Page 32 of The CEO’s Assistant

"You didn't have to wait for me," she said. Her voice came out level, which surprised her. "There's the two o'clock meeting. You'll want time to prep for it."

Something flashed across Wren's face, not hurt exactly, something quieter, as if a small hope she'd been carrying all morning had just been answered. She stood. She didn't slide the folder toward Cordelia, nor did she tuck it out of sight.

"Do you want the handover memo left as it is?" she said. "It still calls the deal a restructuring." Her voice was even and exact, just a normal question about a document. Under it, though, was the only real question in the room: after their shared time in the coastal house, after all of it, was she going to keep lying to Wren's face?

"Leave it as it is," Cordelia said. "It has to match the slide deck for the board."

"Of course," Wren said and left.

She sat at her desk and wiggled her mouse until the screen flashed. After a moment, the ordinary sounds of her working came back through the open door, the small clicks and intermittent pauses, and work papered over the last four minutes as if they had never happened.

Cordelia put the term sheet back in the safe and turned the lock and worked without stopping until the entire office around her had gone dark and quiet. Then she called Astoria and got her voicemail a third time in three weeks, and she understood that she had let that friendship fracture over the years by being too quiet, by never being the one to reach out first. She gathered her belongings, stuffing them into her bag, and walked out of the office without turning off the desk lamp.

While she descended to the lobby, she was still enough for the day’s thoughts to catch up to her. She knew that her silence had settled nothing. It had only put off the day when Wren had decided she had waited long enough for answers that Cordelia wasn’t sure she could give her. Cordelia had seen that day coming already, that morning, in the stilled face across the desk. The only question left was when.

16

Chapter 16: Wren

The kettle had boiled and gone quiet, yet she still had her coat on. She'd come home from work at six-thirty, put the water on, and then stood in the middle of the small kitchen with her keys in her hand while the kettle rolled and clicked itself off and cooled again on the ring. Despite all that, she didn’t actually make a cup of tea. She still had Millie's bag on her shoulder, the brown leather gone pale at the corners, the too-long strap she'd never once shortened to her own height. She looked at the kettle for a while, then she picked her keys back up off the counter, where at some point she must have set them down, and let herself out.

Outside, the air was warmer than any night in late May had a right to be. The street had emptied out for the night, and a bus expelled exhaust at the corner as it turned. Under the neon pharmacy sign, a woman squatted on the balls of her feet as she talked to her dog. And past the railings, the harbor had gone flat and black, the water uncharacteristically still.

The apartment was too small to be inside of. That was the reason she told herself after she had walked the first block, and it was even true. She told herself she just needed to move. She walked east, along the harbor, past the shuttered seafood place where she saw two women sharing a bottle of wine, past the little park with its lilacs and foxgloves, out to where the town gave way to warehouse blocks and the streetlights thinned. Somewhere deep inside, she already knew where she was going.

She massaged the softest part of her wrist as she walked. She'd been useful all day, and usefulness was its own anesthetic. You didn't feel much while you were busy being needed. And Wren had been needed since nine that morning: clearing the inbox, building the deck for the two o'clock meeting, and fielding questions and requests from office staff. It all helped her stay half a step ahead of whatever she was feeling the entire time. But that only worked as long as someone needed the next thing, and at six, she walked out of the lobby into an evening where there were no requests, no tasks to do, no way for her to stay occupied, and it all caught up to her.

She wanted it to feel like a betrayal, a thing done to her, something she could clearly point to. But the coast came back instead. The morning when she was awake before Cordelia because she couldn't sleep in a strange bed, standing in that cold kitchen fighting the unfamiliar machine so coffee would be made when Cordelia came down. She'd been happy doing it, all of it. That was what turned her stomach and stung now—that she'd been happy.

She came up on the purple door before she'd let herself admit that was where she'd been going the whole time. The bay window was warm from the candles and jovial conversations. The chalkboard stood out on the sidewalk with the night's specials etched on it, and she didn't stop to read it. She pushed the door open. The bell rang out its one clear note, and she went inside.

The door swung shut behind her and cut the cool harbor air off at the threshold. In the cafe, the sounds and scents enveloped her and overloaded her senses at first. There was the bitter smell of coffee and something rosemary-heavy in the oven, and the low hum of a dozen conversations were all running at once. After the empty street and the even emptier apartment, the racket landed on her almost like a kindness. She stood on the mat a second and let it wash over her.

It had been like that the first time, too, on the spring night she'd finally pushed through the purple door after passing it since February. She'd walked in not knowing a soul, and Lavender had taken one look at her, set something small and dark in front of her, and told her nobody in the room needed a thing from her. It was the first time since after Millie's funeral that Wren had felt like a person instead of a set of arrangements. She'd found her way back once since. This was the third time she had been here and by far the worst night of the three.

Lavender was behind the bar in a dark blue sweater and her silver rings, cutting a lemon into wheels, and she glanced up when the bell chimed. She read Wren in about a second, the way she read everyone, and didn't make her perform being fine. "There you are, love," she said, low, and tipped her chin toward the room.

At the long communal table, six women were discussing a film animatedly, their hands flying around their faces as one bounced up and down in her chair explaining something. From the armchairs at the window, a regular Wren half-knew lifted a hand, and Wren returned the gesture with a half-hearted wave of her own.

Wren was three steps in before she saw Remy. She was at the far end of the bar, sitting alone, her dark hair down. A hardcover book laid face-down on the wood, and there was a glass of something pale at her elbow. It looked like she had been there a while.

Something came loose in Wren's memory. The face-down book, the pale wine—she knew this woman from somewhere else besides the office. That first spring night, this was the stranger who had swiveled around on her stool and initiated a conversation with her. A friendly local, Wren had thought, and never placed her again. And all that while, she had been Cordelia's daughter.

Remy looked up, and for a beat neither of them said anything. Then she lifted two fingers off the bar, not quite a wave but a greeting nonetheless. Wren tipped her chin back and took a stool a few spots down from her, setting her bag on the one beside it. When Lavender came down the bar with a questioning eyebrow, Wren opened her mouth to order and found she didn’t know what she wanted. She'd wanted a drink the whole length of the walk. Now that it came to choosing one, she couldn't manage the smallest decision in the world.

"Something," she said. "I don't— Honestly, you choose. I'm all out of decisions for one day."

Lavender didn't make her struggle for it. She reached for the squat dark bottle on the back shelf and poured an amber whiskey in a short glass. She slid three rosemary crackers alongside it. "Start there," she said. "Wave if it's wrong." Then she was off to the couple at the far end settling their tab.

The liquor was warm and herbal but not too sweet, and it went down easy. Wren wrapped her hands around the glass and didn't drink much of it. Down the bar, Remy closed her book over her thumb, stared into the empty air in front of her for a few breaths, and then gave it up, collected her wine, and moved to the stool next to Wren.

"You look how I feel," she said.

Wren huffed something that wasn't quite a laugh. "Rough day."

"Yeah." Remy turned her glass by the stem. "I keep telling myself Mondays are like this and tomorrow's an ordinary Tuesday." She meant it to sound easy, but it missed the mark. Wren let it go. Everybody walked in here carrying something they wanted to put down for a while; that was half of what the place was for.

They sat in silence for a minute, the community table laughing at something behind them. Then Remy went still and started turning the loose gold ring on her middle finger around and around.