Page 12 of The CEO’s Assistant

“Second.” She nudged the two manila folders in front of her a half-inch toward Wren. “I need the data room built. All the documents, in order, ready to be reviewed once the restructuring is far enough along. It can’t happen here, though. Too many people come by. And it needs to be done in one stretch, not between interruptions.” She paused, short but enough for Wren to catch it, the smallest hitch before she continued. “The coastal house is the only place outside this building with the same security we’ve got here. I’d like you to be up there this weekend to draft it. I’ll drive up Friday afternoon, and you can come Friday evening, work on Saturday, and finish up by Sunday to be home on Sunday evening.” She paused again. “There’s a guest wing, of course.”

Wren caught the pause. Moving sensitive work out of a secure building came with hundreds of small risks they couldn’t entirely account for. She internalized the rest of it. A private house, two hours from anyone, and a weekend under the roof of a woman she had only known in the context of the office. People who hadn’t done this work before would have raised an eyebrow, but Wren heard there would be a secure location and a tight deadline.

“Yes, that works.”

Cordelia nodded, already reaching for her pen. Wren let herself out of the office and walked back to her desk where she booked an Uber for Friday afternoon to take her to the coastal house before she pulled up the calendar consolidation to get on with her day.

The rest of the afternoon passed quietly, and Wren let herself fall into the work, which was easy on the days she let it. The calendar came together while the light in the antechamber turned from white to gold and stretched long across the floor. Cordelia stayed behind her door, and twice, Wren passed it on her way to the kitchen. Once, she caught Cordelia standing at the window with the phone against her ear, not talking, only listening, with one hand pressed flat to the small of her back as if it ached. Wren looked away quickly before she could be caught looking.

A little before five o’clock, Veronica Kepling stopped at her desk on her way out, her coat already slung over her arm. “That was handled really well this morning,” she said. “The Halvorsen business, that is. Thank you.” She waited long enough for Wren to say, “Of course,” and then she was gone, walking toward the elevators.

Wren knew Veronica meant it, too, which got under her skin a little. It was a good thank you, but when the interaction was done, Veronica continued on home to live her life and Wren was left with…this. People were kind to her, but they were always on their way somewhere else. She had set up her life this way on purpose—new town, new sublet, nothing to hold her down—and it suited her fine. Most of the time, at least. But on the long days when the work floor emptied around her and the lights winked out one by one and she had no particular reason to be anywhere or with anyone, it suited her less.

By half past six, she had worked on the calendar as much as she could for one day, so she shut the laptop, locked the bottom desk drawer, and hoisted her grandmother’s bag off the hook, the leather strap worn pale and soft where Mildred had held it for forty years. Cordelia’s door was firmly closed now, but Wren could hear the low resonance of Cordelia’s voice beyond it. She stood there a second longer than she needed to, listening to the sound of it without being able to make out the words, then forced herself to leave.

The elevator was mirrored on three sides and always a few degrees too warm for comfort. The doors closed and the car descended. She caught her reflection in the mirror: tired with dark circles under her eyes, a little haggard in her face, her grandmother’s watch loose on her wrist that had only gotten thinner than she liked in the last few months. And, underneath all of it, she had nowhere to be, no one left to be useful to. She was just by herself, alone in a warm box, which was everything she had been trying to outrun since this morning.

She had spent all day not thinking about the morning. Now, with nothing to do but drop eight floors, she couldn’t avoid it any longer. She thought about how Cordelia had looked at her when she came back after Wren had patched the leak. The way Cordelia had glanced up as Wren stepped into her office, and for half a second before the mask slid over her face, Cordelia had looked genuinely, simply glad. Glad that it was Wren. It had been so long since anyone had looked at Wren and been glad that she existed, rather than glad she was there to fix something. So long, in fact, that Wren had nearly not recognized the expression when she saw it. Wren had tucked it into her chest and had been carrying it around with her all day since, warm yet slightly uncomfortable, like a coal she couldn’t set down.

She shook her head to come back to herself and stop with the flights of fancy. Cordelia was just a good boss who was pleased with good work. Wren told herself that she was just reading too much into a look that meant nothing because she was tired, and the day had been long and strange, and she was—she made herself think it—lonely. Lonely was familiar, a simple fact about her life. It certainly wasn’t a feeling about any one person.

