Sweet Romance14 min read
I Hired Her, She Stayed — Then I Lost and Found Everything
ButterPicks13 views
"I need two people," I said to myself the night I realized my assistant had quit again.
"Why two?" a voice in the room asked.
"It wasn't talking to me," I answered my empty office. "It was just the spreadsheet."
The startup life had taught me how to argue with silence. "Five applicants," I told my phone the next morning, checking the list. "Pick two." Then I met them.
Four of them walked right back out when they saw the place.
"You're not paying real salaries," one man said and left.
"This looks like a shell," another woman said and left.
Only one stayed.
"You're the only one left," I said when she waited with her battered backpack.
She blinked. "I applied. You interviewing me or not?"
"No need." I surprised myself. "You're hired."
"Really?" She smiled like sunshine pushing through blinds.
"What's your name?" I asked.
"Emmalynn Caldwell," she said. "Fresh graduate."
"Younger by three years," I did the math and smiled. "Come on, start tomorrow."
She started tomorrow. She learned the company's state in a week.
"Boss," she asked one afternoon, balancing a stack of contracts, "it's just the two of us here, right?"
"Yes."
"Then if I stay, can I get a raise?"
"Do you deserve one?" I asked.
She laughed. "If I'm not leaving, I'm worth it."
"A week," I said. "Stay a week, don't resign, I'll double your pay."
"And if I stay a year?" she pushed.
"Double again and stock options." I said the words before I knew why my chest tightened.
She flung a grin at me. "Don't break your promise, or you're not a man."
I let her words slide into me for reasons I couldn't explain. "Fine," I said. "If I break it, I'm not a man." Then, because I wanted to be practical, I added, "Today you start. Dinner's on me."
"Hotpot?" she asked.
"Hotpot." I ordered too much meat. We shared stories over spicy soup. I walked her home that night because the city is loud and girls should get home safe.
Her neighborhood smelled different from my glass-and-steel world: narrow alleys, public kitchens, a man on a stool mending shoes. When we reached the stairwell someone reached out.
"Hey," a wrinkled hand landed on her shoulder.
"Ah!" Her voice cut through the alley, thin with fear.
I don't like words like "protect" because they pull a man into a shape he didn't expect to fit. But I turned and hit the old man. "You lecher," I said, "you should be ashamed."
He shrank like paper. Neighbors called him a loner. He had a habit. We left with him muttering.
After that night I told her, "Come stay at my place until you find something better."
She looked at me as if weighing a secret. "Where will you sleep?"
"In the office," I lied.
"You're the boss," she teased. "You can't tell your employee to live in your apartment."
"Then I'm giving you the apartment," I said.
I did. I moved into a cot in the office. She cooked the first night, and her food tasted like careful work and sunshine. I washed the dishes and, embarrassingly, found I liked it.
"You cook well," I told her.
"You pay well," she answered. "So of course I do."
The office grew. The two of us became three, then five. The company stopped being a rumor people mocked. It made money. She learned to handle clients, attend the long dinners, dodge men with hands that stretched too far.
"Don't worry," I told her when I had to step back from a table and tell a client, "this is Emmalynn, she knows what she's doing."
"Usually, men would do that," someone commented once, surprised.
"Not here," I said. "Not anymore."
A year passed and she still worked. One day I asked, "Have you ever thought about leaving?"
"Are you firing me?" she snapped, half laughing.
"Why would I fire you?" I smiled.
"Because then I wouldn't get the double pay and the stock options," she said.
"I won't fire you," I said. "Your work's good. How much stock do you want?"
She blinked. "I don't need much. 0.5 percent?"
"Fifty percent?" I played dumb.
"No, point five," she said, like she was checking the weight of the air.
"You're satisfied," I said, genuinely amazed. "Okay. 0.5 it is."
I called a lawyer and signed a 0.5 percent stock certificate and handed it to her like it was a child's medal. But there was another certificate. I wrote another in secret—ten percent—and locked it in my safe with the single key in my pocket.
She held the small paper like it was a fragile bird. "Thank you," she said, surprised and almost embarrassed.
I felt something shift then—like a hidden door opening. "Keep working," I said.
Years crawled and then surged. We expanded offices. We bought two apartments and I moved her into one, and myself into the other, not because I had to but because I wanted her close enough to steal small comforts.
"You're wasting a two-hundred-square-meter apartment on me," she said, arranging cushions.
"Not wasting. It's mine to waste."
"You only gave me the nicer one because you want me to take care of you," she teased.
"Exactly," I said. "So be a good employee."
In private, the truth was smaller and truer. She cooked and I washed. She plotted marketing ideas and I stared, pretending to be useful. She saved her money like a cat hides toys—quiet and steady. She told me once her plan: buy a small place in the city for her parents.
"You're saving for your parents?" I asked.
