Kirsten has been chewing on the same pen cap for forty-seven minutes.
It’s been three days since the family gathering, and something is clearly wrong. She scrolls through a document, frowns, scrolls back up, frowns deeper. She pinches her brows together as she clicks between tabs and lets out a frustrated breath. Then she starts the whole cycle again.
She’s struggling. And she’s too stubborn to ask for help.
“Problem?” I finally ask.
She doesn’t look up as she snaps, “No.”
“You’ve been staring at that same spreadsheet for close to an hour.”
That gets her attention. She turns to face me, one eyebrow raised. “You’ve been counting?”
“I notice things.”
“That’s not creepy at all.”
I push back from my desk and walk over to hers. She immediately angles her monitor away, like a student hiding test answers. The move is so childish that it almost makes me burst out laughing.
“Kirsten.”
“It’s fine. I’ve got it under control.”
“You clearly don’t.”
She sets her jaw. “I said I’ve got it.”
I lean against the edge of her desk, close enough to catch the scent of her shampoo. Something floral and utterlydistracting. I force myself to focus on the task at hand instead of the way that scent makes me want to lean closer.
“What’s the assignment?”
She sighs, finally giving up the pretense. “Marcus asked me to analyze the vendor contracts from the Westbrook account. I’m supposed to cross-reference them with our existing supplier agreements and flag any conflicts or redundancies.”
“And?”
“And I don’t know your company’s vendor protocols.” She gestures at her screen with obvious frustration. “I don’t know your pricing structures or which relationships are priority versus expendable. I’m looking at hundreds of contracts, and I have no framework to evaluate them.”
I nod. This makes sense. She’s brilliant at data analysis—her old work proves that beyond any doubt. The reports she produced for the previous management were flawless, and her attention to detail is remarkable. But this task requires institutional knowledge she doesn’t have. Knowledge about my company, my systems, and my way of doing things. None of that was part of her original job description, and nobody bothered to train her on our processes after the acquisition.
“I can handle that.”
“No,” she replies, shaking her head.
“Why not?”
“Because if you do it for me, I don’t learn anything. I’ll figure it out. It’ll just take longer.”
“How much longer?”
She pauses and squints as if she’s mentally working it out. “A week. Maybe two.”
“Marcus needs it by Friday.”
“Then Marcus can wait.”
This time, I do smile. I can’t help it. “Marcus reports to me. If I tell him to wait, he waits. But that’s not the point.”
“What is the point?”
