Page 36 of The Authenticity Clause
The shift in Julian’s expression was a horrifying, split-second transformation. The calm curiosity vanished, replaced by a sharp, cold focus. He stared at Leo, and in his eyes, Leo didn’t see anger. He saw something far, far worse. He saw a scientist watching a beloved hypothesis get disproven in real time. He saw the cold calculation as Julian’s brilliant mind rewound all the data, all their interactions, and re-examined them under this new, harsh light.
Leo’s fumbling interview. His technical incompetence. The near-misses. This little lie was no longer a little lie; it was the thread that, when pulled, unraveled the entire tapestry.
“Scrimshaw,” Julian repeated, his voice low and utterly devoid of emotion. He was looking directly at Leo, but his eyes were blank. The light had gone out. The walls Leo had spent weeks carefully dismantling were back up, not with brick, but with reinforced steel.
“Julian, I can explain,” Leo whispered, a useless, desperate attempt to stop the inevitable.
“You can’t find it,” Julian said, not to Leo, but to Sarah, though his gaze never left Leo’s horrified face, “because it doesn’t exist.”
Each word was a hammer blow, driving the final nail into Leo’s coffin.
Sarah blinked, completely lost. “Doesn’t exist? What do you mean? There must be some mistake—”
“There is no mistake,” Julian said, his voice like ice. He placed his coffee cup on the nearest desk with a soft, final click. Then he turned and walked away. He didn’t run. He didn’t yell. He simply turned his back on Leo and walked toward his office, each step deliberate and devastating.
The dismissal was more painful than any accusation.
Sarah watched him go, then looked back at Leo, the horrible truth finally dawning on her face. She took a step back, as if Leo had suddenly become a stranger. The entire, eerily silent office was now buzzing with whispers. Everyone was staring.
Leo stood there, pinned to the spot by a dozen pairs of eyes, but he didn’t see them. He could only see the closing glass door of Julian’s office, shutting him out. He hadn’t just been discovered. He had been erased.
In the final moment before Julian slid the blinds closed, blocking him from view, Leo saw his expression.
It wasn’t anger. It wasn’t contempt.
It was a complete and utter void, the emptiness of a person who has just realized that everything they believed to be true was a lie. It was the silence after a beautiful world has been destroyed.
Chapter 25: The Climax
The world had dissolved into a low, meaningless hum. Leo could see mouths moving, could see the concerned, pitying faces of his colleagues, but their words were just vibrations in the air, a language he no longer understood. Someone, probably Maya, was touching his arm, a gentle, grounding pressure, but he couldn't feel it. He was a ghost in his own body, watching the scene unfold from a great, cold distance.
There was only one thing in the entire universe that was real: the closed blinds of Julian’s office. A solid, gray barrier. A final, definitive statement.
He didn't know how long he stood there, an unwanted statue in the center of the open-plan office. A minute? An hour? Time had ceased to have meaning. But eventually, some primal, desperate instinct took over. He couldn't leave it like this. He couldn't let the last image Julian had of him be of a liar, a fraud, standing silently in the face of his own deception. He had to try. He had to explain. Even if it was useless, even if it changed nothing, he owed Julian the truth. Not the half-truth of his resume, but the whole, ugly, painful truth of his heart.
He started walking. Each step felt like wading through wet cement. The whispers of his colleagues followed him, a rustling, sibilant tide. He ignored them. He ignored Maya’s soft, worriedcall of his name. He kept his eyes fixed on the gray blinds, his one and only destination.
He reached the glass door and didn't knock. He just opened it and stepped inside.
The office, which had once felt like an intimidating but beautiful sanctuary, now felt like a tomb. The blinds were drawn, plunging the room into a dim, gray twilight. The only light came from the cool glow of Julian’s monitor, casting his face in stark, unforgiving shadows.
Julian was sitting at his desk. He wasn't working. He was just sitting there, perfectly still, his hands folded neatly on the desk in front of him. He looked like one of his bonsai trees—a perfect, sculpted exterior, with a complex, hidden world of pain beneath the surface. He didn't look up when Leo entered. He didn't acknowledge his presence at all. He just stared into the middle distance, his expression a perfect, chilling void.
The silence was a physical weight, pressing down on Leo, crushing the air from his lungs. He had to break it. He had to say something.
“Julian,” he began, his voice a raw, broken thing.
Julian’s eyes moved, a slow, deliberate shift. They focused on Leo, but they were the eyes of a stranger. The warmth, the amusement, the affection that had lived there for weeks—it was all gone. There was nothing left but a cold, flat, analytical gray. It was the look of a scientist observing a failed experiment.
“I…” Leo’s carefully rehearsed confession, the one he had practiced with his cactus, evaporated. He was left with nothing but the raw, unfiltered truth. “I am so, so sorry.”
Julian’s expression didn't change. He said nothing. His silence was a judgment, more damning than any angry words could ever be. He was waiting.
So Leo talked. The words tumbled out of him, a frantic, desperate, disorganized mess. It wasn't an excuse. It was a confession.
“It was never supposed to go this far,” he whispered, his hands twisting together in front of him. “It was just supposed to be a temp job. A few weeks. I was desperate, Julian. My rent was past due, my mom was calling every day, and I just… I felt like such a failure. I saw the ad, and I just wanted a chance, just one chance, to feel like I was good enough, even for a little while.”
He talked about the Scrimshaw Institute, the stupid, made-up name he’d invented in a moment of reckless panic. He talked about the interview, about being so certain he’d failed, about being so shocked when he got the call.
