Page 96 of The Proving Ground

“I know you told the truth, but it’s about credibility. It’s about trust. They’ve caught you in a lie and we need to—”

“What lie? I didn’t lie. I was never asked about any relationship. Plus, I thought maybe they knew about it because Patrick was the one who recommended me to the company as an ethicist for the project. I had no idea he had left out that we were dating.”

McEvoy cleared his throat and I looked over at him.

“What?” I asked.

“She’s sort of right,” he said. “Her employment application is in the materials she gave us, and I don’t remember any question about relationships with other employees of the company.”

“Look, we’re talking about semantics here,” I said, looking back at Naomi. “It doesn’t matter if you didn’t lie on the application. You had a relationship your employer should have been told about. And the whole thing doubles down because you were supposed to be the conscience of ethical programming and behavior, and now it looks like you were hiding what many would say was an unethical relationship with a fellow employee below you in the corporate hierarchy. So, think, Naomi. Is there anything we can go back into court with tomorrow that helps us?”

Naomi wiped her cheeks and her nose with the tissue and looked at me.

“I told you not to do this,” she said. “I didn’t want to testify.”

“Well, maybe if you’d told me about Patrick May, I wouldn’t have asked you to,” I countered.

“That lawyer made it sound like I was his boss. I wasn’t. He may have been below me in the corporate hierarchy. But he was in the coding lab and I almost never even walked in there. He didn’t work for me directly and I never once told him what to do.”

“All right, that’s good. We can use that. Can you think of anybody else at work who knew about the relationship?”

“No, we never flaunted it. We never even took breaks together.”

“Well, that’s not good. It looks like you were trying to hide that you were together.”

“We weren’t. My office was in administration, he was in the lab. It was never the twain shall meet. Until after work.”

“Were you living together?”

“No. I had my daughter at home. This was before she went to USF.”

“Well, when the two of you were together and away from work, did you talk about work? Did he tell you about some of the training of Clair that was alarming you?”

“Well, yes. We did. How could we not talk about work? Is that good or bad?”

“It could be good. I don’t know yet. When was the last time you had contact with Patrick May?”

“Contact? You mean like physical contact?”

“When was the last time you met or communicated with him?”

“That would have been on his birthday, back in August. We were broken up by then but I texted him. He didn’t reply.”

“Any idea at all why he decided to tell the company about your relationship?”

“How do you know he did?”

“You said nobody knew about it. Was there somebody else?”

“No. No one.”

“Then it was him. Could they have had something on him that forced him to reveal the relationship?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Well, I’m going to need you to think about that tonight.”

“Am I testifying tomorrow?”