Page 47 of The CEO’s Assistant

"She tried. Once, in March. She started to tell me, but somebody came into the room and she never tried again." Wren looked at the parsley. "And I let her leave it alone and approach it when she was ready. I kept waiting for her to be ready, but she never was and I never asked."

Lillian gave her space and said nothing.

"I've done this before."

"Done what?"

"This." It didn't come out the way she'd meant it to. "Well, not this exactly. But there’s always a woman who needs somebody, and I'm very good at being that somebody they need. And then, when it's finished and they don’t need me anymore, I'm standing there like I didn’t see it coming." She heard her own voice go thin. "I do that. On purpose. And I’m always left surprised and disappointed in myself."

"Wren…"

"I'm in love with her."

She hadn't planned to say it, but it came out anyway. "It would be an easier week if I weren't."

The silence went on longer than she was comfortable with, and she almost filled it. But then Lillian said, "Did Millie ever tell you about her sister?"

"Iris." Wren straightened. "A little. She died before I was born. Millie said she was the pretty one."

"Iris wasn’t. Millie was the pretty one, and it drove her insane that nobody said so." She placed the cup on the saucer. "Iris was six years older. Their mother got sick when Iris was thirty-one. 1964, this would have been. Or maybe it was ‘63. She started leaving the stove on, then she couldn't find her way back from the corner store, and the doctor called it hardening of the arteries and said she'd want quiet. That was as much as anyone could tell you about senility in those days." She took a breath. "And somebody had to take her in. Iris was the one with no husband and a job at the telephone company she could quit."

"So Iris took her in."

"Yeah, Iris took her in and cared for her." A pause. "And everybody was grateful. You have to understand how grateful everybody was. My own mother used to say it at church. ‘That Iris Calloway, what a good daughter.’ Twenty years, little bird. She never married and she never moved. Their mother stopped knowing her name after about fourteen years, and yet Iris kept going another six after that without leaning on professional support."

Wren sat down on the kitchen floor with her back against the cabinet.

"Where was Millie?"

"An hour up the road, with a job and a husband and a baby. She went to visit every second Sunday. She'd come back and sit in my kitchen and say she's disappearing, and I'd ask who, and she'd mean Iris." Lillian exhaled. "She tried. She offered to take a year of caretaking duties herself. Iris wouldn't hear of it because she had built a whole system by then. She was the only one who knew the medications, the one who set all the doctors’ appointments, the only one who could get their mother to eat. She'd made sure there was nobody else to ask. And the family let her, because why wouldn't they? Iris would do it. Nobody goes looking for a second person while the first one keeps saying yes."

The refrigerator kicked on and hummed through a cycle before fading into background noise.

"She said it to Iris," Lillian said. "Near the end, when their mother had gone into the county home at last and Iris was fifty-one, still with no life partner and no house of her own. Millie sat on her sister's bed and told her, and I know she did, because she called me that night in an absolute state, convinced she'd said it forty years too late. She said, you don't have to keep doing this, sweetheart. You're allowed to have your own life."

Down on the street the dog had gone quiet.

"Iris died two years after their mother," Lillian said. "Sixty-one. Millie never got over it but never admitted it.

"She said the same thing about you. More than once, when you were twenty-four, twenty-five. Once when you took the Boston job, and once when you were on the phone about somebody's book at eleven o'clock on a Saturday night. She'd swear she wasn't going to breathe a word of it to you because you'd only be kind about it."

"She said it to me anyway. At the end."

"I know. Eventually, she said she was going to." She took another breath. "She was frightened of one thing her whole life, little bird, and it wasn't dying."

They talked another ten minutes about nothing, because that was how the calls ended. Lillian had quit a book at page sixty and wanted Wren to know it. The woman downstairs had gotten a parrot, evidently.

"I'll call Wednesday," Wren said.

"Good. I’ll hold you to it. Make sure to eat the soup, and don't put too much salt in it." And she was gone.

She stayed where she was a few minutes, then got up, wrapped the chicken and put it in the refrigerator, and wiped the board down. She crossed the room to the wall under the window and pulled the packing tape off the nearest box.

Books, mostly. Library discards with the pockets still glued in the back, the paperbacks Millie had read to pieces and rebought and read to pieces again. Wren carried them over four and five at a time to the shelf beside the green chair, which only had a lamp and a phone charger on it.

The photograph was face-down against the side of the box under the last of them. She knew what it was before she turned it over. It had stood on the shelf in Millie's hallway for thirty years, at the height of a child's eye and then at the height of Wren's shoulder: two girls on a porch step in white dresses, the taller one squinting, the smaller one laughing at whoever was working the camera. She had walked past it every day of her childhood and never once asked. She stood it up in front of the books where she would see it and went back to the kitchen.

The soup was better than it had any right to be, which annoyed her. She ate it standing up at the counter, then washed the pot and put it in the rack. After that, there was nothing left in the apartment that needed doing, and the room started to look like somebody lived in it.