum of productive activity had become an orchestra of complaints and frantic keyboard tapping.

Through it all, Roy Robinson had been a rock.

The vice president had noticed him arrive before almost everyone else. She'd noticed him identify the network problem while others were still trying to work out whom to blame. By the time the first round of frantic emails had begun circulating, Roy was already coordinating a solution. When reports went missing, he tracked down the people responsible for their last revisions. When conflicting instructions left employees standing around wondering which way was up, Roy gave them direction.

He'd done all of it without making a production of his efforts, without demanding praise, and without once suggesting that someone else ought to have been handling the mess.

Hardworking. Steady. Reliable.

Helena could have added a dozen more complimentary adjectives, but the important thing was that Roy delivered. He was the sort of department head every executive wanted and very few were lucky enough to have. Give him a problem, and he'd work through it. Give him a crisis, and he'd keep his head. Give him a team that had lost its way, and he'd get everyone moving in the right direction again.

She honestly wasn't sure what the company would do without him.

Which made the fact that she'd spent part of the morning snapping at him all the more embarrassing.

Stress did unfortunate things to Helena's personality. She knew that about herself, even if she wasn't always particularly successful at doing anything about it. When the pressure mounted, patience became a luxury she couldn't afford, and her usual polished professionalism acquired some rather sharp edges. This morning, she'd been marching around demanding answers, issuing orders before people had finished explaining the questions, and making it abundantly clear that she expected everyone to perform at their best.

Roy had caught some of the worst of it.

He'd taken her complaints without arguing, even when the problems she'd blamed him for had been beyond his control. There had been no sulking, no defensive excuses, no wounded expression designed to make her feel guilty. Instead, he'd looked at her with a quiet understanding that had somehow made her feel even worse.

Most employees regarded Helena with irritation on mornings like this. She couldn't really blame them. Nobody enjoyed being on the receiving end of an executive's bad mood. Roy, however, had looked at her as though he understood exactly what she was dealing with. As though he recognized the pressure she was under and was prepared to help carry it.

And he had.

By lunchtime, the network was back online, the reports had been recovered, and the various departments were functioning again. The potential losses from the network outage alone had been substantial. Roy's quick response had spared the company an ugly mess of lost productivity and wasted payroll, to say nothing of the deadlines that would otherwise have been missed.

He'd earned himself a little breathing room.

So when Roy disappeared from the office midway through the day, Helena hadn't complained. He wasn't in the habit of vanishing, and after a morning like that, she could hardly blame him for needing some time away from his desk. If he wanted to take a long lunch or walk around the building until he felt human again, she was hardly going to object.

Still, she'd been keeping an eye on him lately. That was part of her job, at least the part she considered important. A good executive didn't merely monitor spreadsheets and performance metrics. She watched the people who kept the company running, particularly the ones whose contributions made them difficult to replace. If a key employee was struggling, Helena wanted to know before the problem became a resignation letter.

And Roy hadn't seemed quite himself recently. He was still doing the work, and doing it well, but there had been moments when his attention seemed elsewhere. A distracted pause during a meeting. An expression that vanished when someone asked if he was all right. The occasional look of a man who'd been handed a problem with no obvious solution and was trying to decide how much of it he could share.

Perhaps he was stretched too thin. The rumour mill had certainly been busy about Roy's romantic life. The man apparently had five girlfriends, give or take, which seemed like an exhausting amount of relationship management for anyone with a full-time job. Helena had no idea how he managed it. She could barely keep track of her own appointments some weeks, and she wasn't trying to coordinate dinner dates with half a dozen women.

Still, she could understand why they liked him. Roy was kind, intelligent, and trustworthy. He had a quiet warmth that made people comfortable around him, and he treated colleagues with the same basic respect whether they were senior executives or junior employees. He didn't need to be the loudest person in a room to command attention.

Perhaps having so many women in his life was a sign that things were going well for him. Perhaps it was a sign that he was trying to juggle too much.

Or perhaps something else was wrong.

That possibility was what finally prompted Helena to seek him out after lunch, once the office had settled into its usual rhythm and the morning's chaos had faded into a collection of emails and post-mortem notes. She found Roy at his desk, studying something on his monitor with the expression of a man who'd rather be somewhere else.

"Roy, do you have a minute?"

He looked up. "Of course. Come in."

Helena stepped into his office and took the chair opposite his desk. For a moment, she considered opening with a joke about the morning's disasters, but Roy's expression gave her pause. He looked tired. Not merely the ordinary fatigue of a long day, either. There was a tension around his eyes that hadn't been there a few weeks ago.

"I wanted to check in with you," she said. "You've seemed a little distracted lately, and this morning was quite a lot to deal with. I know you've had your hands full. Is everything all right?"

Roy leaned back in his chair, then looked down at his desk. His fingers moved briefly against the edge of a notepad. Helena waited, resisting the urge to fill the silence. She'd learned over the years that people often needed a moment to decide whether they could trust you with the answer.

"It's Tom," Roy said at last, his voice quiet. "Tom Burgess."

Helena's expression tightened. "Tom? Didn't you two go to school together?"

"Yes."

"And I take it this isn't a happy reunion?"

Roy gave a humourless little smile. "Not exactly. He's always hated me for some reason. I don't know if it's something that happened back then or if he just decided he didn't like me. But now he's trying to blackmail me."

The word landed with a weight Helena hadn't expected.

