It was a good intention that became way too seen. A report intended as a confidential procedure. To raise a concern about a colleague’s inappropriacy. About a professional boundary that might have been broken. No more.
I discreetly copied my superiors on the email loop. Not to seek redress or trigger disciplinary action, but to seek their guidance.
If it escalated, the job turnover in the department would rise — with immediate effect. I had to stop it.
To save my job. It wasn’t about getting anyone into trouble.
So I crafted the email.
The shared inbox and misdirected forwarding unveiled it all.
That email. It raised the issue, in apparent confidence. I kept my superiors in the BCC loop — I needed guidance.
Not action.
Written in the hopeful belief that it would preempt and correct — quietly.
I clicked on the send button and went on a mid-morning coffee break.
It was Procedure. That’s all.
Nothing unusual, just a log of a routine slip.
I believed the process to be ordinary. Internal. Just a chastisement. Professional guidance.
A gentle correction for the drawing of boundaries, before matters escalated.
I never anticipated exposure. After all, the system was solid.
A confidential chain.
Restricted circulation, never meant for his eyes.
With the usual safeguards.
But what was private became—
Shared.
Public.
Irreversible.
He shouldn’t have had any access to it.
A mistaken forward, to his professional nemesis.
Then, the entire department.
And finally—
Its head.
A misdirected forward loop.
“So this is what you think of me. After all those years working together.”
His tortured voice.
Too late to recall.
The cardboard box. The desk, cleared.
Him, walking past, giving me that lowered, sideways glance.
His raspy, trembling voice accused. “So this is what you really think of me. You never even asked me anything.”
I would have fixed it. But it’s already on the company’s records.
What would you have done?
Original story by Michelle Liew Tsui-Lin. AI tags are coincidental.
Mirrors of the Mind by Michelle Liew is a collection of psychological and supernatural short stories that explore the quiet unease beneath ordinary moments. These are not tales of spectacle, but of subtle fracture — where memory distorts, silence speaks, and the self is not always singular. In these stories, what is unseen often carries the greatest weight, and what lingers is not what is shown, but what is felt.