Page 21 of The CEO’s Assistant

Cordelia thought of calling her, but she already knew there was nothing she could say that would be true and safe at the same time, and she had spent a lifetime saying only the things that were both. So she did not call Wren. She stood at the glass with her own reflection hovering faintly over the drowned harbor and went looking, in the woman there, for the one who had run this firm for three decades and nursed a wife through eleven months of dying and raised their child alone afterward and never once let a soul watch her break. She was in there somewhere. But tonight, Cordelia could not reach her.

After a while, she gave up searching. She lifted her bag and closed the office door behind her, out of a habit that meant nothing tonight, with no one left on the floor to shut it against. Wren's desk stood empty in the lamplight, the cold mug where she'd left it, the binder squared to the edge exactly as Wren squared everything. Cordelia switched off the lamp. The dark came up over the whole floor at once, and she crossed it by the green shine of the exit sign, as she had crossed it a hundred times at two in the morning with a deal on the line. Except tonight there was no deal, and the thing at stake had already happened.

Thea looked up when the elevator doors opened. "Night, Ms. Hale."

"Goodnight, Thea." Her voice stayed even and untroubled as it always did, and she was grateful for the one part of her that hadn't deserted her tonight.

Outside, the fog had come in thick. The streets ran slick and empty under it, the parked cars beaded with condensation, the street lamps standing tall in their own small hazes, and the cold reached through her jacket in a way it hadn't on the walk over, when she'd had a lit window to aim for. She turned the other way now, toward home.

The small park sat between the office and her building, a square of grass and a few old trees she had walked past twice a day for twelve years and never once really seen. Tonight, the lilacs were in bloom. She caught the smell before she found the source, that thick green sweetness riding in on the wet air, and she stopped on the path among the dark mass of the bushes and stood there breathing it as though it had been put there that afternoon for her, as though it had not come every May, on this exact corner, through all the years she'd hurried past with her mind on a meeting.

She walked on. The shell buttons of her blouse had gone in wrong under her jacket, one riding in the wrong hole where she'd done them up too fast in the dark. She was a woman who did not leave things crooked; she lined up these very buttons every morning without a thought. Tonight, she left the wrong one where it sat. Setting it right would have meant agreeing the night was over, and she was not ready for that just yet. She wanted to hold on and savor it a little longer.

At the corner, she came to the café with the purple door. It was Friday and Lavender's was still full, the windows gold and warm and steamed at the edges. Women sitting at the long table inside were illuminated by the light on their faces, and the sound of the place reached the street: talk, the clink of glasses, and a piano threading somewhere beneath it. She didn’t take a second, closer look at the community festivities, and instead, she kept her eyes ahead of her and walked on into the fog.

She walked the rest of the three blocks to her building that rose high into the Phoenix Ridge skyline. She rode up, let herself in, and left the lights off. The apartment was exactly as she'd left it that morning, which was to say exactly as it had been for the last eight years. She had changed nothing in it since Eleanor died, down to the side of the bed she still kept to. She slept here, and kept it clean, and did not, in any way that counted, live in it. Tonight, she stood in the dark of the entry with the bag still on her shoulder and her jacket and shoes still on, and the sameness of the place, which had not once bothered her in eight years, was suddenly unbearable. Everything around her was exactly as it had been. She was the one thing in it that had changed.

She could feel the night clinging to her still. The warmth of it, the weight of it, her body awoken and rearranged after eight years of asking nothing of it, all of it standing here in the doorway of the very life she had built to keep a night like this from ever reaching her.

12

Chapter 12: Wren

Wren woke a few minutes before her alarm. The room was gray, with no shadows in it; the fog had come in off the harbor overnight, and the light through the window was flat and dull. She rolled over to look at the analog clock on her wall. Ten to six. She turned over to lay on her back again and looked at the ceiling for a while. A truck idled somewhere down in the street and pulled away. She had slept, which surprised her, and she stayed there a moment longer, under the good duvet she'd bought her first week in the apartment.

She reached for the phone on the crate beside the bed. Eleven emails had come in overnight. She read them while still lying down, the screen too bright in the dim room, and sorted them as she went into the order she'd deal with them later. Two from outside counsel, with the markup she'd been waiting on since the night before. A note from operations closing an audit query that had been open three weeks. A Monday calendar change, moved and then moved again. The usual overnight emails for a firm in the middle of several long projects that required her attention and input. None of them were from Cordelia. She set the phone face-down on her chest and lay there for a moment. Then she put it aside and got up.

The shower water hadn't warmed yet and she didn't wait for it to by the time she stepped under the stream. She washed, rinsed, and was out before the mirror fogged. She didn’t let her mind wander where it shouldn’t, so she kept her body occupied and got out of the shower before it could. She wrapped up her hair in a towel, the ends dripping cold down her back as she went to the kitchen.

Coffee was the one thing in the apartment she did the same way every morning. Water in the kettle. The good beans in the grinder, the one indulgence she'd kept from her old life. The filter in the pour-over cone above the mug, the slow pour, the aroma wafting up. She drank the coffee at the counter with her hip against the edge, looking at the brick wall eight feet off and the one lit window in it, where someone else was up at six on a Saturday too. It was too hot and she drank it too fast, as she always did.