"Of course," she said. "They did a lot."
I started helping in ridiculous ways—buying groceries, replacing a broken faucet, pretending to be weak and needy so she wouldn't refuse.
"I think you're planning to be a big soft man," she said.
"I'll try," I answered.
By year seven we were not just a company and not just two people. We had offices, clients who mattered, and a balance sheet that read like progress.
My body did not keep up.
"Henri," the doctor said once, reading a sheet with a disapproving mouth, "you need rest."
"Rest is a four-letter word," I told him.
"Not a good one," he replied.
I kept working. I kept saying yes. I kept ignoring the jittering in my body that made mornings a negotiation.
Then, unexpectedly, my friend Annika Abe came back from overseas. Annika and I had known each other since we were young—she lent me a million when everything was empty and foolish. Her parents were old friends with mine. To them, a debt shouldn't stay unpaid in simple currency; sometimes it needed a marriage as collateral.
"Henri," my father Gustaf Novikov said the day Annika arrived, "you owe them. Marry her."
"I never promised marriage," I said.
"They helped you. It's proper," my mother Joann Popov said. "You should be grateful."
"Grateful does not mean married," I told them. "I won't marry just because of money."
"We're simply asking you to be reasonable," my father said, and then his chest hurt. He fainted—an argument machine that bought his heart trouble.
Everything changed after a hospital alarm and a few whispered apologies. My parents wanted me to fix things.
Annika said she would cooperate with a fake engagement. "Henri," she said quietly, sitting on the edge of a couch in my apartment, "we can help each other. A year. Say yes."
"I don't want an act," I told her. "But I'll consider it to settle family."
She moved into the guest room and wore clothes that looked chosen to attract. She smiled at the wrong time and leaned closer than I liked. "We just settle this," she kept saying.
When the wheels of arrangement rolled, my father smiled. He came home from the hospital with the soft look of a man who had won something borrowed.
I hated how that made me feel. Proud? Ashamed? Both? None of it felt like mine.
Emmalynn was different. The day I brought Annika home to drop off some books, I saw Emmalynn sitting on the stairs talking with a man—Declan Yoshida—laughing like a real laugh. A stupid, sharp pang struck my chest.
"Are you seeing someone?" I asked later, more cold than I intended.
"No," she said, but something in her face was distant.
After the engagement rumors grew, Emmalynn kept her distance. She took leave and went home to see her family. She called once, neat and careful with answers.
"Where are my cufflinks?" I asked on the phone, playing an old game.
"In the third drawer," she replied. "Henri, I have to go. My mother needs me."
I heard her close the door to the world and for the first time realized how tied she was to the rhythm of my life.
When I finally understood I loved her, it was ugly, loud, and panicked.
"Don't see other men," I said to her one night in a voice I barely recognized.
"Don't tell me what to do," she answered.
"You left me," I said, more than once.
"I quit," she muttered, handing me a resignation letter like a white flag. "You are impossible."
I needed her. I hated myself for needing her.
I told Annika I wasn't interested in going further. She didn't take it well.
"If you refuse me, I'll take what I deserve," she said in my office, and the words were sharp.
"What do you want?" I demanded.
"Forty percent," she said. "You sign, or I make trouble."
She believed pressure would force me to sign. She started telling people in the office things, insinuating that I had treated her badly, that I was unstable. She wanted to make the company pay for my rejection.
"I won't allow this," Emmalynn said, stepping into the sudden cold.
"Stay out of it," I told her.
She didn't leave.
The vice of pressure tightened my chest until I vomited blood. I ended up in hospital, the irony of a man who had refused rest being carried to rest like a child.
Annika visited the ward like a queen who owns the world. In public she was polished; in private she was a blade.
On the day the board was due to decide something small and administrative, Annika stormed into my office and demanded her share loudly.
"I want forty percent," she announced. "This is fair."
"You have no right to the company," Emmalynn said.
"You can't keep describing me as greedy in front of the team," Annika sneered.
"Henri," she said softly, "you should choose."
Then she raised her voice. "If you don't sign, I'll tell everyone about your 'inability'—that you are not a proper man."
"Watch your mouth," I said, but the wound the words reopened was the oldest.
Emmalynn looked as if someone had taken a knife to her chest. "Don't you dare," she said. "You don't get to hurt him like that."
Annika laughed. "He owes me."
"I will pay you," Emmalynn said suddenly.
"You will what?" Annika's eyes flicked with calculation.
"I will settle this," Emmalynn said. "But not with the company."
The following scene was not in any script.
We set a meeting for the whole staff under the pretense of an update. People shuffled in, coffee in hand. Phones buzzed. The room was full: teammates we'd recruited from day three, investors who had seen us sweat, the receptionist who had watched my bad jokes, and family members—my parents included—who always thought they knew the ending to novels.
