These people. Andre stood frozen outside that door. One hand on the rag, one hand flat against the wall, his jaw locked so tight he could feel his molars grinding against each other. He wanted to kick that door open.
He wanted to walk in there and say his name out loud and watch Greg's face collapse in on itself, but he didn't move. He breathed, stepped back, kept wiping. That afternoon, he found Patrice alone in the walk-in cooler organizing inventory. She looked tired.
Not the kind of tired you fix with a good night's sleep, the kind that lives in your bones. "How long has it been like this?" he asked quietly. She didn't look up. "Since Greg took over day to day. About a year."
"Anyone ever report it?" She almost laughed. Almost.
"To who? Greg tells everyone he's Andre's right hand. 'I talk to Andre every day. Andre trusts me completely.' That's his favorite line, his shield. Anyone who pushes back, he makes their life hell until they quit. Then he tells Andre they left for personal reasons."
"How many have quit?" "Three in two months. Best people we had. Janice ran the dessert station for 4 years."
"Walked out on a Tuesday. Didn't even finish her shift. Greg told Andre she had family issues."
"Why didn't anyone go directly to Andre?" Patrice finally looked at him. Something heavy and sad behind her eyes. "Because no one has Andre's number. Not his real one. Everything goes through Greg."
"Phone calls, emails, schedules, complaints, all of it. He set it up that way on purpose. Andre doesn't know. He probably thinks we don't care enough to reach out."
Andre felt his chest tighten like someone had wrapped a belt around his ribs and pulled. His own employees, the people he'd hired, trained, worked alongside, couldn't reach him. Greg had built a wall between Andre and his own restaurant brick by brick, and Andre had handed him the mortar. He walked back to the supply closet, closed the door, pulled out the phone hidden in his back pocket, opened the voice recorder.
From now on, he was recording everything. He texted Elaine two words. "It's bad." She replied in 10 seconds.
"How bad?" He thought about the schedule on the wall, the phone call, Patrice's face in the cooler light, the three people who walked away because they couldn't reach their own boss. He typed back, "Worse than I thought, and I'm only on day three." Day four.
Greg left for lunch at noon. Said he'd be back in an hour. Andre had learned by now Greg's hour meant two, sometimes three. Nobody questioned it.
Nobody dared. The moment Greg's car pulled out of the lot, Andre grabbed his cleaning cart and wheeled it down the hall toward the office. He'd cleaned this hallway a dozen times already this week. Nobody would look twice at the janitor pushing a mop bucket.
He pushed the office door open, sprayed the desk with glass cleaner, started wiping. Then he opened the top drawer. Invoices, stacks of them, neatly organized in folders with colored tabs. Andre pulled the first one out.
Valley Ridge Foods. He'd never heard the name in his life. He scanned the invoice. Ground beef, bulk chicken, pork ribs, seasonal produce, all the staples Fletcher's Table ran on every single day.
He checked the prices, then checked them again. 60% cheaper than what Andre was paying his original suppliers. He pulled out another invoice. Same company, different month.
Then another and another. Four months of orders from a supplier Andre had never approved, never heard of, never signed a contract with. Andre set the invoices down, pulled out his phone, searched Valley Ridge Foods, and found their website. Bare bones, no customer reviews, domain registered six months ago.
He clicked on the product page. Grade C meat, bottom-shelf produce, the kind of ingredients a school cafeteria would think twice about. His restaurant, the restaurant that built its name on his grandmother's recipes, on hand-selected prime cuts, on vegetables from a family farm in South Georgia he'd visited personally every spring, was now serving food from a company that didn't exist a year ago. This was why the reviews changed.
Not the recipes, not the cooking, not the staff. The ingredients. Someone had ripped the foundation out from under the entire menu and no one told him because the only person who could tell him was the person who did it. Andre kept digging.
Second drawer, more folders. He found the original supplier contracts. Harris Family Meats, Dawson Produce, Southern Grain Company, companies he'd built relationships with over a decade. Every single one had a termination letter attached, signed by Greg Holloway, dated within the same two-week window four months ago.
Greg hadn't just switched one supplier. He'd gutted the entire supply chain in 14 days. Quietly, completely, without a single phone call to Andre. Andre did the math in his head.
Original suppliers cost the restaurant roughly $32,000 a month. Valley Ridge was billing $17,000. That was a $15,000 gap every month for four months, $60,000. But the restaurant's books still showed the original spending levels.
Andre had reviewed the monthly reports Greg emailed him. The food cost line hadn't moved, which meant the money was going somewhere, just not back into the restaurant. He found the answer in the bottom drawer. A manila envelope inside, incorporation papers for an LLC called HG Hospitality, filed in Delaware six months ago, registered to one person, Gregory P.
Holloway. Andre read it three times. Then he photographed every page, every invoice, every termination letter, every line of the LLC filing. His hands were steady now.
The shaking from day one was gone. Something colder and sharper had taken its place. He slid everything back exactly where he found it, wiped the drawer handles, sprayed the desk one more time for good measure, wheeled his cart back into the hallway. To anyone watching, the janitor had just cleaned the office.
Nothing more. He walked to the parking lot during his break, the break Greg never officially approved, and sat in his car, opened his email, attached every photo, sent them to Elaine with one line. "He's stealing from me." His phone buzzed 40 seconds later.
Elaine calling. "I'm looking at the photos now, and this is embezzlement, Andre, clear as day. The LLC, the fake supplier, the doctored reports. He's siphoning profit through a shell company he owns."
"How much?" "Based on what you've sent, at least $60,000. Probably more once we run a full audit." Andre closed his eyes.
$60,000 stolen from a restaurant his grandmother dreamed about but never lived to see, by a man Andre shook hands with every Monday morning for 3 years. "What do I do?" "Keep going. Don't confront him. Don't change anything about your behavior. I need more bank statements, communication with the supplier, anything that proves this was intentional and systematic."
"How long?" "End of the week. I want this airtight. When we move on him, I don't want a single crack he can slip through."
Andre hung up, sat in the silence of his car for a long time. $60,000. That was more than Patrice made in a year, more than Derek made in a year. Greg was pocketing their combined annual salaries in stolen money while telling them to be grateful they had jobs at all.