"Your attitude was the humiliation."
"Everyone in that conference room saw it. You think they're stupid?"
I stopped responding.
Everything she was saying, I'd heard a thousand times in my last life.
Back then, I'd fought her on it. Told her I was looking out for the company. Told her his program genuinely had problems. As a co-founder, I couldn't just sit back and watch a product riddled with flaws go into live testing.
We'd fought viciously, and she ended it with a line I still remembered to this day.
"You just can't stand anyone being better than you!"
Looking back now, my relationship with Kate had shifted the day Nelson walked into the company.
Nelson was the one that got away for her.
Almost nobody at the company knew, but I did.
They'd grown up together. He'd gone abroad for high school and stayed through graduate school. When he finished, Kate offered him a salary far above market rate to bring him back.
His title was technical supervisor. His actual compensation and treatment were closer to a vice president's.
Her favoritism toward him had been brazen from day one.
When the company was first starting out, Kate hadn't been like this.