I stumbled out of the glass-walled conference room, my shoulders slumped under the heavy weight of a dozen judgmental stares. My legs felt like lead, and the -inch heels I was forced to wear dug like knives into my aching feet. The throbbing in my stitched-up hand was perfectly synchronized with the violent hammering inside my skull. I needed to sit down. Just for a minute. Just to stop the world from spinning.
I made my way toward the emergency exit stairs. It was a trick I’d learned over the last two years: the executive planning meetings always ran long, sometimes for hours, and the stairwell was the only place in the entire building where I could escape the eyes of the corporate world.
But the moment my foot touched the first concrete step, the rigid, Pavlovian habit of being an empl
