Untitled, 2018

Chapter 71: Why I Hate Mondays

Two Days Later, New Year's Eve, Riti
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I had checked the news frantically on my phone, and once the celebrity couple had been revealed to not be Jimin, I closed my eyes and nodded. What I'd had faith in had pulled through, and I felt some amount of pride swell up at both myself and Baek Hee. It was a risky gamble but her conscience did pull through finally.
How heartless could someone in love possibly be– especially someone Jimin had liked? I think we could have gotten along if we'd met in more normal circumstances, perhaps.

I smiled staring at my phone and at the news, despite the situation I was currently in. My phone suddenly rang, and Dr. Kang, who was staring at me, motioned at me to go ahead and take the call. I cleared my throat softly and answered, "H-Hello?"

I heard a relieved sigh from the other side of the phone. "Riti."
I was going to gasp but my breath hitched and I brought my voice to a whisper. "Ji– um, I can't believe I'm saying this right now but... can I call you later?"
"Um? What are you...?"
"I'm in the middle of a meeting. I'll be done in an hour or so."
I heard him giggle, "After a week and a half this is the treatment I get? Fine, I'm just glad I could hear your voice. Call me, please." He hung up, and a small smile slipped from me. But my face quickly straightened out again, and finally the door in front of me opened, and Wang invited me in with Kang.

She had just been cleaning up the room for the three of us to sit in, and I could tell that I was in some serious trouble for some reason. Now, as for reasons for being mad at me: there were plenty. I just wracked my brain to figure out exactly what they'd found out I'd been up to. Was it because of me disappearing randomly? Skipping work sometimes last week? Hanna...?

Dr. Wang spoke first, because Kang seemed hesitant to do so. "Riti... we're almost at the end of this little internship with you but we're a little troubled."
My smile sunk. Why were they looking so upset? If we parted on bad terms... this whole quarter could go to waste. I might not get their recommendations or future opportunities. I gulped and waited.

"We know your personal life is your personal life but Hanna actually let us know about something troubling recently. According to her you've been neglecting your duties as a third party and getting cozy with the BigHit team."
I scrunched my brows. "But Dr. Kang said it was fine to maintain a personal relationship with Bangtan..."
They glanced at each other. "We heard that you've been getting too comfortable with upper management at BigHit and another media companies... and that you've been manipulating the data we've been accumulating and leaking them."

I blinked. And blinked a few more times. "I'm sorry, did you say that Hanna said this?"
"Yes. I... double-checked our data with the notes and it's very clear that it's been completely fabricated in a lot of places... by you. Hanna, could you come out here for a second?"

Hanna timidly stepped out from the back and stood next to Wang. I stared at her, trying to discern what was going through her mind, but she was stone-faced. Turn around for one moment, and you get stabbed in the back somewhere else. And to think I'd been holding off on snitching because I was scared for her, too. I sighed and shook my head, disappointed.

"Mateo is on his way too," Wang said. "This is a group issue we need to resolve together. Hanna was working on checking old files since I asked her to check up on your and Mateo's finished work because she's continuing her internship this year, and she reported this to me. Did you change the data on the interview vitals files, Riti?"

Think fast, think fast.

"I-I did." Kang breathed in sharply, and Wang's lips pursed into a tight line. "I did it because a member of the team was sending our raw data to your competitor's lab while changing the files in our database before they could get processed by Kang and me." I looked at Hanna.

"I didn't know how to say this before but I probably should have mentioned it as soon as I recovered the missing files. Dr. Wang, do you remember when I had mentioned that files had gone missing? The ones that we saw were not the original. Hanna had swapped them and sent the originals to the other lab. I wanted to recover them so I waited to say something until I could get my hands on the originals. But I wanted data to stop leaking so I started changing our files too."

"That's not true!" Hanna squawked indignantly.

"You can't let her continue as a researcher in the group! She's been leaking your dat and manipulating you. Now she's trying to pin it on me!" I raised my voice too.

"Calm down! Both of you." Wang said, looking exhausted. "If this is true then why are you just informing us of this now, Riti?"
"I... was scared, Dr. Wang. And I wanted to retrieve the data first. I was afraid she would delete the files if I confronted her and that weeks of work would be lost."
"I don't know what she's talking about, Dr. Wang! I've been helping you this whole time. Please believe me." Hanna interjected.

I pulled my laptop out and turned it to show them the screen. "But look! I managed to get her extra email address too. This is how I found out where the leaking files were going."
I tried to login to the account, but it returned an error message saying that the email account did not exist.

Oh... shit.