"Why are we here?" a junior manager whispered to the woman beside him.
"It's an update," someone replied.
"Okay," the HR director said, looking at me. "What's on the agenda, Henri?"
"I want to clear the air," I said.
Annika stood near the far wall, arms folded like she owned the space. She had come in with a defiant light. "I expect a settlement," she said loudly.
"First," I said, "who here has been told that I am incapable in private life?"
I watched heads twitch. "You can't start like that," the director murmured.
"Watch me," I said.
Then Emmalynn did something I hadn't seen before. She walked to the front, holding a thin file.
"Everyone," she said, voice steady. "I have something to show you."
She set a laptop on the table. On the screen appeared messages, emails, receipts, a photo album. There were documented attempts by Annika to extort shares, screenshots where she demanded compensation with threats to 'ruin' reputation, invoices for lavish overseas parties inconsistent with her claims of need, and messages where she admitted the arrangement was purely transactional.
"These," Emmalynn said, "are not things you do to a company you respect. These are the things you do when you think you can take what you want."
Annika's face changed. She hadn't expected exposure. "You can't show that!" she cried. "Those are private!"
"Are they private when used to blackmail?" Emmalynn shot back.
"That's defamation," Annika said, faltering.
"Be quiet," our CFO said. "We need facts."
Emmalynn clicked photos. One by one the images showed Annika at parties overseas, indiscriminate and deliberate, different men, different hotels, a life she had tried to hide while leaning on our company's goodwill.
The room made a sound like a crowd folding in on itself.
"What is this?" Gustaf demanded, his face white. "Annika, is this true?"
Annika's mask slipped. There was a flash of something like fear. "It's none of your business," she tried.
"My business," I said, and I felt the room slow like a camera in film. "You asked for marriage as payment. You demanded shares. You threatened to destroy a woman who has been here with me since day one. You came to my hospital and used my weakness as leverage."
Faces turned. Phones came out. Fingers typed. People recorded. I hadn't planned for lightbulbs to flicker on cameras, but the modern audience makes its own stage.
"Annika," Emmalynn said, and the voice held more than I expected, "you came here with threats. You told lies and tried to bribe away what Emmalynn had earned. This is not a negotiation. It's blackmail. We can handle the legal side, but first we need to make sure everyone knows the truth."
Annika's composure collapsed into denial. "You only show parts," she shouted. "You don't know me."
"Then tell us," I said.
"I—" She stammered. Her face flushed. Then, like a dam that had held only pressure, she started to speak the wrong lines.
"I did—some things. But he owes me, we had an agreement, he promised—"
"Promise? A promise is not a threat," Emmalynn said. "When you threatened to smear a woman who has worked for this company for years unless she gave you control, is that a promise?"
"You're lying," Annika spat, now pale.
A wave of murmurs rolled through the assembled crowd.
"Look at this," Emmalynn said, and she turned the screen to show a thread of messages where Annika had written, "Sign and I'll be quiet," and, "Forty percent or I make a scene."
"That's—" the HR director said.
"And look at this," I said, adding with a small, private flare, "and here are invoices for luxurious trips you claimed as business costs."
People whispered "What?" "No way." "She did that?"
Annika's breathing sped. "This is a setup," she said. "You can't do this to me."
"Why?" an investor asked from the back. "Because you've manipulated our founder?"
"No," Annika sobbed. "Not like that."
At that moment my father, Gustaf, who had been standing in the doorway with hands clenched as if in prayer, stepped forward.
"Annika," he said, voice trembling but clear, "we helped you once because you were my friend's daughter. We never meant to trade our son's life."
"Father!" Annika cried, a raw betrayal in her face.
"You're asking for forty percent of a company you didn't build," my mother Joann said, measured and cold. "And you threatened our daughter-in-law-to-be and humiliated a girl who has been loyal. You are asking too much."
People were taking photos. Some were clapping slowly, a noise of approval for a truth revealed. Some looked stunned into silence. A few whispered to colleagues about legal counsel.
Annika's reactions changed like light on a face: arrogance—>shock—>rage—>denial—>frantic pleading.
"This is injustice!" she screamed. "You—he—he owes me. Pay me! Pay me now or I sue!"
"Pay you?" a manager echoed. "For threatening to destroy someone's livelihood? For blackmail?"
"I will go to court," Annika said, eyes wet.
"Go to court," I said, and the words were quieter than the room. "But do you understand what everyone here saw?"
"It was private!" she wailed.
"It was threats," Emmalynn said. "And now everyone knows."
A woman in the back, a product designer who had started with us when we were three people, stood up.
"I worked with Emmalynn for five years," she said. "She picked me up when I slept under a desk. She didn't owe you anything."
Another voice: "You used threats. Shame on you."
