Page 3 of The CEO’s Assistant

“In return for your discretion, the salary is a step above what I quote to the recruiter. If you choose to take it, you’ll start a week from Monday, and there’s an NDA. Twelve pages. I know this is unconventional, but I’ll need it signed before you leave the building.”

“Can I review it first?”

“Yes.” Cordelia reached into her desk and pulled out another manilla folder and handed it to her.

A year ago, Wren would have insisted on being about to take it home to meticulously review. She’d have read every line, scribbled notes in the margin, and asked questions before putting ink to paper. But now, she was too fatigued to insist, and having somewhere to be again, having someone who needed her to be good at the one thing she’d always been good at, was the first thing in months that had gotten through the static.

She read through the contract once, signed, then slid the folder across the desk.

“A week from Monday,” Cordelia said.

Out on the street, Wren was already working out how to tell Millie—the job, the strange woman who hired her, the contract she had barely read before signing. She had the whole conversation scripted before she remembered her grandmother was three months dead. Her shoulders slumped over.

She didn’t go home but instead rode the number fourteen bus out past downtown to the end of the line and walked down to the harbor as she had on that empty Sunday. Unlike then, today, she felt the cool wind whipping off the water and the emptiness in her sternum at Millie being gone. She felt all of it, all at once, and she would have traded it all back to feel nothing again, if anyone had offered.

Wren sat on a cold bench and called Lillian, the closest person she could call besides her grandmother, and she answered on the second ring.

“I’m fine,” Wren said, before she could talk. “Nothing’s wrong. I just… I just wanted to hear your voice.”

“It’s Thursday, little bird.”

“I know.”

There was a pause, then Wren heard the creak of Lillian lowering into her chair. “You had your interview already?”

“Yes. It went fine. I got the job.” She heard Lillian draw in a breath to make it into a celebration, so she cut in first. “It’s an assistant job. Scheduling and emails. Nothing to plan a parade over.”

“You’re staying then? Here, in Phoenix Ridge.”

“For now.”

“Little bird,” Lillian said and breathed deeply. “That’s a good thing.”

Wren didn’t know what was good anymore. Nothing felt right in her body, and her insides felt scrambled. She changed the topic. “How are you? Did you go to the eye doctor yet?”

Lillian told her about the eye doctor and the library book she had quit at page forty in a huff. Wren volleyed the next question and the next, keeping the flow of conversation going anywhere except what she didn’t want to talk about.

But then Lillian said, “And what about you, little bird? Are you sleeping?”

“Some.”

“Eating enough?”

“Lillian,” Wren said with an edge to her voice that she didn’t mean.

“Somebody has to ask you,” Lillian said. “Otherwise…”

Lillian didn’t have to finish the sentence for them to both know what she was going to say. Otherwise you’ll slip into one of your dark spells again, and the end of it that Wren knew they’d never voice aloud: and maybe this time, we won’t see it in time.

Wren looked at the glittering water and softened her eyes, almost in a trance. She inhaled once, deeply, to come back into her body.

“I should let you go, Lillian.”

“You should come for supper Sunday. I’ll make the thing you like.”

“Sunday,” Wren agreed. She meant it, too, or at least she wanted to.

She sat on the bench a while after the line went dead, letting the cold seep into her pants, then she slipped the phone into Millie’s bag, stood, and walked back to the bus stop before daylight faded.