The message arrived as Emma was packing her laptop into her bag, the office slowly emptying around her like a tide going out. At first she thought it was another routine update—legal redlines, a scheduling change—but when she opened it her stomach folded in a way she knew too well: the subject line read "Draft press release – Hart Ventures announcement" and the first paragraph used the phrase "strategic advisory relationship with Emma Clarke".
She read it twice. Then a third time. Her eyes moved as if scanning for a typo she could claim—strategic advisory relationship implied a formal, ongoing role, not the one-off consult they had discussed. It implied alignment, commitment, and, as the day's rumors had taught her, optics. Someone had drafted language that would lock her into a public perception she hadn't agreed to.
She scrolled further. The draft was pleasant enough in tone: measured, positive, full of the cautious optimism that characterized product PR. But the fact remained: someone intended to position her as an advisor. The intention held consequences. She felt the old ledger unroll: agency clients, investors, partners—words that could be used to prove influence or collusion.
Her first reaction was professional—call the PR person, clarify. Her second reaction, quieter and more personal, was a spiral of irritation aimed at the gap between private conversation and public framing. She pinged Liam.
Did you authorize this? she typed, and watched the three dots appear: typing… then gone. He replied quickly.
No. I didn't. I'm in a meeting. I'll call you in twenty.
Twenty minutes stretched thin. She read the draft again, highlighted a paragraph that dangerously implied equity or decision-making rights. Highlighting felt like a concession to the thing itself—she was treating the narrative as a document rather than a weapon.
When Liam called, his voice was immediate and agitated in the way of someone discovering something unplanned. "Emma—I'm so sorry. That shouldn't have gone out. I'm pulling it back."
"Who put it together?" she asked. She kept her tone even; keeping it even was a professional strategy. She could not afford to be the person who let outrage write her actions.
"My PR team drafted a release to prepare for different scenarios," he said. "They did a broad-brush version and accidentally CC'd you. It's a template—no one meant to publish it. I'm on it. I'll tell them to scrap it and send you a note."
His apology landed like a bandage—appropriate, immediate, pragmatic. There was space in that explanation for her to accept it. She could have. She wanted to. She told herself she should: this was the sort of bureaucratic slip that happens when a company moves fast and worries faster.
"Okay," she said. "Make sure they remove my name. And tell legal there's no advisor relationship. I don't want this framed any other way."
"I will," he promised. "Emma, I swear—no one should position you like that."
She let the conversation trail into safer topics—scheduling, next week's check-ins—until a team member popped by her desk and asked if she'd seen an internal thread. Someone had forwarded the draft to a small list for review and included a note: We should present advisors as part of the launch optics to reassure investors. The forwarded note had a different tone from the draft itself: it read less like a mistake and more like strategic positioning.
Emma felt her fingers go cool. "Who forwarded it?" she asked the team member.
"Uh—Charlotte from PR? She said she was just getting buy-in on a list of names," they replied, uncertain.
Charlotte. A competent, steady PR lead who'd worked Hart's releases for months. Charlotte, the same woman whose calendar Liam had access to. Emma's mind began, mercifully, to follow the path of evidence instead of accusation. If it was an internal suggestion, it was conceivable—if troubling—that someone had assumed naming advisors would smooth the narrative. If that had happened without consulting her, it was sloppy at best; at worst, it was an attempt to manufacture credibility.
She called Liam back.
"Charlotte forwarded it?" she asked, keeping the question neutral.
"Yes," he said, pause long enough to feel measured. "She was prepping a buffer doc. She shouldn't have shared it with external contacts. I'll have her retract it."
He sounded earnest. He sounded hurried. He sounded like someone who wanted a solution more than a fight. Emma wanted to accept the solution. Instead she asked a different question—one that had been gathering like static in her mind since the photo and the unnamed messages.
"Did you ever ask her to position advisors publicly?" she asked.
A longer pause this time. "No," he said. "Not publicly. Internally, we talk about narrative scaffolding—how to reassure a tense investor. That's not the same as telling the world you're affiliated. I should have told you this doc could circulate internally. I'm sorry."
She listened and felt the not-saying: the nuance that separated internal conversation from public statement in a corporate environment where private talks could leak as readily as public tweets. She wanted more: who had suggested advisors, why, and whether this was a one-off thinking aloud or a plan with momentum. He offered immediate next steps—he would get Charlotte to retract the email, issue a clarifying internal note, and confirm that nothing would be published.
She made him promise he'd copy her on the retraction. He did. Then she did what she always did: she wrote a checklist—confirm retraction, request a written assurance from Hart's PR that her name would not be used, inform agency leadership she had not accepted any advisory role, and document the communications. Tedium felt like control; control, right now, felt necessary.