Her clothes for the day were folded over the back of the chair, where she'd laid them out the night before. Yesterday's outfit was on the seat of the same chair, dropped there when she came in—the blouse with its popped buttons, the skirt that had been hiked up—and she reached past them for the folded ones without looking too long at them. She dressed and put on her grandmother's watch, the leather strap gone soft and dark and shaped to her wrist now. She pressed her thumb once to the inside of her wrist, over the strap.

By the door, she picked up Mildred's bag off the bench and let herself out at five to seven, down the two flights to the street. She walked to the office in twenty-five minutes, down through the residential blocks where the porch lights were going off on their timers and the first sprinklers had come on. People’s front yards were filled with blooming flowers of all types. Wren spotted bright pink rhododendrons and azaleas, fragrant purple wisteria vines, and yellow primroses. The residential streets faded into the familiar Phoenix Ridge downtown, and her mind switched gears to her growing to-do list waiting for her. She got to the building at twenty past and rode up the elevator alone.

The eighth floor was quiet, the morning light streaming in along the windows the fog hadn't reached. Cordelia's office was still dark. She almost never came in before half past eight on a Saturday, and there was no reason today would be different. Wren was glad to have the floor to herself for an hour before she had to be in a room with her.

She set the bag beside her desk, turned on the laptop, and clicked on the markup file to sink into, page one of twenty-six. She pulled her chair in and began. Most of it was the usual business of two sets of lawyers tightening the same sentences from opposite ends, and she read each of the outside counsel's changes against what the firm had sent over the week before. She marked as she went—black where she'd sign off for Cordelia and blue where she thought Cordelia would want to push back—and she kept a short list at her elbow of the few places where a change did more than it appeared to. She'd been reading documents like this for years and could practically do the work without thinking, and that was the trouble this morning because it allowed her mind to wander.

She reached the bottom of page four and knew she would have to read it again. Her eyes had read every word on every line but taken in none of it. Somewhere around a clause on the timing of consents, her attention had slid sideways, out through the wall, to the office on the other side of it. To the desk in there. To where…

She put her index finger underneath the first word and started reading it over again. This time it clicked. Pages five and six were clean, a defined term she agreed with and a notice period she flagged for Cordelia in a single blue line. She tucked her hair behind her ear and kept going.

But by time she reached the middle of page eight, her fingers went to the side of her neck before she'd consciously decided anything, to the place under her jaw that was faintly sore. For a second she remembered feeling the pressure of a mouth there in the dark. She hadn't stood at the mirror long enough this morning to see if Cordelia had left a hickey there. She pressed the tender spot once, hard, to feel the pain. Then she put her hand down on the desk.

The thing was, she had known she wanted it. She'd known for weeks, but it wasn’t until that night in the shower, when she had whispered Cordelia’s name aloud to nobody but herself just to hear how it sounded, when she had heard how much she had meant it. That much she'd already made her peace with. It was Cordelia she kept coming back to, never herself: whether she'd slept, whether she'd gotten home alright through the fog, whether she was sitting in her own kitchen this morning wishing none of it had happened. And already, without deciding to, Wren was working out how to make the day easy for her when she came in. Clear an hour off her afternoon. Have the coffee she liked ready, so nothing about the morning asked anything of her. Wren had half the list written before she caught what she was doing and what it meant.

Because this was how it always started. She'd find a woman worth orbiting and begin arranging herself around her, folding down smaller and smaller to fit what the woman needed until there was nothing of Wren left over that she could point to, and she'd call it love the whole way down. It had happened before, more than once, the last time badly enough that she'd left everything and moved here to stop. Three months on, she was sitting at a desk before eight in the morning planning a woman's coffee.

Her hand had found her wrist again, closed over the strap of the watch. She didn't know how long she'd been sitting like that, the cursor blinking at her, nothing marked. She made herself let go.

Under that was the thought she knew better than to look at head-on: that she had no real idea what last night had been, that Cordelia had told her to leave and go home, and that Wren was already, this morning, pouring herself into a thing she couldn't even read. She wasn't going to take that one thought out and turn it over at her desk. There was a document in front of her. She went back to it.

She put herself into the markup, and she stayed focused on the work. Ten, eleven, twelve. Down in a definitions section, folded in where a tired reader would slide straight past, she found the first change that actually did something: one phrase reworded just enough to shift what the whole clause meant. She marked it red and set two clean lines under it for Cordelia. Her mind went quiet while she worked. It always did; whatever else came apart in her, this part never had. For a run of pages, there was only the document and the small pleasure of uncovering something that someone had buried and counted on no one finding.

The elevator chimed at twenty to nine. Wren kept her eyes down and stayed on her line, but she heard the doors part and the heels click along the floor, and she knew whose they were without looking. Cordelia passed the desk and didn't stop. Wren looked at her in her periphery without looking at her directly. She wore dark jeans and a soft sweater the color of wet moss, and last night's coat was folded over one arm. In the months she'd worked for Cordelia, she had never once seen her in anything but a suit. Cordelia closed the inner office door to make a call, and it shook Wren back to the present. She restarted reading from the top of page nineteen, committed to staying focused this time.

Behind the door, Cordelia was on a call. Wren couldn't make out the words, only the low rise and fall of the voice, and her whole body had tuned to it before she'd noticed, bracing for the pause that would mean it was over. She read the same line four times without taking in a word. Last night, that voice had been against her ear, low and coming apart, saying things she could still feel more than remember. And now, it was three feet away from her on the opposite side of the wall, smooth and unbothered, and she couldn't get her breathing to even out. She sat very still and hated how much of her was straining to hear.