Two months ago I fucked up, and now I’m scared for my life.
I’m the CEO of a startup that has been getting some clout in my industry. I started this company with my co-founder, Matt. His girlfriend, Paulina, joined us shortly after as our first employee in Finance. We started this whole entrepreneurial journey in 2019, and everything has been going great so far. Well, company-wise at least. We have significant investments, are growing every month, and are slowly becoming profitable.
I’m a great CEO, but as a friend, I’m a complete disappointment. Paulina and I have spent countless late-night sessions together working on investor presentations and going over excel sheets. And two months ago, it happened. We were overworked, but there was no chance of getting some rest, as we had an incredibly important presentation the next morning and were pumped with adrenaline. One thing leads to the other and we end up spending the night together. We swore to never lose a word over it, and up until last week, I believed that this was the case.
However, this week on Tuesday Matt started to suddenly behave very differently. At first, there were only small cues. Matt started avoiding me at work, as he kept re-scheduling our meetings or switching to written communication instead of just calling through or coming by my office, as he usually did. In the beginning, I thought that he might be stressed, as we had a board meeting coming up at the end of the week which he was preparing with me, but I quickly realized that there was more to it. He and Paulina suddenly started working from home, which was quite unusual for them. Even though our employees have complete flexibility about working from home policies, Matt wasn’t a big fan of remote collaboration and preferred coming to the office.
Yesterday, on Friday, however, things got weird. Out of guilt, I avoided contact with Paulina as much as possible, but I needed to get some updated numbers from her for our board meeting - after all, I’m still the CEO, the one who gets shit from the investors if I don’t know the latest performance numbers. I wrote her at 9 am, but Paulina didn’t respond for hours. Normally she would at least get back to me with a short message, saying that she is busy right now. But I got no answer at all - until 3 pm when I got a message saying “Leave me alone. We messed up. Quarterly numbers won’t kill the company, but me telling him will kill more than just the business”. “What do you mean??”, I responded immediately. And with that, Paulina’s activity status turned to offline.
My stomach turned upside down. “Did she tell him? Is that why he keeps ignoring me?”, my thoughts were going back and forth. I called Paulina, but she didn’t respond. I tried calling Matt, I needed to know whether she told him already. After ringing twice, I heard Matt’s voice. “Hi, I’m currently not available, just leave a message and I will call right back as soon as I can”, his mailbox answered. I called again, and this time the call went directly into the mailbox. “Fuck”, I thought as I hung up the phone, “this fucker turned off his phone”. My heart started racing, as a notification sound caught me by surprise. A new message from Matt’s email account.
Hi! I’m currently in a meeting, what’s up? Best, Matt
I checked our shared calendar. There indeed was a private appointment in Matt’s calendar right now, which was weird, as we never mark our appointments as private. 3 pm until 8 pm. He definitely would have told me, if he had a three hour long meeting on a Friday afternoon. “Calm down, this is just a big coincidence paired with Paulina’s guilt trip”, I said to myself. But it still left an unpleasant aftertaste, that Matt would take a whole Friday afternoon off, right the week before an important board meeting. I decided to call it a day and to head to a local bar in order to get rid of the thoughts around Matt and Paulina and to relax.
I woke up today with a massive headache. The last thing I remembered was ordering my fourth beer when some dude approached me with a bottle of gin, after that I’m blank. But luckily, a lot of networking events and birthdays of friends that I only could participate in by making sure to compensate for my lack of working hours by working on Sundays, taught me some tricks when it comes to counteracting a hangover. So it wasn’t too late in the morning before I was finishing scraping the numbers for the board presentation myself in the office when Matt suddenly entered the building. “Ah, back in person?”, I asked him a pretty redundant question, as I saw him standing in front of my desk. I was quite surprised, to be honest, normally I wouldn’t even come to the office on a Saturday and the entire floor was empty besides me, but I had to finish this stupid presentation. No answer from Matt. He sat down at his desk, took his laptop out of his backpack, and started plugging it into the docking station when I saw a tear running down his face.
“Matt? What’s wrong?”, I asked, now more vehemently. “Now you care about me? Now that I had to do all of this?”, Matt responded. Before I could ask what he meant, he ran out of the office in direction of the parking lot, leaving his laptop and backpack open. I was contemplating following him, but something told me not to. Instead, I watched Matt from my desk through the office window as he was approaching his old Toyota. But there was something odd. He was approaching his trunk and… there was something inside. Something large. In a plastic bag? And did he just turn around and smile directly in my direction? I could be wrong, though, as our office was on the second floor and this might have been some sort of optical illusion. As Matt drove off, I was unsure what to do next. Call the police? On my best friend, without any evidence of something actually being wrong? No way. I suddenly felt a bit dizzy again, as I startled from my seat hearing my phone fall down. I must have pushed it over the edge of the desk with my elbow as I was lost in my train of thought.
And suddenly it came to my mind: Matt left his laptop open. Matt, our CTO, who covers his laptop AND smartphone camera, uses VPN even for regular online browsing and does not use standard instant messaging apps because of security reasons, left his laptop unlocked on his desk. I couldn’t resist checking the device. I know, it’s immoral to invade his privacy like that, but so is sleeping with his girlfriend. Paulina. I almost puked as I checked his open files. The seemingly boring slideshow titled “Board Meeting” was filled with horrific images of Paulina covered in blood. I couldn’t identify whether she was still alive or not. Maybe I wasn’t wrong after all. “You bastard!”, I screamed out loud. I checked the laptop for any trace where he might have gone, anything that might allow me to find Matt. Maybe some evidence that would allow me to believe that Paulina is still alive.
And suddenly I froze, as I opened the folder “Iceland 2019”. That wasn’t Matt’s laptop, he has never been to Iceland. I was staring at images from my vacations a few years ago. That was my private laptop, which I was only using at home for non-work related stuff. I kept staring at my laptop in disbelief. I completely lost any track of time when I suddenly heard a loud but somewhat subdued voice. “We know what you did, Sir. Please come out of the building with your hands up right now, it’s over”, the voice screamed. I snapped back to reality and crawled towards the windows. A dozen of police cars and a helicopter were surrounding the main entrance of our office building. Fuck.
I heard my phone vibrating on my desk. Matt. “Dude, what the fuck is this game that you are playing?”, I shouted at him, “I’m sorry, okay dude? But did you really have to kill her?!” Matt didn’t seem to understand a word of what I was saying as he responded: “What are you talking about? Killing whom? Did you drink last night? I just wanted to let you know that I’m back from my travels to Germany. I just landed and had to call you immediately, we got the deal with the corporate. We will soon get an official offer from them to acquire our company. I am taking a cab home right now, I can’t wait to tell Paulina the great news.” I hung up. I suddenly could think a hundred times more clearly again, as if suddenly sobering up. As if the cocktail of pills I took in order to be able to at least be a tiny bit productive today suddenly potentiated into the most effective remedy on earth.
Matt barely responded and didn’t come to the office because he was traveling to Germany for the past week. Matt couldn’t have been in the office today. But who was then? Who brought this laptop here? My laptop. Was there even anyone besides me inside of this building today? And how the hell do I explain the dozens of officers outside that I didn’t kill Paulina?
I feel like I’m going crazy. I’m posting this for my own sanity. These might be the last sentences that I write. I would never harm Paulina, you have to believe me! I … love her. Wish me luck.