Page 8 of The CEO’s Assistant

“Would you like something to drink?” Cordelia asked, remembering how to play host.

“Um, just water is okay.”

Cordelia turned toward the kitchen and grabbed a glass to fill it, grateful for something mundane to do. She set it next to Wren and sat in the stool next to her.

“So,” Wren said. “Where do you want to start?”

Cordelia unlocked her briefcase and slid the file onto the island in front of them. “From the top.”

For the first hour, Cordelia did most of the talking. She walked Wren through the restructuring: what it changed, the order everything had to happen in, and what had to be true at each stage before the next could begin. Wren read the papers while she listened, one finger moving down the page, stopping her in the gaps with better questions than the ones the lawyers asked.

Wren flipped between two pages. “It moves in stages. A lot of them. Why so careful?”

“Because once a piece is done, it can’t be undone. People stay or they don’t. Every stage makes one thing absolutely certain before the next is allowed to touch it.”

“And you’d rather it be a slower process.”

Cordelia looked over at her. “Why do you say that?”

“Because you built the whole thing to keep the order in your hands.” Wren tipped her head at the screen. “If it goes too fast, it gets away from you. And it’s clear this can’t get away from you. You set it up so it couldn’t.”

It was true, and Cordelia had never said it aloud to anyone in quite that way, yet a stranger saw through it in about an hour.

“Something like that,” Cordelia finally said, then steered the conversation back to the schedule before the quiet could become anything significant.

They went down the packet line by line. Wren caught a place where a step was dependent on something with no date beside it, only a note that said when, not if.

“This one’s open,” Wren said. “Everything else has a date, but this just says it happens eventually.”

Cordelia leaned over to see what Wren was talking about. “That one we’ll talk about another night.” She said it lightly, and it was true enough. But Cordelia recognized what this was—her having to make the decision all evening what to hand across and explain to Wren and what to keep to herself. For now, anyway. She realized she’d be having to make these choices all evening as they went page by page, looking over paragraphs Wren wasn’t meant to see, much less understand the implications of.

Outside the windows, the harbor went from pewter to slate to nothing. The freighter’s lights came up off the breakwater, green and white, and the room drew in close around the two of them. Somewhere during the second hour, Cordelia plated the chicken dish she had cooked and placed a small woven basket with bread between them.

They ate in relative silence without working, and Wren complimented Cordelia saying, “This is good,” around a mouthful, as if it had caught her off guard. Cordelia swallowed the impulse to confess the bread wasn’t freshly homemade and that she had walked down to the harbor for it, or she hadn’t cooked for anyone else in longer than she’d like to admit.

Later, it was Wren who found the first real problem, a little after eight. She had gone quiet, moving back and forth between two pages, the space between her brows slightly furrowed more and more each time she flipped the pages. She looked at the laptop, like she was trying to confirm something, then turned it toward Cordelia by a few degrees.

“The value you’ve put on the firm.” She set her finger on the number. “You got to this by comparing yourself to a handful of companies like yours and seeing what each of them was valued at. But most of these numbers are old, from back when borrowing money was cheap and everything got priced high. That world is gone, which means the other side gets to say your comparisons don’t count anymore and that by today’s math the firm is worth less than this. As it stands, you’ve handed them the evidence to win that argument.”

“The number is defensible,” Cordelia said. She had defended it herself more than once.

“It’s defensible if nobody pushes. They’ll push.” Wren didn’t budge or give any ground. “Right now, you’ve got three or four examples holding up your entire argument. I’d want twenty if I were you. So many that when they lowball you, you don’t need to argue. You just bury their number under twenty, or more, that say otherwise, all recent, all real, and you let the numbers do the talking for you.”

Cordelia leaned in and read where Wren was pointing. She ran the scenario forward in her head the way the other side would run it. Wren was right. The number was sound and the ground beneath it was thin. Thin ground was where a projection like this came apart.

“Get me more,” she said. “Twenty or thirty recent numbers. I’m meeting with them on Monday afternoon, and I’d rather walk in with that information than be defenseless.”

“You’ll have it tomorrow.” Wren was already writing down a note in a notepad.

Something in Cordelia eased that she hadn’t planned on. She had forgotten what it was like to work beside someone who kept up with her, someone who got there first half the time and didn’t make her feel slow for the extra few seconds it took for her to catch up. She didn’t say this aloud, though. She just reached back for the bottle of wine and poured them both some.

Wren had drunk two glasses of water and was starting a third. When Cordelia set the wine glass next to her, Wren capped the pen and picked up the glass and swirled it. For a moment, neither of them did anything but drink and watch the dark water and lights standing out in it. The building was quiet around them. It was the kind of quiet that Cordelia was most comfortable spending her evenings in alone, and she didn’t question herself why tonight, when there was someone else here, it still felt easy.

“Can I be blunt for a minute?” Wren asked.

Cordelia looked at her. “Of course.”

“Whoever built this was good. Fast and good, which is a rare combination. They just stopped a draft too early. They got it most of the way there but then ran out of time before the last stretch.” She turned her wine glass slowly by its stem. “I spent six years cleaning up after people who were careless and sure of themselves. This is the opposite of that. This is someone who is careful and meticulous but just ran out of runway to finish it properly.”