Chapter OneStatistically, the most common days of the week to be fired are Monday or Friday. Which partly explains why, when I get to work—today, a Wednesday—and my keycard has been deactivated, I am very f***ing surprised.
“Oof,” I say, when instead of gliding through the plexiglass barrier, I bounce right off it. The man behind me, too, is surprised, when he goes careening into my back. The security gates are meant to be a neat assembly line, not a five-car pileup.
I fumble, trying to swipe my card again, but by now I’m flustered—I’ve just made full-body contact with a middle-aged man in a charcoal suit.
“Go,” he orders, slamming his fob down over the sensor, granting me the access I couldn’t grant myself. I’m flushed with embarrassment, my brain frozen on the moment I felt his kneecap make contact with the back of my thigh.
Behind me, the barrier alarms go off again. Another person has been denied, and when I turn, I realize I know this person. It’s Suzy, the copywriter behind the company’s now infamous tagline:
Tick your to-do list off one Taskio at a time.The pull and release of awareness is like an elastic band snapping against my skin. The faulty keycards aren’t a coincidence. They’re a ghosting.
I watch in horror while a security guard steers her away, and then I can’t move fast enough. I’m clawing around the bottom of my tote bag, flicking aside dozens of crumpled receipts until I fish my phone out from the debris. It’s vibrating in a short, insistent staccato before I even unlock the screen.
When I do, it’s covered in notifications, each little snippet forming a picture of what’s transpired in the time since I last checked it. Chief among them is a mandatory meeting invite staring at me in all caps, scheduled with HR at 8:30 a.m., and long since missed. Which begs the question: can I truly lose my job if no one can get hold of me?
I have the answer as soon as I flip into my emails. Instead of my inbox, I’m greeted with a lock screen that simply says Contact Systems Administrator.
Next: texts. I’ve been added to a new group chat, aptly titled WHAT THE F***?, and the messages are pouring in faster than I can read them, the names of my teammates appearing in rapid succession. My phone starts ringing before I finish crafting a reply. I swipe as soon as I see work wife on the caller ID.
“Annie, where the hell are you?” Carrie’s voice hisses in my ear. “You were supposed to be on the phone with me fifteen minutes ago.”
“I’m here. In the lobby.” My hands are so clammy. “My keycard didn’t work. Someone else let me in. Am I being laid off?”
She doesn’t even bother to deny it. “Just get up here. Don’t talk to anyone. Come straight to my office.”
The line goes dead.
•••
By the time the elevator deposits me on the twenty-fourth floor I’m half expecting a group of people to be standing by the doors with confetti, shouting Surprise! You’re unemployed!
Do I find my job ridiculous? I work for a productivity software company, so yes, obviously. Do I want to lose my ridiculous job? I do not.
My best friend Carrie works in the HR department, her door at the end of a narrow hall. I find her in her closet-sized office, a windowless room lined with thick carpet she once admitted was installed to muffle the sound of crying.
We both started work on the same day at Jotter, the now-defunct startup that was bought out by Taskio. Over awkward chitchat with a dozen other new inductees, Carrie and I bonded for life when we realized we were both new to the city and secretly hoping to manifest our own rags-to-riches Working Girl storyline, complete with Harrison Ford.
That obviously did not happen—tech guys are either enormously socially awkward computer geeks or cocaine-snorting sales leads that speak in gibberish—but it didn’t matter. Instead, I got Carrie, my partner in crime both during working hours and outside of them.
She’s hunched over her computer, typing away furiously, the echo of her keystrokes bouncing around the compact space. Her head swivels toward me when I enter the room, like an owl. Her hands, I notice, never pause in their typing.
I close the door behind me. “What’s happening?”
“Shitshow,” she says, summing up my own take on the matter perfectly.
In under a minute, she puts me in possession of the facts as she knows them: the big executive meeting that took place yesterday, the list of layoffs that came in late last night.
“I don’t understand. How did I not know about this?”
I usually hear all the big workplace gossip. Carrie is even more skillful. Like a pig rooting for truffles.
I eye her with suspicion. “How did you not know about this?”
“On my life, I had no idea,” she says. “I don’t even think my boss knew. It feels really sudden.”
“So that’s it? Goodbye, Annie, have a nice life?”
“If you had turned up on the call when you were supposed to, you’d know the answer to this! Where were you?”
“Pacing around outside, arguing with my mom. Shannon and Dan are engaged again.”
I’m hard put to decide, now, which of the two calls I’d rather have been taking: the one telling me I’d lost my job, or the one telling me my sister is re-engaged to the worst man in the world.
“What, the mayor guy?” Carrie asks. “I thought you banished him.”
So did I. Also, to be clear: he is not the mayor. Of anything.
“She wants to throw another engagement party.” She being my mother. My sister Shannon has not deigned to discuss this—or anything else—with me in over two years.
Carrie scrunches her nose. “Ew.”
“No kidding.”
“Anyway, yeah,” she says, returning to our original conversation. “You’re laid off.”
“Damn it.”
The hideous prospect of interviewing for jobs even more pointless than this one appears before me. I barely repress a shudder.
“Carrie, I kind of need this job, you know, to pay rent, and have friends. And to not be a crushing disappointment to my parents.”
“And I sympathize with that, absolutely,” she says, squaring her shoulders. “We appreciate all your hard work during your time at Taskio. The business is experiencing difficult market conditions and is making some structural changes. Unfortunately, your role has been impacted.”
I feel like I just watched in real time as a demon took control of my best friend’s body. I look over my shoulder, checking we’re still alone. “Are you filming this for YouTube?”
She ignores my question. “Your role has been terminated, effective immediately. In recognition of the contributions you’ve made to Taskio, we’re able to offer you a generous compensation package to help you transition to the next stage of your career. You’ll need to return any company property in your possession, and as a reminder of your contract, commercially sensitive information cannot be shared during or after your employment at Taskio.”
I wave my hand in front of her face. “Seriously, Carrie, are you in there? If you can hear me, blink twice.”
“I have to read you the script. Legally.”
“OK, well, that was horrifying. Is there more?”
“That’s basically it,” she admits. “How did I do?”
“Um . . . fine.”
“Did you feel like your distress was taken seriously?”
“Sure.”
“Was my delivery a bit robotic?”
“Kind of.”
“Damn it,” she mutters.
This day is so weird. “Not that I have anything to compare it to, but for what it’s worth, that felt like a textbook firing to me.”
She perks up. “Really?”
“Definitely. Now can we please focus on the fact that I just lost my f***ing job?”
“Right, sorry,” she says, snapping back into action.
“Isn’t there somebody else you could lay off instead? You know, besides me?”
She shakes her head, her blond hair ruffling against her shoulders. “I tried that already. It didn’t work. However, I may have a solution.”
She turns back toward the computer, clicking open the Careers page on the company website. I shift impatiently while she scrolls.
“When the business does layoffs like this,” she explains, turning back to me, “they always freeze hiring. It’s against employment laws, or something.”
“Isn’t it, like, literally in your job description to know this stuff?”
“Zip it,” she orders. “The particulars don’t matter. Bottom line, they can’t make any external hires for a while, so any open job listings need to be filled internally. The only thing is, if I reassign you, you won’t get your redundancy package.”
Copyright © 2026 by Rachel Wood. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