That night she opened her email to find the retraction. Charlotte's note read apologetically that the document had been an internal draft and had been shared in error; she thanked Emma for flagging the issue. Liam's message was appended: I'm very sorry. We will be careful. It was tidy and correct.
But tidy and correct did not address what she found an hour later when she scrolled further down the thread and saw an earlier exchange between Charlotte and someone on Liam's board. The subject line: "Launch narrative: advisors + optics". The body was a brainstorming note. One line read, casually: "Naming 2–3 advisors signals stability to Series B buyers—Emma Clarke could be a strong name." It wasn't an instruction; it was a brainstorm, language that in a world of deliberate PR meant it might be adopted, refined, and used.
She stared at that line until it blurred. The words were soft—could be a strong name—but the implication was heavy. Someone had thought of her as a lever months ago. Someone had suggested using her. Had Liam known? Had he been aware and not told her because it was in the brainstorm phase? Or had Charlotte suggested names independently?
She called him.
This time, when he answered, there was silence before his voice. "Emma?"
"Did you see the board note?" she asked without preface. Her breathing was steady; the question needed to be a fact-finding probe, not an accusation.
"Yes," he said. The admission was small and immediate. "I saw it a few weeks ago."
"You saw it and you didn't tell me," she said. The sentence was not loud; it was precise. The way she had learned long ago to measure hurt—by naming it—was an exercise in keeping clarity over chaos.
"I didn't want to worry you with brainstorms," he said. "It was internal. We were debating narrative options. I thought—wrongly—that I could manage it without making you need to take a stance."
"That's the thing," she said. "It's not a burden to ask me if someone is positioning me in the narrative. It's a burden to discover it in my inbox. You didn't tell me because—you were trying to protect me?"
He inhaled. "I was trying not to make you feel like you had to decide immediately. It's cowardly, I guess. I thought I could keep it from becoming a thing."
Emma felt something in her chest tighten—less anger than a bewilderment that he would decide for her. "You chose for me," she said. "That's the part that stings. I'd rather know. Even if it's messy."
There was a long silence. She could hear the faint background of a late-night call—someone speaking in low tones—and then he said, with the sort of flatness that meant he was granting himself a necessary truth, "You're right. I'm sorry. I should have told you."
"I don't want an apology that's about feeling bad on your side," she said. "I want transparency. Even internal brainstorms matter when they use my name. That's the boundary."
"I understand," he said. "I'll be transparent. Completely. From now on, anything—even brainstorms—that involve you will be shared with you. No exceptions."
The promise satisfied something and left another thing empty: it did not erase that someone had considered her a lever. It did not erase that in a room where people mapped narratives, she had been a node. It did not erase the hollow she felt at being chosen by someone else's strategy.
They talked for a while after that—about process, disclosure, and practical steps to prevent repetition. He agreed to call Charlotte and the board to clarify the boundaries, to instruct PR never to use advisor language without express consent, and to have legal send an email to any internal recipients clarifying the situation. He sounded like a man making concrete gestures, not theatrical apologies.
When she hung up, Emma sat with the quiet of her apartment pressing in. The cat hopped up and nudged her knee, and for a moment she felt the simplicity of that small life—food, litter, a companion who did not strategize her value. She poured tea, and the ritual of it steadied her.
The next morning Hart's PR sent a corrected internal message and legal confirmed Emma's status as a consultant, not an advisor. On the surface the fix was clean. But the bruise left by the omission was slow to fade. She found herself noticing small silences in Liam's replies, a microsecond delay when he spoke about board decisions. She tested the new promise that evening, asking him to send her a copy of a memo Charlotte had flagged he'd drafted.
He sent it immediately.
She read it. No mention of naming advisors. The memo read like defense and caution and, beneath that, a man trying to keep control of too many levers. She believed he'd sent it because she had asked. She also believed the earlier brainstorm had happened. Both things could be true.
That night, as she lay awake with the city breathing cold around her, she considered the nature of honest mistakes. There were ones born of clerical error and those born of omission. The former could be fixed with a retraction; the latter required a change in habit. She had been skilled at managing the first kind. The second was harder because it demanded trust be rebuilt through repeated, sometimes tedious, demonstrations.
She did not want to be guarded always. She did not want to meter love with receipts and proof. But she also knew the practical ledger that kept her life from being a series of narratives written by other people.
She texted him one sentence: Thank you for fixing this. Transparency will be the thing that keeps us honest.
He replied quickly: Agreed. I'll show you everything moving forward.
She put the phone down and watched the city lights blur into a smudge of orange and white. The draft had been retracted. The file labeled advisors + optics had been closed, at least for now. But the day's small reveal had done its quiet work: it had taught her that some mistakes were honest only until the omission was discovered. After that, they were a test—of generosity, of process, and of whether two people trying to be something like careful could keep the promises they made when push came to shove.