Page 14 of The CEO’s Assistant

Chapter 8: Wren

The private road ran a quarter mile through fir trees old enough to close over the top of it, and for that stretch, the light turned green and spotty. Wren eased the car slowly around bends. She had been driving for two hours already, and the GPS had lost its signal on the cliff road somewhere back and found it again at the turn-off, announcing it with the flat confidence of a machine.

Then the trees opened, revealing a clearing on a low headland, the grass long and silver where the wind moved through it. At the far end, Wren could see the house, facing the water. It was older than she had pictured. Cordelia had said there was a guest wing, back in the office, so she expected something a little more modern, something that would fit her idea of Cordelia’s aesthetic. This was a two-story cedar cottage weathered to a gray color of the rocks below it, with a porch running the entire western side of the house. The roof was low and settled, and the cottage looked like it was approaching a century old. Wren spotted a garden that ran the length of the sound wall and had gone all the way to weeds, but the slightly raised beds were still visible, somebody’s old attempt at order holding on underneath the chaos of it. Cordelia’s sleek, black Porsche was in the gravel driveway. Wren pulled in beside her and cut the engine. The chilly wind whipped off the water and stripped the warmth of the long drive off her in one salty pass. As she walked toward the house, she noticed Cordelia had opened all the windows to let the house breathe and release stale air.

“You made good time,” Cordelia called at her from the porch, lifting a hand in acknowledgement.

“The roads were clear.”

“They usually are.” She carried a canvas bag of groceries against one arm. “There’s more in the car, if you don’t mind.”

Wren didn’t mind. She grabbed the rest of the groceries and her own bag, then walked inside. She stopped a few steps in the house and scanned the layout: kitchen to the left, a long dining table straight ahead and set lengthwise along the windows with a lovely view of the water, a stone fireplace to the right, and stairs rising at the back into the dark of the second floor. Indoors, the air was cooler and stiller than the air outside, despite the windows flung open.

They put the groceries away together. Cordelia both knew the kitchen and didn’t. She went straight to the right drawer for the corkscrew, then opened two cabinets before she found the pots, and once stood with a bag of onions in her hand and looked at the counter as if it had moved on her while she wasn't watching. A person could know a kitchen by heart and still have to hunt for the pots, if it had been long enough. Wren handed her things and didn't ask.

Cordelia cooked. Onions and anchovies going soft in oil, then garlic, a can of tomatoes, olives, and a spoon of capers. And at the end, a handful of parsley off the one plant in the garden the weeds hadn’t suffocated. The smell of it filled the downstairs, and Wren set out two place settings on the wooden dining table. After Cordelia plated the puttanesca on top of a bed of pasta on both plates, she chose a bottle of white wine from the rack and uncorked it.

They ate with the light going down over the water. Cordelia asked what she'd thought of a piece that had gone around the week before, some argument about how the small coastal towns would pay for the things that might save them. Wren had read it on a train and said so, and then she said what she thought was wrong with it, which no one had asked of her in a long time. Cordelia set down her fork and listened like it mattered. And Wren, who fed powerful women what they needed and kept the rest, felt herself wanting to keep talking and didn't trust it, but she kept talking anyway.

“You disagree with him?” Cordelia asked.

“He wants to build the structure and let the town grow into it. It’s backwards. A better way is finding out what the town already does and you fund that.” Wren twirled some pasta on her fork. “Bridges to nowhere get built by people who love bridges.”

Time passed easily, the two of them discussing the finer nuances of the article and civil stewardship philosophy. Wren couldn’t remember the last meal she had eaten that wasn’t standing up or alone or both. After, they cleared the dishes together. Cordelia ran the water too hot, but she washed the plates and Wren dried them with a towel she found hanging on the oven door. By time they had worked down the stack of dishes in the sink, the last hint of twilight disappeared.

Wren passed Cordelia the towel, and she dried off her hands. “The room at the top of the stairs on the right is already made up for you. Let’s come down and start at eight.”

“Thank you. Eight it is,” Wren said.

“Good night.”

Wren picked up her bag still by the foyer and climbed the stairs. The room was small and plainly decorated: a double bed with a white quilt, a dresser, a side table with a reading lamp, and a window with a view of the ocean just beyond the sheer curtains. Wren set her bag on the floor and let out a large exhale.

The water was black now, and far down, Wren could barely make out a scatter of lights illuminating houses, small and warm, belonging to people she would never meet. Around her, the house made its small, strange noises she couldn’t hear during the day. Wren felt the familiar ache of not having something to do to pass the time or feel useful. It was just her and the darkness until morning. Her right hand fiddled with the watch face before she worked loose the wristband and slipped it off. She stripped down to her underwear and put on her pajamas, then crawled into the bed. Sleep was a long way off.

Fog had swallowed the water by the time Wren came down at ten to eight. The house was cold. Cordelia sat at the long table with coffee already brewed and the files fanned out in front of her, her hair pulled back in a messy bun. She looked up when Wren’s foot hit the bottom stair.

“There’s coffee,” Cordelia said.

“Thanks. I smelled it.”

They worked in tandem. Cordelia read each page slowly, wrote some notes in the margins, and then sorted it in one of two piles. Wren took the piles and made sense of them, this paper behind that one, collated until the documents told a story.

The house warmed by a few degrees as the sun climbed. The only sounds around them were Cordelia’s pen scratching against the papers and the waves lapping at the rocks below the headland. By ten, the fog had thinned and the light came in off the water, and Wren found herself in a flow state. There was a lot to do and Wren moved through it quickly, piles growing at her elbow and cold coffee drunk without fully tasting it. Twice, Cordelia’s hand crossed into her line of vision to set a page down, and both times Wren’s flow hiccupped for a second before she found it again.

A little before noon, she hit a snag. Three of the contracts overlapped. Each one referenced the other two, and she couldn’t file any of them without a reviewer needing the others for context. There was no good place to start to untangle the thread.

She turned her laptop so Cordelia could see. “These three, each page points at the other two. I can’t put one first without the other two⁠—”

“Don’t order them.” Cordelia set her pen down. “Group them instead. One entry, all three, a note at the top⁠—”

“To read as a set.”

“To read as a set,” Cordelia said at the same time. She looked up at her for a second, then went back to reading.

It was the solution where Wren had been circling but hadn’t landed yet. Her chest went warm and stupid. She pulled the file over and got back to it, faster than before. They ate standing at the counter around one: bread, mozzarella, basil, and the last soft half of a tomato.

Cordelia held her caprese sandwich without eating it and watched the ocean. “You don’t have to feed me.”