Page 27 of The CEO’s Assistant

"Good. You’re here. You didn't have to knock, you know."

Wren didn't have an answer for that.

"Same room as before," Cordelia said. "It's already made up for you." She turned back toward the kitchen. "We'll start at four."

Wren carried her bag past her into the house, and the smell of the place came back at her before she'd taken three steps, salt and old cedar. It seemed like nothing in the house had moved since April, as if it had been frozen in time. She went upstairs.

The room was the same. The white quilt, the reading lamp, the view of the water past the curtains. The bed had been made up with fresh sheets, and Cordelia had left a folded towel at the foot of it. Wren looked at the towel for longer than it warranted, her mind sifting through various possibilities, then she unpacked. It took four minutes: two shirts onto hangers, the rest into the top drawer, and at the bottom of the bag, folded flat under everything else, the fancy underwear she didn't wear to work. She slid it under the rest of the clothes and shut the drawer.

She came back downstairs at ten to. Cordelia had the pages spread across her half of the table and her glasses on already. "Start with the second-quarter numbers and work backward. Everything Kepling sent in May supersedes what she sent in March. If there's a version conflict, flag it. Don't resolve it."

"Finished by Sunday night."

"Finished by Sunday night," Cordelia confirmed. "And after that, nobody touches it again."

So Wren opened the index. The first thing she did was go through April. The version she'd built went into the archive with a date on it, and the new one took its place. It took four keystrokes, and then it was gone. After that, it should have been easy. It was the kind of work she had done for years, long enough that she could do it while listening to someone else talk. But she couldn’t get her brain to stay focused.

The table was four feet across. Cordelia sat on the other side of it, with her sleeves still pushed up and her glasses down her nose. She read and turned pages, and every so often she made a mark with the pen. Every time Wren heard it, something in her went tight. She read the same line in the schedule three times without any of it sinking in. Then she read it a fourth time and gave up and went on to the next one.

Her whole body knew where Cordelia was at any given moment. She didn't have to look up to know when she shifted or reached for her water or pushed her glasses back up. She could smell her from across the table, the same soap she'd smelled in the dark on Wednesday, and her stomach dropped. She sat there, letting it happen. Keep your eyes on the screen, Wren. Her mouth went dry. She took a gulp of water, but it didn't help. She read a line about payment terms four times and could not have said what it was about.

Say something about it, Wren thought. Say one thing.

Every time Cordelia drew a breath to speak, Wren's fingers stopped on the keys and waited. But every time, it was just about the work. To her credit, Cordelia didn't look up. Not once in two hours—not when she asked a question, not when Wren answered it. She kept her eyes on the paper and her voice on the work, and Wren sat there with her heart going and typed, because it was the only thing she felt like she could do.

Around six she stopped working and didn't know for how long. She looked at what she was making. Every document had been indexed, cross-referenced, and named in a scheme a stranger could follow. Every version had been reconciled. Every gap was closed, and every gap that couldn't be closed was written up so that nobody would ever have to come and ask her what she'd meant by it. A set that could be handed to someone who had never been in the same room as any of it and would still make sense.

And that’s what struck her. She had built structures like this before. Twice, actually, and both times she had known what it was before anyone had told her. This was more than just a firm reorganizing itself for efficiency and was instead made for a stranger to come in and take over, seamlessly, as if Cordelia were still pulling the strings herself.

She didn't want to know. That came first, low in her stomach, before any thought did, and she pushed it down and made herself think anyway. Cordelia was fifty-three. Wren kept the calendar and was the only one who saw the complete picture, which meant she could spot patterns faster than anyone else. Since March, slots had been filling up with the senior women, one at a time, an hour each, no reason given in the invitation. She had booked every one of them herself and thought nothing about it, but now, with the information she had, it made her look at it more closely.

A woman who meant to step back from a company she had built would want it running without her before she left. That was all it was: a succession. She wanted that to be the answer badly enough that she almost stopped there. Then she reached for her water and stopped halfway.

Nobody hid a succession. A succession came with a press release, a photograph, eighteen months of speeches, a party with a cake and somebody standing up to talk about legacy. Cordelia wasn’t doing any of that, and Wren still didn’t know why she was the only person who was able to handle sensitive documents when she had only been at the firm for three months. There was one more question after that one, and she was already most of the way to it, and her heart was going hard, and she thought: if I ask it, I'm not who she thinks I am.

"Wren."

She came up out of it so fast the room tilted. Cordelia was still looking at the page. She had her glasses on and one hand flat on the paper. The quiet went on long enough that Wren heard the refrigerator start humming in the kitchen.

"The May pages," Cordelia said, finally. "Have they been reconciled?"

"Yes."

"Good." She turned the page.

Wren sat there with her pulse hammering her throat and waited for Cordelia to reveal everything to her, but she stayed quiet and kept working. About an hour later, Cordelia stood up. She went into the kitchen and stopped at the counter without running the tap or opening a cupboard. Wren watched her from the table, following Cordelia’s eyeline, and saw she was looking at the wine rack.

She stood there a while. Then she came back and sat down and picked up the next page, and read three lines of it before she said, not looking up, "It's later than I thought."

"It's half past seven," Wren confirmed.

"Yes." She took her glasses off. "That's enough for tonight."

Wren saved the file and closed the laptop. She stood and felt how sore her back was, then stretched her torso long as she looked out the window. At some point, the sun set without her noticing, and the only lights came from the half moon and stars. The wind had picked up hard enough to move the branches at the tree line and the water below the headland thrashed against the rocks.

Cordelia crossed to the kitchen. She went to the rack and put her hand on a bottle in the second row and stopped and stood there with her back to the room. "Hungry?”

“Yes,” Wren said, walking into the kitchen. “I can help. What would you like me to do?”