Page 17 of The CEO’s Assistant

It was a good line. Pasternak laughed too loud, grateful for anywhere to put herself; Wei gave the small ready smile she kept for it. But Cordelia didn't smile back. A smile was the way out Beck wanted. One from anyone on Cordelia's side, and the whole hour turned into a friendly disagreement between old partners, nobody really up or down. Cordelia had won, and she wanted them all to know it walking out—Beck most of all. So she kept her face still and expected to be the only one who did.

But she wasn't. When she glanced down the table, Wren hadn't moved either—no smile, no soft laugh to fill the gap, just the same level look she'd worn all afternoon, while everyone else in the room had softened their faces for Beck. No one had told her to sit still. No one had taught her that it mattered. Cordelia certainly hadn't.

Beck looked around the table, found nothing to catch her, and let the joke go. She nodded once and handed Cordelia the floor to speak. They settled it in a few sentences back and forth. The agreement stood, and the manufacturer's third quarter would be looked at when the agreement said it would, at the quarterly, six weeks out. Done. Beck called it fair as she got to her feet. Over was closer to the truth, but Cordelia let her have the kinder word; it cost nothing, and Beck had a long drive home with three of her own people watching how she took the loss.

They shook hands across the table, quick and dry. Cordelia gave Beck's grip back at the same pressure, about as warm as the two of them ever got, then walked all three to the door and said something easy about the harbor this time of year. Then they were gone. Wren was already gathering the pads and pens that were left behind.

The corridor was empty, and they walked it without talking, as they had all week. In the elevator, Cordelia glanced over at Wren, a second at most, the same flat look she'd give anyone after an hour that had gone right. Wren returned it exactly. Neither of them said anything, and nothing needed saying. Cordelia watched the number climb above the door until the car stopped at the executive level. She stepped out, and the doors closed on Wren, who was going back down a floor to put away what they'd carried out. Cordelia didn't turn around. She heard the car start down.

The floor was half empty, heads bent over screens. Wren's desk sat outside her office, the legal pads squared at its edge, just as Wren had squared them on the conference table an hour before. Cordelia went in and shut the door. She had nine minutes before her next meeting. She used three minutes to write the meeting agenda and two to pull what she needed for the next call—a company a quarter behind on a number it had promised with a chief executive who would take half an hour to admit what she could have said in a sentence. That left four minutes, and Cordelia sat with the file open in front of her and didn't read it.

She wasn't thinking about Beck. She'd read Beck before the meeting started. Beck had come in with a weak hand, played it about as well as it could be played, and lost. None of it was a surprise, and it didn’t require some in-depth analysis to figure out why she won.

No, she was thinking about Wren, at the end of the table, not smiling.

She sat with the mental image for a minute. Thirty years of good assistants, and not one of them had ever predicted her needs so clearly or mirrored her body language in a meeting. Wren had done both that afternoon as if she had been doing it for years.

That wasn't the part that stayed with her. What stayed was that she'd stopped being surprised by it. Somewhere in the last few weeks she had started expecting Wren to know what she needed before she said it, and she couldn't remember letting that begin.

She set the thought aside. The file was still open, still unread. The phone rang out in a low tone. Meeting time. Cordelia picked up, said her name, and let the woman on the other end start in on the slow work of not quite admitting she was behind.

10

Chapter 10: Wren

Wren moved the place card down two seats and checked it against the list. Delacroix and Reyes couldn't sit together, not since the spring vote, and the event manager had put them one chair apart, close enough to go wrong somewhere between the second course and the wine. She set Reyes across the corner and straightened the card in front of the plate. That was the last of it.

The board had their quarterly dinner in the private room at Elements four times a year, and Wren had been in charge of the last two. She'd run nights like it for years before that, for other people, in other cities—handling the seating, the wine pace, the guest who ate no shellfish, the one who tried to leave early. She had spent six days prepping it. Now the room was ready, and she had forty minutes to spare. She walked a lap around the room once more and found nothing out of place.

The event manager came in with the wine list for a last sign-off and Wren initialed it without slowing. "Second pour after Ms. Hale's remarks. Not before. They'll run long if you fill them early." The woman nodded and went out.

She took the small table by the service door, where the assistant sat, half a step outside the light. She had always liked being on the edge of a room. From here she could see every seat and no one had to see her. She could observe everyone and take notes—who said what, what Cordelia would want a follow-up on in the morning, the thing someone let drop in passing that mattered more than they knew they'd said.

The board members came in at seven, warm from the bar downstairs, in twos and threes. Wren had the pad open and the names ready. She marked them off as they sat. Cordelia walked in last, and late, which was out of character for her.

She was in a dark dress that was plainer than her usual style, and she wore small pearl earrings that caught the low light when she turned her head. Wren could tell they were antique and real, though she hadn't seen her wear them before. She took all of it in, the dress and the pearls and the late arrival, in the time it took Cordelia to cross to the head of the table. Then she made herself stop looking, and she turned her attention down at the pad and uncapped her pen.

She wrote the time at the top of the page: 7:02. Down the table, the last chair scraped in, and the room went quiet for Cordelia, the way it always did. The first course went out at 7:10, right on the schedule she'd padded. She marked it and moved on.

She wrote while everyone else talked. The first half hour was the easy part of any dinner. Everyone was still loose from the drinks downstairs and glad to be off their feet, and she captured snippets from the night on paper: who'd ended up where, who Adler had pulled in close on her right, the joke about the drive up that landed and the one that didn't. All the things they said and did that they would guard better by ten.

She had always been good at reading the room and knowing what a person needed before they knew how to ask for it. It was the thing she was surest about being good at, maybe it was the only thing, and it had turned out that people would pay for her to be useful.

She'd put Delacroix and Reyes across a corner from each other on purpose, because they'd been on opposite sides of the spring vote and neither had let it go. It wasn't far enough. Over the soup, Reyes started in.

It came in over the soup, folded inside something that sounded like nothing. Reyes was talking about a hire her division had made in April, a good one, and she mentioned she'd had to fight for the money.

"You'd know about that," she said to Delacroix in a pleasant tone, not looking at her. "You held it up long enough."

"I asked questions," Delacroix said. "That's the job."

"Sure." Reyes turned her wine glass by the stem. "The job cost me six weeks and a candidate who nearly walked. She didn't. So."

"So it worked out."

"It worked out."

Adler leaned in from Delacroix's other side before either of them found the next thing to say. She asked Reyes how the new hire was settling in, and got two easy minutes back, long enough for everyone to compose themselves again. Delacroix drank her water, and Reyes kept talking. They let it drop. Wren wrote it small at the bottom of the page. Reyes / Delacroix, April hire, not settled. Cordelia would want it before the next meeting.