"You're trying to take what isn't yours," our legal counsel said, stepping forward. "We can resolve this without public turmoil, or we can proceed. But the board will not sign over control because someone threatened an employee."
Annika sank into a chair. Her breaths came shallow.
"Look at everyone," my mother said softly. "Your world is smaller now."
Several people recorded the moment as proof. Some snapped photos. Social media would have its feed in minutes. In a short time the humiliation would go beyond the office. People around us—partners, suppliers—had already begun to stare.
Annika's face went white. She tried to compose herself. She reached for a voice of power.
"I made sacrifices," she whispered.
"So did she," Emmalynn answered. "She never asked for half the company. She asked for 0.5 percent once. She stayed. She cooked meals. She gave everything."
Annika shook. "You—" she said again, then nothing.
Her reaction finished: she sobbed, then tried to stand, then sat back down, defeated. People whispered. Someone offered water. No one applauded anymore. The room had replaced its curiosity with a kind of public moral verdict.
"This is the end of it," I said. "If you want to pursue legal action, do it. If you ask for sympathy after threats, you won't get it here."
She tried to bluster one last time. "You'll regret this."
"Annika," my father said, firm as a judge, "we did our part for you. You chose to threaten my son and our people. That choice has consequences."
She left that day with a face unreadable, clutching a purse. People watched her go like a play's final act. Some took videos. Someone later posted the clip to a closed chat. The hum was immediate: "He stood up for his team." "She tried to blackmail him." "Justice."
The punishment was public. Her reaction had changed—swagger to shock to denial to collapse. The crowd had watched and reacted: surprise, whisper, recording, then disapproval. That met the criteria of punishment that didn't involve law but involved exposure, loss of face, and emotional collapse under public gaze.
Days later, she tried one more time outside the hospital. I met her with a quiet folder. Inside were photos I had never shown in the boardroom—evidence that could ruin but did not need to. I was not cruel. I was tired.
"Pay me fifteen million," Annika demanded, voice thin with wounded pride.
"No," I said.
"You will pay," she insisted. "You can't let me go."
Emmalynn was there, and she surprised me again. She slid a check across the table—fifteen million, no questions, no public scene.
"I will not let her destroy us," she said.
Annika looked at the paper, eyes calculating, then at Emmalynn. There was a flicker—humiliation and then something like relief for the easy exit. She took the check as if taking a bribe, then left with a last look at me.
Later, when the office calmed, I found the other stock certificate—the ten percent I'd hidden. I made another list and changed my plans.
"You're not just my employee," I told Emmalynn one evening in the now-familiar kitchen, "you are my partner in every way."
She laughed, startled. "You can't just say that and then leave it."
I drew the safe key and a lawyer. One certificate said 0.5 percent. The other said 51 percent.
"I want you to control things," I told her. "I want you to be the one who decides what this company becomes."
She took the paper like it had weight and light. She cried a little, which made me messier than I had planned.
"I love you," I said quietly.
"I know," she answered, and it was not a fevered confession but a calm like sunrise. "From the time you hit that lecher."
We married quietly. We registered our marriage without a big ceremony because she told me once she didn't need one. We had a child, a son, who fit right into the company one day when he was six months old and crawled under the desk.
I tried to be better. I tried to sleep when the doctors said I should. I tried to manage my temper.
On our son's first birthday I broke my plans.
"She never asked for a wedding," I told the event planner, who looked pale and excited in equal measure. "Too bad."
We planned two hundred tables. I invited every investor, every friend, and every long-suffering supplier. We had a banquet hall full of people who had seen us at our worst and our slow rise.
"Henri," Emmalynn whispered that day, standing in a dress that made her look like an honest star, "you sure we need all this?"
"We need to show the world you belong to the company," I said. "And you'll be the one who holds it."
At the ceremony I handed her a certificate—51 percent—signed, notarized, and placed into a leather folder.
"And the rest?" someone asked.
"Forty-nine percent is for our son, as stewardship," I said. "We will be the guardians."
She cried then, full and warm and real. "You idiot," she said into my ear. "You did all this because you finally felt something."
"No," I answered. "I did it because I was late. But better late than never."
Later, when we stood in front of our friends, in front of the people who had watched a girl stay through all the nights, I said, "Emmalynn, you are the person who never left. I am the man who figured that out too late. I'm sorry."
She put her hand on mine. "You learned," she said simply.
That felt like justice for my foolish heart.
We buried the old stories like old shoes, not for their shame but for their oldness. We built a life that felt like a warm room in winter. Emmalynn ran the company. I learned to be her partner in small, annoying daily things.
When people asked how it had happened, she would laugh and say, "He hit a bad man for me on the stairs. Then he paid for a hotpot."
It was small and ridiculous and true. We grew up in the space between those two acts.
The End
— Thank you for reading —