I read it twice.
Then I set it down on the desk. I pick the letter up, and I tear it in half.
She blinks. Once. “Mr. Petrov?—”
“No.”
“You haven’t heard my reasons?—”
“I don’t need your reasons. The answer is no.”
She pulls in a breath. “With respect, you cannot simply refuse a resignation. I have the right to?—”
“You have the right to give me a reason worth considering.” I set the two halves of the letter on the desk between us. “Personal circumstancesis not a reason. It is a placeholder.”
“It’s the reason I am giving you.”
“Then it is not sufficient.”
She looks at me with the expression she gets when she’s deciding how hard to push, and I look back at her and wait, and the office is very quiet.
“I cannot continue in this role,” she says carefully. “Given everything that has happened, I think it is better for both of us if I?—”
“You are the most capable person in this organization.” I say it plainly, the way I say things that are simply true and not up for discussion. “I have no interest in replacing you. I have less interest in spending the next six months trying to find someone who can do half of what you do, and I will not do it. The answer is no, Elena, and that is the end of this conversation.”
She opens her mouth.
“That is the end of this conversation,” I say again.
She closes her mouth. She looks at the two halves of the letter on my desk, then at me, and whatever she sees in my face tells her that pushing further today won’t produce a different result. She picks up her folder. She straightens her jacket.
“Is there anything else you need this morning?” she says.
“The Morrison summary on my desk by ten.”
“It will be there.”
She walks out.
I watch the door close behind her, and I stand behind my desk and look at the two halves of her resignation letter.
I think about the way she looked at me when I tore it, that single blink, and the way she held herself through all of it. I think about three weeks of sitting in hotel rooms in Moscow and Geneva, and not being able to stop turning her over in my mind.
I’m not as angry as I should be, and that tells me something I have been declining to look at directly for six weeks. She lied to me by omission for three weeks, and I tore her resignation letter in half, and what I am feeling right now is not anger. It is something considerably less straightforward than anger and considerably more inconvenient.
She is twenty-three years old. She is my secretary. She has been both of those things the entire time, and none of it has made any difference to the fact that I think about her constantly and have been thinking about her constantly since the night of the masquerade, and I’m done pretending that is going to stop on its own.
She is also hiding something.
I don’t know what it is yet. But I have been reading people for thirty years, and the thing underneath her composure this morning was not just the weight of a resignation she was preparing herself to deliver.
It was something else. And she is not going to tell me what it is voluntarily, which means I am going to have to wait until she has no other option.
I pick up the two halves of the letter and drop them in the bin.
There’s a knock at the door.
“Come in.”
