Mina’s heart froze then sped. “Chris?”
Amy nodded, her eyes gleaming.
“Do you know what it’s about?”
“No, but I’d bet anything it’s about the junior loan officer position. I mean, he’s certainly been taking his time choosing someone, don’t you think?”
Mina nodded mechanically, hope rising up in her heart even as she tried to stop it. Maybe the reason Chris wanted to see her had nothing to do with the position. Maybe there’d been a mistake with her check – that had happened once – or he needed her to sign something, or—
“You’d better go,” Amy said. “I’ll take care of things here.”
Mina drifted toward Chris’s office in a half-daze, and she couldn’t help glancing toward the cubicles as she went. Maybe she was about to be given one of her own. Soon she was standing in the open doorway to Chris’s office, feeling as if her stomach had tied itself in about a dozen knots. “Amy said you wanted to see me.”
Chris nodded. “Come on inside.” He waved a hand toward the chair across from his desk as he stood and closed the sturdy oak door.
Mina eyed it apprehensively. He almost always kept his office door wide open. What did he have to say to her that was so private? Her nervousness spiked. Maybe this was it. Maybe when she walked back out the door, she’d be a junior loan officer instead of a teller.
“Mina, there’s something serious I need to talk to you about.”
Mina nodded, not trusting herself to speak.
“Another employee brought something to my attention this morning, and it needs to be dealt with.”
Mina’s high hopes plummeted. This didn’t sound like a preamble to a promotion. It sounded downright ominous. “Is it something to do with me?” She wracked her mind for anything she might have done that could have gotten her into trouble at work. Nothing came up. She was a model teller – punctual, honest and attentive to her duties. Chris knew that. In fact, he’d told her that was why he was considering her for the junior loan officer position.
He nodded, gave her an unnervingly solemn look and opened a desk drawer.
Mina waited on pins and needles as he pulled out a piece of paper. “This is the issue.” He laid it on his desk and smoothed out a few crease lines that marked where it had been folded.
Mina leaned forward, her hopes that Chris was being overly dramatic and that the problem wasn’t really about her evaporating as she laid eyes on the paper. “Where did you get this?”
“Like I said, the problem was brought to my attention by another employee.”
She was silent for a moment, eyeing the paper – obviously a computer print off – and the pictures it displayed. “And this is really a problem?”
Chris nodded. “As an employee, you’re a representative of this bank. This is not an appropriate representation.”
Heat flooded Mina’s cheeks as she glanced at the paper again, unable to look away for long. “I wasn’t working at the time. I wasn’t aware that I was expected to let my employer dictate what I do outside of work.”
Chris shook his head. “What you do on your own time is your business. But these images are being displayed publicly, and not far from here, either. Customers may see them and consider them offensive.”
Annoyance tinged Mina’s nervousness. “I doubt that anyone would notice and put two and two together.”
Chris waved his hand over the paper. “Someone already has noticed.”
Mina couldn’t help but mentally substitute ‘someone’ with ‘Ashley’. She couldn’t imagine who else among the staff would have made a big deal out of the photos. She curled her hands into fists as she remembered Ashley listening to her phone conversation with Karen. Mina hadn’t thought much of it then, but now that she considered it, Ashley had probably been plotting a way to use what she’d heard against Mina ever since that day. And apparently, she’d succeeded.
Chris sighed. “Look, Mina. This sort of thing is bad for the bank. Look around.” He gestured toward the window. “There are dozens of other banks out there, and if something we do offends customers, they won’t hesitate to go to them instead. It’s difficult enough to remain competitive without something like this driving customers away.”
A thick knot of anxiety had formed in Mina’s throat. She swallowed it. “What does this mean?”
“It means these photos have to disappear from public view, or you’ll be dismissed.”