Page 43 of The CEO’s Assistant

It was an ugly thing to think about a woman who had died nearly a year ago. She waited for it to fall apart the way unfair thoughts usually did, but it didn't.

And under it, the part that had taken this long for her to realize was that none of them had really known her. Vivian hadn't, neither had Helena. The partners knew her hours, but that was about it.

On the other hand, Cordelia knew how she took her coffee. She knew Millie's name. She'd seen Wren asleep and seen her come apart. She knew the version of her that nobody at work would recognize. Cordelia knew her.

And yet, despite all that, today, Cordelia had looked right at her for nine hours and had only seen an assistant. A capable one, to be sure, but just the nearest set of hands to help out to avoid a crisis. It could have been anyone sitting in that chair, and Cordelia would have treated them the same.

Being invisible to a stranger was one thing. But this was Cordelia, and she had still looked right through her and only saw her for what she could do professionally. She opened a blank email and wrote her resignation. It took eleven minutes, most of it spent on the second sentence.

The professional voice came easily, even now. She gave her two weeks’ notice and said she was grateful for the opportunity, keeping the tone polite and impersonal. When she went to give a reason, she stopped. There wasn't one she could type. “You know me and you looked through me anyway” was true, but it wasn’t a thing you put in a letter. She left the space blank.

She read it once. It was good. Of course it was good. She was good at this. She saved it to drafts, sat still for a moment, and then went to get her keys.

The purple door was propped open a hand's width, the same it always was when the ovens had been running, and the bell gave its one clear note as Wren pushed through. The place had mostly cleared out. Two women sat at the far end of the long table, their heads bent over a laptop together, and nobody claimed the armchairs yet. Lavender stood behind the bar drying glasses, wearing a dove-gray cardigan with the sleeves shoved up past her elbows and her silver rings catching the glint from the lights. She looked up as the door swung shut and had Wren read by the time she reached a stool.

Lavender didn't ask her anything. She took down the squat dark bottle, poured the whiskey into a short glass, and set it on the bar. Then she went away and came back with a plate of bread and butter and put that down next to it.

"Food first," Lavender said, and moved off down the bar.

Wren ate the bread and sipped the whiskey. She wasn't hungry and hadn't been all day, but by the second piece her jaw had let go of something it had been holding since morning. Rain came down the front window in sheets, and one of the women at the table laughed at whatever was on the screen. For the first time in days, there was no one in the room who needed anything from her. It should have felt freeing.

The doorbell chimed again about ten minutes later. She didn't turn around. A wet umbrella came past her shoulder and Remy Hale-Dalisay dropped onto the next stool, hair dark at the ends from the rain, and blew out a breath.

"It is absolutely coming down out there."

“What made you brave the storm to come here?”

“You, actually.” Remy pushed her hair back. "I tried your street first, which is deranged, I know. I don't even have your address. Walked up and down it like I was delivering something. Then I thought, no, she'll be here. And here you are."

Lavender set a glass of white wine in front of Remy without being asked. Remy said thanks and turned it by the stem.

"I heard today was bad," she said.

"It was long."

"Yeah." Remy looked at the bar. "Okay. I'm going to say something. I rehearsed it in the rain for forty minutes and it kind of became a little loopy, so it's going to come out worse than the version in my head."

"They usually do."

"My mother does something." She turned the gold ring on her middle finger, once. "Under enough pressure, she disappears inside herself. She's there and the work gets done—the work gets done beautifully—but there's nobody home. You can stand right in front of her and she'll look at you, but none of it reaches her. Not really."

Wren held the tulip-shaped whiskey glass but didn't drink from it.

"She's done it since I was little. After my mama died, it stopped being once in a while." Remy kept her voice level. "I was twenty. I lost one mother in April and the other one somewhere around June, except the second one still showed up to dinner every Sunday."

"Remy…"

"No, I know. I'm getting there." She drank some wine and set it down. "My mama had a name for it. She used to call it the executive coma."

Wren put the glass down carefully.

"Which sounds insane when I say it out loud." Remy's mouth moved, not quite a smile. "It was a joke. She'd say it at breakfast. ‘She's in the executive coma, she'll be back Thursday.’ And she could joke about it, because she could snap her out of it. I never figured out how she did it. She'd put a hand on the back of my mom's neck at the sink, and my mother would come back into her own body like somebody turning on a lamp." She stopped. "Then my mama died, and there was nobody left who could do that so it just kept going. Eight years. That's not a dip, Wren. That's just how she lives now."

Rain ran down the window. Wren turned her wrist over on the bar and pressed her thumb between the tendons below the worn leather band of Millie's watch.

She'd known by four that afternoon. Standing in the doorway with the call sheet while Cordelia pushed a meeting fifteen minutes and never looked up, she'd known it in her stomach before she had the words. What she hadn't known was that this had lasted for eight years and her late wife had loved her enough to give it a name and reached through the fog to pull her out of it.

"I wanted you to have the name for it. Because when it happens and you don't know what it is, you think it's about you."