Page 11 of The CEO’s Assistant

Before the phone could finish its first ring, it clicked. “Voss.”

“Wren Davies from Ms. Hale’s office. There’s a query open that came out of a meeting last week. The reference number is 4471. The Halvorsen expense got mentioned in there, and it shouldn’t have been yet.” Wren pulled a legal pad toward her. “If audit decides to follow up with anyone who was in that room, I’d like to know who they would call, so I can get to them first, just to keep the narrative consistent.”

The line went quiet, and she could practically hear Voss mentally running through the list of people who were at that meeting. She let the silence linger—ten seconds, maybe fifteen. The sharp ones always took an extra beat to be thorough, and Voss was nothing if not sharp.

“Most likely these two.” Voss gave her the names, and Wren scribbled them on the notepad. “Those are the ones who would actually field a call. The third person was barely in the room.”

“That’s what I needed. Thank you.” Wren circled the two names.

The final call was to the vendor behind the Halvorsen line, a woman named Ingrid Ostberg. She had been affiliated with the firm for six years and one of the few people outside the building who knew about the restructuring, which made her someone worth protecting from a stray phone call. Wren reached for the phone and called her on the secure line. It rang for a long while, half a world away.

“Ostberg,” Ingrid said with a German accent and a room full of chatter behind her.

“Ms. Ostberg, this is Wren Davies, calling from Cordelia Hale’s office. I’m sorry to catch you so late in your day.”

“Nearly evening,” Ingrid clarified. “I’m in Geneva. What happened?”

“Nothing yet, and I want to keep it that way. There’s an internal query open that brushes up against the Halvorsen line. It’s contained, but if anyone from our side reaches out to you directly over the next couple of days, I’d be grateful if you happened to be unreachable.”

She laughed, short and dry. “I am in board meetings until Thursday. I’m unreachable to my own mother.” She paused. “But thank you for the call. Most people wouldn’t have thought to make it.”

“Thank you.” Wren let out a breath.

Three calls in barely fifteen minutes. She set the phone down and stayed there a moment, perfectly still and aware of her own pulse, quick and steady, and of how good it felt to have done something hard and done it well. She’d forgotten that feeling—or at least taught herself to live without it. This was the thing she was good at, better than almost anyone she had worked beside, and it was the same thing that had ground her down to nothing by the time she was thirty-one, until she’d walked away from all of it with empty hands. For eleven months, she had been sure that part of her was gone for good. And here it was, back like it had never left, and that frightened her more than losing it ever had. She pushed away the feeling.

The rest was paperwork. She pulled the expense summary from the deal files she’d had since her second day on the job, printed it, and read it over while standing at the printer, checking every line twice. Every number on it was accurate, just presented in a way where it looked like nothing—a routine vendor payment, the kind the firm made a hundred times a quarter—with nothing on the page about why this vendor mattered. She wasn’t lying to anyone, necessarily, just making the document seem as mundane as possible to not raise any red flags.

She carried it to the third floor. The audit floor was brighter and louder than the executive floor, and the windows were cracked open, letting in the ambient sounds of the harbor and gulls. Margot had a corner desk with a second monitor turned sideways and a mug of coffee gone cold beside it. Wren sat across from Margot and took her through the line items one at a time, answering Margot’s questions and not volunteering any information not inquired about. When Wren was done, she set the document on the desk and wrote her direct extension on top.

Margot skimmed the first page. “I admit; this is tidier than most of what crosses my desk.”

Coming from an auditor, that was practically a hug. “Call me if anything else turns up or if you have more questions,” Wren said, meaning it, then took the elevator back upstairs.

She sent two quick emails from her desk—one to Voss, one to Kepling—to say the query was handled and put to rest for now. Kepling answered within a minute, a simple “good.” Now to tell Cordelia in person to properly debrief her. Wren crossed to the inner office. Cordelia was still at her desk, and she had clearly worked straight through the day. A stack of signed pages was in the tray, and a call log was pulled up on her screen. The debacle Wren had been dealing with clearly hadn’t interfered with Cordelia’s day, but Cordelia looked up the second Wren crossed the threshold before she was fully in the room.

“It’s handled,” Wren said. “I gave the auditors what they needed to close the query. Legal is monitoring to intercept calls to two people who were in the meeting, and the vendor is out of the country, so nobody is reaching her by accident.”

“It’ll stay buried until the books close for the quarter?”

“It should.”

Cordelia nodded. “Thank you. That was good work.”

Wren felt the compliment land somewhere behind her ribs and settle warmly. She nodded back and whispered a quick, “Thank you,” before turning toward the door.

“Wren.”

She stopped and turned back. Cordelia waited until Wren had turned all the way back around. When she spoke, it was in the same calm, even voice she’d had all morning, like she was reading off a script that she didn’t feel the need to dress up.

“Two things,” she said. “First, I’m going to give you more access. Effective today, legal will add you to three additional files.” Cordelia gave her the reference numbers. “Handle them the same as you handed the one from this morning.”

Wren did the math before she could stop herself, the reference numbers dropping into the map of the firm she’d been building in her head since the first week. Three more matters to solve. On top of what she already had on her plate, it nearly doubled what she was cleared to access. These weren’t the small, safe things either. Cordelia just handed her, a new assistant, a set of keys most people would work nearly their entire career for and still not get.

Warmth spread through her chest—being trusted with something important always did that to her—and right behind the warmth came the familiar wariness, quiet but there. This was how it started, every time. Someone saw how much she could carry and gave her more, and of course she took it because she could. And then she took the next thing and the thing after that until she had poured so much of herself into the work that there was nothing left over for a life. That was how she had ended up at thirty-one with empty hands, walking out of a job she had been brilliant at. And here it was, starting again, and the worst part was that some part of her had already said yes before the rest of her caught up.

“Okay,” she said.

Cordelia held eye contact a beat longer than expected but then moved on.