Page 57 of The CEO’s Assistant

She carried the sheets upstairs again and forced herself to open the door.

The room smelled of dust, and under the dust, there was the scent of salt and old cedar, the same as the rest of the house. She had been afraid it would smell of Eleanor, but it had stopped doing that years ago. There had been nobody living here to notice when.

Eleanor's sketch hung by the window in a frame the size of a paperback—Eleanor at four, hair in her eyes—and Cordelia stood in front of it, trying to figure out which drawer downstairs she would put it in. She left it where it was instead. She put both hands under the window pane and shoved upward. It had swollen in the frame and stuck, then lifted up all at once. Wind off the water breezed in and moved the dust sheet on the bed.

She stripped the dust sheet off the bed and dropped it on the landing of the stairs. She made the bed, hospital corners, the way she had been taught at nineteen. She found a certain kind of comfort and satisfaction in doing something the same way each time, meticulous and exacting. In the closet, she found two pillows. She grabbed one and slapped it twice to shake off the lingering dust, then threw it on the bed before grabbing the second and doing the same thing. When she was done, she straightened and fluffed both pillows on the bed.

Downstairs, she pulled a wine bottle from the second row, Eleanor’s row, and opened it, leaving it to breathe on the counter. Then she called Astoria, who picked up on the second ring.

"Is something wrong?" Astoria answered.

"No, why?"

"Cordelia, it's five o'clock on a Friday and you've called me."

"You told me to."

"Okay, you’ve got me there. I did tell you to." Astoria laughed at her. "Give me a second. I'm adjusting."

"Take your time."

"I saw the press release at eleven. Remy sounded like she's been doing this for ten years."

"Remy wrote the note to everyone at the company herself. She brought it in for me to look at before she sent it out."

"And?"

She took a breath. Was she about to admit this out loud? "I reached for a pen to sign it." Wind came down the length of the upstairs hall. Cordelia stayed rooted to the spot. "But there were already three names at the bottom. There wasn't anywhere to put mine. It was…"

"Oh, Cordelia."

"It was better than the one I'd written."

"Well, of course it was. You raised her."

"You know, Wren is driving up to my house on the coast at six," Cordelia said.

"I know. Remy told me before she got her coat off."

"Honestly, I don't know what she's coming to say."

Astoria didn't answer that. Cordelia crossed to the window at the end of the hall and looked down at the beans she'd tied an hour ago, the only real work she'd done all day.

"Okay," Astoria said. "One question, and then I'm hanging up because if I stay on the phone you’ll start to tune me out eventually."

"All right, I’m listening."

"What are you hoping she says?"

Below the headland, the tide pulled back off the rocks. "I… I hadn't gotten that far."

"You've had five days to figure it out, Cordelia!"

"Yeah, I know."

"Well. You've got until six." Something shifted on her end, a cup going down on a table. "Thursdays. Seven o'clock. We're dead serious about it." And she hung up before Cordelia could ask what she meant.

There were still forty minutes left, and she had done everything she could to prepare. She walked down the stairs and went out to the porch to sit. Low light came through the glass and lay flat across the boards. Along the coast, the fog lay in a long, gray line far out, and under the headland the water went on lapping at the rocks. She listened to it and closed her eyes while leaning back in the chair. She could not remember the last time she had sat anywhere without a reason to be sitting there.