"Blackmail you?" She leaned forward. "Roy, that's a serious accusation. What exactly has he done?"

"He showed me some documents. Emails, printouts, approval chains. Evidence that makes it look as though I've been involved in things I had nothing to do with. It's all forged, but it's thorough. He's put a lot of work into it."

Helena stared at him for a moment, trying to reconcile the accusation with what she knew about Tom. She'd never particularly liked the man. He had a tendency to confuse confidence with competence and to treat every workplace interaction as though it were a contest he needed to win. But blackmail was a different order of misconduct.

"What does he want?"

"Me to quit. And he wants me to recommend him for my position."

For a few seconds, Helena didn't say anything. The sheer audacity of it was almost impressive, if one could separate the ingenuity from the criminal stupidity. Tom wasn't simply trying to undermine Roy. He was attempting to manufacture a vacancy and then position himself to fill it.

"Can you show me these documents?"

Roy's shoulders sank a little. "I can't. He didn't leave anything with me. He just showed me enough to make his point. I didn't know whether to tell you, or how to handle it. I've never dealt with anything like this before."

"Understandable."

Helena folded her arms, considering the situation. Her initial instinct was to march into Tom's cubical and demand an explanation, but she had enough experience to recognize the danger in acting on instinct alone. If the documents were convincing, even if they were fraudulent, an accusation could become a serious problem for everyone involved. The company would have to investigate, and any misstep could give Tom an opportunity to release his supposed evidence before they were ready.

"Roy, I need you on my team," she said. "I trust your work, and I believe you're telling me the truth. But I'm only one part of this company. If Tom has something that appears credible, there's only so much I can do without evidence of my own. I need you to get me whatever you can. Copies of the documents, messages from him, anything that establishes what he's doing. I can bring it to HR, and if necessary, we can escalate it further. But the first question they'll ask me is what proof we have."

"But I don't have any."

"Then we need to get some."

The words came out more firmly than she'd intended, but Roy didn't flinch. Helena softened her tone.

"Listen to me. I believe you. I want you to understand that. Tom is a snake, and if I had enough grounds to fire him right now, I'd happily escort him out myself. But if he's sitting on this false evidence, making a move before we know what we're dealing with could give him exactly what he wants. He releases the material, and suddenly we're all scrambling to explain why we didn't take it seriously or why we acted without following the proper process. We need to be smart about this."

Roy nodded slowly, though he didn't look particularly reassured.

"How much time do we have?"

"Two weeks."

Helena exhaled through her nose. Two weeks was not a generous window. It was barely enough time to get a complicated HR investigation moving, let alone establish that a collection of forged documents was fraudulent before someone could use them to damage a career.

"Not much time," she admitted. "But it's not impossible. Leave it with me for the rest of the day. I'll think through our options, and we'll talk again tomorrow. In the meantime, don't confront Tom unless you have a very good reason, and keep a record of every interaction you have with him. If he contacts you about this again, I want to know."

"All right."

For the first time since the conversation began, Roy looked as though he'd allowed himself to believe that he might not have to face this alone. The change was subtle, little more than a softening around his eyes, but Helena noticed it. She'd mentored him long enough to recognize how much he tended to carry on his own. Roy was capable, conscientious, and stubbornly independent. Those were excellent qualities in a department head, right up until he decided he had to solve every problem without help.

Helena rose from her chair and walked around the desk. Roy looked up as she bent slightly to touch his arm, her hand resting there for a moment in a gesture of reassurance.

"I'm sorry this is happening to you," she said. "It's not fair. You're a good man, Roy. You don't deserve to have someone try to destroy your career just because he's got some personal grudge against you."

"Thanks." He met her eyes, and the hope there was unmistakable. "I appreciate it."

The sincerity of his response warmed her more than she'd expected. Helena had spent years working with people who treated kindness as a weakness and professional relationships as transactions. Roy was different. He didn't seem to assume that support was something he was automatically entitled to, and when someone offered it, he received it with genuine gratitude.

It was one of the reasons she liked him so much.

Helena turned towards the door, already beginning to assemble a mental list of people she would need to speak with and procedures she would need to review. She was halfway across the office when another thought occurred to her.

"Oh, and Roy?"

He looked up again.

"I'm sorry about this morning, too. I was out of line. You spent half the morning putting out fires while I ran around making things worse, and I still managed to snap at you. You saved us a great deal of trouble today. I saw what you did, and I want you to know that you didn't deserve any of that."

Roy gave her a small, reassuring smile. "Helena, you've got a big job. Mondays can be rough. I'm just happy to help."

There was no resentment in his voice, no hint that he expected an apology to come with some additional concession. He'd simply accepted her explanation and offered her the same understanding he'd shown her all morning.

Helena found herself smiling back.

"No wonder all those women are crazy about you."

Roy's cheeks coloured slightly, and the reaction was so unexpectedly endearing that she nearly laughed. For all the attention he apparently received from his girlfriends, he could still look like a man who wasn't entirely sure what to do with a compliment.

"See you tomorrow," she said, leaving before she could tease him any further.

The moment the office door closed behind her, Helena's expression sharpened. She had a company to protect, a good employee being threatened, and a thoroughly unpleasant problem named Tom Burgess to deal with. There were procedures to follow, people to consult, and a deadline that wouldn't wait for anyone to get organized.

Roy had spent the morning keeping the company afloat.

Now it was her turn to make sure someone was looking after him.