I’d always done most of the work, cleaning up everyone else’s mistakes. I didn’t mind—until my boss picked someone else to lead a new project. She laughed and said, “We don’t need you playing the hero all the time.” That night, I decided to stop being the hero.
I closed my laptop and stared at the ceiling, realizing hard work hadn’t made me visible—just convenient.
The new lead, Nico, was charming but careless. I’d spent months fixing his numbers, reminding him of deadlines, quietly making him look competent. I thought it would pay off someday. It didn’t.
So that night, I ignored his last-minute text asking me to check his slides. I turned off my phone and went to bed.
The next morning, he swaggered into the meeting, grinning. “We got this, right?”
“Hope so,” I said.
When he started presenting, the mistakes were obvious—botched projections, missing costs, duplicated data. An investor frowned. “Are you sure these margins are correct?”
And for once, I just sat back and let silence do the talking.