Except…it was about one person. That was what she kept coming back to. She had learned Cordelia by now. The small things underneath the surface, the ones you only came to know from observing someone closely and often, and from wanting very much to understand what you saw. She knew that Cordelia’s eyes were gray most of the time, but that there was a flash of light that turned them an almost green hue when something excited or reached her deeply. She knew the particular stillness that meant Cordelia had already decided on something and was waiting patiently for others to catch up to her. She knew that Cordelia had a fresh scent, like the air off the harbor just before dawn, and that getting close enough to know it had become, god help her, the thing Wren had quietly built the rest of her day around.

And she knew what it did to her, letting something matter. Except last time, it was her work, not a person. She had found something she could pour herself into and she poured until there was nothing left. By thirty-one, she was so burned out that she had sat on the edge of a hotel bed in a city she couldn’t, for a moment, name and cried for the better part of an hour over a houseplant. It was a pothos that she had left behind in the last apartment and had forgotten to give away, dead by now for certain, the only living thing that had ever depended on her and she had let it wither and die. That was what being constantly needed made of her. She refused to hand herself to a person and let it reduce her to that again.

So, no, whatever this was or wasn’t, she wasn’t going to indulge in it. She was going to drive up to the coast on Friday and build the data room and be very good at her job, and then she was going to come home on Sunday. And if some disloyal part of herself spent the weekend aware of Cordelia’s presence, it would pass. Things passed, and she was very good at allowing things to fizzle out.

The elevator car slipped past the third floor. Her left hand found its way to the pulse point on her right wrist without her realizing it, and she closed her hand around the watch, turning the loose face of it. Mildred had done that all her life, a hand at her own wrist, turning the watch face, as she thought through a problem. Somewhere along the way, it had become Wren’s go-to tell too. Mildred had loved her plainly without asking her to earn it, which was the one kind of love Wren had never quite known what to do with. She held on to the watch until the doors opened to the lobby. Then she let go, and stepped out into the evening, and went home to her rented room.

7

Chapter 7: Cordelia

It was far enough into spring that the flowers on the dogwood trees along the harbor block were dropping, and by two o’clock, the petals fluttered down past the windows whenever the wind moved through them. Cordelia had the quarterly figures open and had gone through them twice, writing and scratching out notes as she went down the list. She glanced at the clock. Remy was dropping by the office at two-thirty.

At a quarter past, her daughter’s voice rang through from the antechamber. Early, which was Remy’s style. She ran ahead of schedule for the things she cared about and arrived precisely on time for everything else. Cordelia couldn’t make out the words, only the quick, easy sound of them. Wren’s voice threaded lower underneath. Something Remy said turned into a laugh. Cordelia capped her pen and went to the door.

Remy stood at the corner of the desk with a brown leather portfolio against her side, in a soft dress in periwinkle blue. Remy had already gotten Wren talking, and Wren, whom Cordelia had not once in three weeks seen caught off guard, was half-turned up from the desk toward her with the look of someone picking a conversation back up rather than starting one. Remy had this effect on people, and Cordelia had stopped being surprised by it a long time ago.

“You’re early,” Cordelia said.

“Since when am I not?”

Remy crossed the room and wrapped both arms around her, holding her a few seconds longer than usual. Remy always held on longest. When she stepped back, the light reflecting off the water was full on her face, and her eyes were suddenly Eleanor’s—dark and level, staying trained on Cordelia past the point of comfort. Cordelia had never quite learned how to be stared at by Remy. She looked at the portfolio instead.

“Come in. Do you want anything?”

“Wren’s bringing me some water,” she said lightly.

So, Remy had sent Wren to the executive kitchenette. Cordelia stepped aside to let her daughter through to the office ahead of her. Wren came back with the glass as they reached the door and held it out. Remy took it, and there was a small smile shared between them. Cordelia brushed it off.

“Thank you,” Remy said, then took a sip.

Wren smiled again and went back to her desk, and Cordelia shut the inner office door. Remy took the left chair opposite from the desk, the one that she had sat in since she was old enough to come in after school and wait out the afternoon with a book or homework. Remy set the water on the edge of the desk and placed the portfolio in her lap. It was thicker than Cordelia had expected, its edge feathered with the colored tabs Remy used when she was annotating something closely.

Cordelia came around the desk and sat in the chair next to her. “Go ahead.”

Remy looked at her, then opened the portfolio. For the first few minutes, Cordelia only listened to Remy’s presentation. It was about water: the towns too small to protect themselves from what the next twenty years were going to do to them and the money that only ever showed up after the flood instead of before it. Remy had spent over a month, by the look of the tabs, working out how to get it there first. She talked fast, which she only did when she believed deeply in something, and she was half out of her chair, turning the pages face-out on her knee for Cordelia to see. Cordelia let her finish before asking any questions.