The Night I Left, He Turned Grey

At the meeting, Leila Jennings witnessed the intimidating authority of a man in power.

Nathaniel Cole simply placed the tender proposal on the table. His gaze darkened, and without saying a word, he silenced the room. The people below him didn’t dare to breathe too loudly.

After the proposal, with its errors, was passed around, everyone broke out in a cold sweat. They truly hadn’t noticed such minor mistakes.

Nathaniel Cole said, "If you’re not paying attention now, you’ll be forced to compare it word by word when the audit comes."

"President Cole, we’ll go and revise it immediately."

"Revise it here." Nathaniel Cole tapped his bent fingers on the table again. The sound was like a hammer blow to everyone’s heart, leaving them resentful but silent.

Nathaniel Cole watched them make the corrections. Leila and the other secretaries had to wait by the side, ever observant. When President Cole glanced at his watch, they had to hurry the team along. When he loosened his tie, they had to bring him water.

Leila wasn’t accustomed to this yet, so she watched from the side the entire time. At one point, she noticed a lingering issue in someone’s revised content and couldn’t help but mention it.

Instantly, all eyes turned to her.

Nathaniel Cole lifted his chin slightly. "What is it?"

"It’s impossible to derive this result from this data. And this data... doesn’t seem right, does it?" As soon as Leila finished, someone to the side snapped at her, asking what she could possibly know. He insisted that was the number registered in the database.

Leila said, "Then the database is wrong."

This implied that someone had falsified the records, which had much larger ramifications.

Everyone knew that President Cole had been investigating this very issue in recent years.

"Jennings, you just came up from administration. How many days have you been a secretary? Even Caine and Gwen wouldn’t dare to criticize the proposal, yet you..."

"Hm?" A sharp glance from Nathaniel Cole shut the man up instantly, though he continued to mutter about what a mere secretary like Leila could possibly know.

"What does she know?" Nathaniel Cole’s gaze swept over them one by one. "Every single error in that document was circled by Leila Jennings. And you have the nerve to question her!"

Everyone was shocked.

Leila thought, ’This is bad. Now I’m really going to be a target.’

"Why are you staring at her? Go investigate!" Nathaniel Cole stood up. "I want the results before the end of the day."

As Nathaniel Cole passed by Leila, he said, "Keep up."

Back in the conference room, someone asked in confusion, "Who exactly is this Jennings? President Cole keeps her by his side and trusts her this much."

"Who knows? Renee Scott was the one who hired her. She was a nobody in administration for four years, and then she suddenly popped up out of nowhere."

"Don’t tell me she’s... with President Cole..."

"Manager, watch your words," Caine kindly reminded him. "Jennings is married, and President Cole is single. Speculation like that can ruin someone."

They walked out.

Gwen said in surprise, "Are Jennings and I in the same line of work? She seems more like a tech person."

Caine shrugged slightly. "I don’t know. Maybe you can ask Zachary."

"Right, Zachary looks like he knows everything," Gwen nodded seriously.

Back in the office, they saw that Leila had a new phone and was happy about it, only to realize it wasn’t a gift from President Cole.

"Why aren’t you using the one President Cole gave you? It has a whole terabyte."

Leila replied, "I don’t need that much storage."

The new phone she bought was a 512GB model she’d chosen specifically, which felt like more than enough.

The phone was still transferring data. There were tons of pictures, all of meals Leila had cooked herself.

Gwen watched from the side, her mouth watering.

"Jennings, did you make all of this?"

Leila stared at the pictures on the screen and nodded.

She had made every dish according to Sean Sinclair’s tastes. She would send him a picture every time she finished cooking.

She had never deleted any of them.

Four years of breakfasts and dinners. Nearly four thousand photos.

Suddenly, she hit pause.

"What’s wrong?" Gwen asked.

"These photos are useless now." Leila canceled the transfer and started deleting things from her old phone.

The longest chat history: Sean Sinclair.

The most numerous photos: meals made for Sean Sinclair.

The contacts in her address book were almost all related to Sean Sinclair.

Other than that, there was nothing much.

There was a lot on the phone, yet not so much. But all of it was related to Sean Sinclair. There was very little that was related to herself.

Leila decided not to transfer anything else. She turned off the old phone and put it in a drawer.

On her new phone, she added Caine, Gwen, and Zachary as contacts and joined two group chats.

[President Cole’s Elite Secretary Squad], a five-person work group.

[What is Cole 4? (4)], a four-person group without the big boss.

Caine said there had originally been only three of them—her, Gwen, and Zachary—and the group name had been different. They changed it right before adding her.

Leila looked at the name, which she read as "What is Cole for?", and almost couldn’t hold back her laughter.

’My colleagues are fun.’

’It’s a different kind of fun from working with experimental data. That fun came with the joy of self-fulfillment. This fun was a pure part of life.’

Gwen reminded her, "Shh, hide it well. Don’t let President Cole see."

Caine, on the other hand, said, "You’re his subordinate, so remember to add the boss on WeChat. As for a template for the greeting, do you want me to give you..."

She watched as Leila added him in a second.

"..." Caine was speechless for a moment. "You’re certainly a woman of action."

Leila had so little experience dealing with people that she didn’t know there were so many unwritten rules. She’d already sent the request.

Caine said, "Well, President Cole probably won’t acc—"

Leila’s phone screen lit up.

[Summit]: I have accepted your friend request. We can start chatting now.

Caine lightly slapped her own mouth, then quickly grabbed a mirror to check if she’d smudged her makeup.

Now, she had the same question.

’Who on earth is this Jennings?’

’Stellaxis Technologies is Lantech’s rival, which makes it The Cole Group’s rival. Leila Jennings is the wife of the rival company’s president. Why is President Cole paying so much attention to President Sinclair’s wife?’

’Good old-fashioned corporate warfare?’

’Or does President Cole have... a special fetish?’

Caine shook her head, trying to quickly banish those thoughts.

Leila was looking at her chat window with Nathaniel Cole. The indicator on the other end kept showing that he was typing.

Leila: [President Cole?]

In an instant, the "typing..." indicator vanished.

Nathaniel Cole never replied.

Just as Leila was about to turn off her phone, a message came in from Sean Sinclair. He reminded her to pick up his custom-made suit tonight. He needed it for the tech expo next week, which was only a few days away.

He didn’t mention a single word about the evening’s reception.

Leila didn’t mention it either. She just said okay, like she always did, and then ordered a courier.

The tailor shop refused to hand the suit over to a courier, worried something might happen to it in transit. Either one of their own staff had to deliver it, or Leila had to pick it up in person, as she had done before.

Leila chose to have them deliver it. She had forgotten that the shop didn’t have Sean’s home address, so the suit was sent to his company.

Before the workday was even over, Sean Sinclair called.

"Why didn’t you deliver the suit?"

"It wouldn’t be appropriate for me to show up at your company," Leila said, giving an excuse that Sean would seemingly find hard to refute.

But Sean retorted, "Didn’t you used to bring me dinner all the time?"

Leila recalled a time when she had delivered dinner and inadvertently overheard the receptionists at Stellaxis Technologies talking about her.

"President Sinclair’s housekeeper is here with dinner again. It always smells so good. I wonder where he found her."

"Don’t even think about it. The good housekeepers aren’t available on the open market."

"But President Sinclair’s housekeeper is so young. She doesn’t really look like one, does she?"

"But President Sinclair said..."

She had walked too far away to hear the rest and hadn’t thought much of it at the time.