It wasn’tnothing. She was apparently not aware of that.
"I know you don’t like mess or tardiness," she said. "So I’ll be clean, on time, and organized. No plants. I sanitize my workspace every morning so you won’t have to worry about my area when you walk past."
My fingers stopped on the coffee scoop. Mid-pour. Beans scattered across the counter and I didn’t care.
I didn’t care about loose coffee beans on my counter.
That should have been my first indication that something was seriously wrong with me.
Nobody had ever said this to me. Every assistant before her had treated my requirements as a list of eccentricities to endure—a checklist of weird things the boss needs that they’d tolerateuntil they couldn’t anymore, and then they’d quit, and I’d start the whole process again.
She wasn’t tolerating it. She was respecting it. And the difference between those two things waseverything.
"Why?" I asked.
She looked at me. And then she smiled. It reached her eyes, stayed there, and it was directed at me. My body responded by sending every drop of blood in my system straight to my head.
For a horrifying second, I thought my nose was bleeding again. I nearly touched my face to check. I wasn’t bleeding. It was just my pulse, which had apparently decided to abandon all professionalism along with the rest of me.
"Because I need this job," she said. "And because you’re a human being, not a puzzle to solve. You have your reasons. I don’t need to know them. I just need to respect them."
She turned and went back to her desk. I stood in my office. Coffee beans on the counter. Scoop still in my hand. The machine behind me did nothing because I’d forgotten to press the button.
That evening, I was back in my penthouse. The city lay below the windows, all glass and light and distance. I sat in the chair by the window with my phone on speaker and Dr. Adler’s voice filling the room.
"How was your week?" he asked.
"Productive."
"You know that’s not what I asked."
I turned the cube.Click, click. "There’s a woman."
Silence from Adler. The particular kind that therapists deploy when they want you to keep talking without being prompted.
"My assistant," I said. "She’s been here a few weeks. She’s chaotic, disruptive, and brought pollen into my office—I should have fired her after the first day."
"But you didn’t."
"Miles made that difficult."
"Miles made it difficult, or you let Miles make it difficult?"
I didn’t answer that.
"Tell me about her," Adler said.
"She’s…" I searched for the right word. Competent. Infuriating. None of them were the words I was looking for. "When I’m with her, I don’t think about it."
"About what?"
"The contamination. The dirt. The contact." I adjusted my glasses. "When she's in the room, when she's talking, when she…"
I stopped. Started again.
"In the elevator. When the power went out. She held my face. Her bare hands on my skin."
I let that sit for a second.
