"And after that, we'll be eating sawdust and caterpillars."
"Amazing."
Silence. A long stretch of it, and that was when Chelsea belatedly realized Kelly might be on to her at last.
"I'm sorry." Chelsea met the other woman's gaze in sheepish apology.
It had been over a week since Kelly had been assigned to her, and in that time Chelsea had learned two things: Kelly was terrifyingly good at her job, and Kelly had absolutely no idea what to do with a boss's wife who wanted to be her friend.
Chelsea adored her.
Kelly did not yet know what to do with being adored by Chelsea, which was part of what made the whole thing so enjoyable.
"Do I even want to know why you're unusually distrac—-" Oh no. The moment Kelly saw Chelsea's face light up, she knew right away she had said the wrong thing. "Forget it," she said quickly. "I don't even—-"
"But you already asked," her billionaire boss's wife argued, "and I already heard you, and so you can't take it back."
Kelly looked at her watch. "Oh, will you look at that? I just remembered I have another meeting to attend to."
She was already turning around and heading to the elevator, but since she was wearing three-inch heels while the younger woman, like always, was so much more mobile in her comfortable pair of Mary Janes—-
"You have to hear me out, Kelliebear."
Not only was it impossible to outrun Chelsea—-
"I don't know who Kelliebear is—-"
But so was freeing herself from Chelsea's arm that was suddenly tucked around hers, which was like trying to get away from a mousetrap.
"He agreed to read it, Kelliebear!"
"I'm really busy—-"
"Sienah told me that he's always politely turned them down, but he said yes right away, and that means something, right? It does, right? We can hope, right?"
Chelsea was beaming, and Kelly made the mistake of looking at her directly, which was always a tactical error because the girl's happiness was so uncontained and so genuine that it did something to Kelly's reserve that she would never, under any circumstances, admit to.
And that was the thing about Chelsea Cannizzaro that Kelly had never figured out how to defend against. Most people who were relentlessly nice were performing. Kelly had spent fourteen years in corporate communications and she could spot a performance from three floors away. But Chelsea wasn't performing. Chelsea was simply, bafflingly, inconveniently sincere, and the sincerity wasn't a strategy, it was a condition, like her limp or her inability to pass a person without making them feel like they mattered.
It was, professionally speaking, the most disarming thing Kelly had ever encountered. And she had no protocol for it.
It was also the reason Kelly had, three days ago, done something she had never done in fourteen years of working with executives and their families: she had gone home and told her cat about her day. Not the meetings or the briefings or the schedule. The fact that Chelsea Cannizzaro had noticed Kelly rotating her wrist during a long briefing, and the next morning there was a small tube of arnica cream on Kelly's desk with a sticky note that saidFor the wrist! I used to get those cramps too in rehab. This brand is the best, I promise!!with three exclamation marks and a smiley face.
Kelly had stared at that note for a long time.
Then she had put the cream in her desk drawer and used it every day since and told absolutely no one.
The elevator doors opened, and Chelsea was still beaming as she pulled Kelly inside, and the last thing anyone on the floor noticed before the doors closed was Kelly's expression, the long-suffering, slightly bewildered look of a woman who had built her entire career on composure and was watching it get dismantled, daily, by a girl who called her Kelliebear and meant it.
The elevator descended, and in its wake, the floor settled back into its usual rhythm.
Rhea watched Ms. Nobody from Nowhere disappear behind those closing doors with her assistant.
Herassistant. The one that should have been Rhea's, if things had gone the way they were supposed to go.
Because things were supposed to go a certain way. Rhea had made sure of it. Two years of positioning herself at this desk, two years of arriving early and staying late and making sure she was at her post, impeccable and camera-ready, for the ninety-second window each morning when the boss crossed the lobby toward his private elevator bank. She had studied what he liked. She had dressed for it. She had done the work.
And instead, he had ended up with a girl who had done nothing. Who had simply walked into this lobby with a limp and a Bible and a cotton dress covered in flowers, and smiled, and the whole building had rearranged itself around her like she was magnetic north and everyone else had been pointing in the wrong direction.
