Chapter 8

Risa went home that night feeling hollow in a very specific way.

The kind of hollow where you’re not crying, not angry—just quietly exhausted, like your soul had been placed on airplane mode.

At dinner, she told her family what her manager had said.

Her mom frowned. “Well… then you just have to work harder.”

Her dad nodded. “If your manager thinks you’re not doing enough, do more.”

Simple.

Her brother chimed in, unhelpfully. “Yeah, that’s just the bare minimum.”

Risa stared at her plate.

She nodded. “Yeah. I know.”

What she didn’t say was that the bare minimum was already taking everything she had.

This wasn’t one job she was learning slowly. This was two full jobs stitched together and handed to her with a smile. Not fifty-fifty. Not even one hundred and twenty percent.

Two hundred percent.

And apparently, that still wasn’t enough.

But there was nothing she could do about it.

So Risa did what she always did.

She stopped complaining.

She worked harder.

That week, two new interns joined—three weeks after Risa had started—and they all attended their first official product training.

The session lasted thirty minutes.

It was actually interesting. There were serums and creams and kits and promotional bundles. Risa finally learned what all those SKUs meant, instead of just processing them like abstract concepts that ruined her inbox.

The trainer ran out of time.

“I’ll send you the website,” she said cheerfully. “You can look through the rest when you have time.”

Risa smiled.

She did not have time.

That thirty-minute training set her back roughly twenty emails.

She opened her inbox afterward and stared.

What do they need every single day? she wondered.
How is there always a problem?

Still—she liked her distributors.

They were polite. Grateful. Apologetic, even, when asking questions that had been asked yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that.

She dug for answers.

She emailed Marketing about promotions.

She emailed Supply Chain about delays.

She emailed Finance about pricing discrepancies.

Customer Service, she realized, was less about answering questions and more about knowing who to bother internally.

The moment an email came in, Risa mentally sorted it:

Marketing? Forward.
Supply Chain? Forward.
Finance? Forward.

If no one responded by end of day, she’d email the distributor:

Hi! I’ve looped in the relevant team and will update you as soon as I hear back.

She became very good at that sentence.

Then Rachel called.

It was a small call. Casual, even.

“Why didn’t you complete all the uploading and transcoding on your own?” Rachel asked.

Risa frowned. “Oh—Fred and I talked about it. We agreed to split it fifty-fifty.”

Rachel’s expression changed.

“That’s not what was agreed on,” she said. “You were supposed to take on all of it.”

All of it.

Risa felt her stomach drop.

“I—I’m sorry,” she said quickly. “I wasn’t aware. If I had known—”

Rachel cut in. “Even if not all twenty-four, you were expected to at least handle all U.S. distributors.”

Nineteen.

Nineteen distributors.

On top of Customer Service.

Risa stared at her screen. “Okay. I’m sorry. I’ll take all U.S. distributors starting next month.”

Rachel looked annoyed now. Her tone sharpened.

“This shouldn’t have been misunderstood.”

Risa nodded. “I understand.”

She did not understand.

The call ended.

Risa sat there, motionless.

If they wanted her to do more distributors… why hadn’t Fred said anything?

Why hadn’t Rachel clarified earlier?

Why hadn’t Brad mentioned it when the work was split?

Because no one had said anything, Risa had made a reasonable proposal.

And now she was being punished for it.

Uploading and transcoding wasn’t just busywork. It was managing every data point feeding into Power BI. Every dashboard. Every metric.

Canada made up maybe ten percent of the data.

Which meant even at nineteen distributors, she’d be handling ninety percent of the company’s entire dataset.

One person.

A junior analyst.

Twenty-two years old.

First job.

She leaned back in her chair and stared at the ceiling.

It was insane.