Page 42 of The CEO’s Assistant

Nine years with Veronica and she had never once had to ask her for a thing twice. Dinah, she had hired out of a dying newspaper and had never regretted a day of it. Lauren was forty-one and would be running a third of this place within a year, and she was sitting there in a sweatshirt eating out of a carton with her feet on a chair, and Cordelia thought, with the particular satisfaction of a woman who had spent thirty years choosing people: They'll be fine. Whatever else happens, the people in this room will be fine.

"I won't keep you," she said. "But I've never seen a Sunday go the way this one went, and I want to say so while you're all still in the room. Veronica, you had the news at seven and you were in the car before you called me. Everything ran through you today and nothing dropped.

"Dinah, a reporter called you with no warning at all, and you said exactly the right thing in the first eight seconds. Most people would have tried to be helpful. Then you rewrote that statement four times in five hours and didn't complain."

"I complained."

"You complained beautifully. Lauren, you got off a tennis court to call six women you'd rather not owe anything to, and that's how we found out how little Lindqvist really had."

"Four-two," Lauren muttered, to nobody in particular.

"Petra, you'd ruled out everyone here by two o'clock, and that's the only reason we knew to start looking outside. Etta, you kept us legal all day from three states away, and it's after nine there, so go to bed."

"Going," Etta said, and the line clicked off.

Cordelia looked down the table at each person. Wren had the day's pages in front of her and a pen in her hand. "Wren. There was one sentence in that statement this morning that would have handed her the story, and you were the only one who caught it. You were at your desk at half past seven without anybody calling you. Every single thing I needed today was in front of me before I asked for it. I don't know what I would have done today without you."

"Of course, ma'am."

"Right." Cordelia pushed her chair back. "Tuesday. Dinah, statement final by noon tomorrow. Veronica, twenty minutes for the two of us before the board call. Everybody else, go home and don't answer your phones."

Chairs scraped against the floor as everyone stood up. Lauren took the last of the food with her, and somebody laughed out in the corridor. By the time Cordelia looked up, the room was empty.

She stayed, even though there was no particular reason to. She sat down again at the end of the long table with the far end of the floor dark and the sky still orange outside and wrote the Monday note. She'd written one after every difficult day for twenty years, and the trick was to do it before it flattened out into everyone worked very hard, which had never inspired anybody. She read it back, cut two sentences, and put Wren's name in with the rest of them, because Wren had earned it more than any of them. She liked it, which she almost never did.

Then she took her phone out of her coat pocket, where it had been since ten past seven that morning, and opened the thread with Wren. The last two messages in it were still the ones she'd sent the night before. Wren hadn't answered either of them. It had been a long day for everybody. She'd talk to her tomorrow.

Cordelia sent the note, hung her coat on the back of the door, and sat down to start on Tuesday’s tasks.

20

Chapter 20: Wren

By the time she reached the harbor walk, she had most of Monday planned.

The nine-fifteen conference would have to move. She’d need to tell Petra, who would take it well, and then send three follow-ups before midnight. There was the document list to send and the statement Dinah wanted ready for the reporter, plus a dozen smaller tasks to do after. Somewhere in the middle of recalling the list came the thought that none of it would be hers to handle much longer. She set it down and kept walking.

The peonies and sweet peas had bloomed along the harbor walk all at once the week before, four blocks of them, thick and slightly ridiculous. She noticed them about as much as she noticed the crosswalk signal.

She'd had a bagel at eight that morning and nothing since. She noticed it about as much as the weather, a fact about someone else. The air had gone heavy and still, the dry spell finally about to break. Millie would have made her eat before a day like this one. The thought arrived and she moved past it, onto the note for Harriet's office and the Thursday reshuffle, up the steps under the maple tree and through the front door and up the stairs to her own.

She got the key in on the second try. Inside, she set the bag down on the floor by the boxes and reached for the next thing to do, but there wasn't one. She stood in her own foyer in her coat with the lamp off and the room dark blue at the edges, and in the quiet where the next task should have been she heard her own voice, from six-thirty that evening, perfectly clearly.

Of course, ma'am.

She'd said it to Cordelia in a room full of people, and Cordelia had nodded and turned back to the schedule without a break in her voice. She sighed as she took off her coat and hung it up on the hook by the door.

In the kitchen, she poured a glass of water she didn't drink and opened her laptop. The note from Cordelia was already there, waiting for her, sent to eleven people not too long after she had left the office. It was only four paragraphs, but it was good, factual. Cordelia had said what the day had actually been instead of calling it a challenge, and she didn’t use the word team. There was a line about Veronica and a line about how Dinah said the right thing and near the bottom, in a list with four other names, it said, Wren, who caught the sentence nobody else did.

She had been here before.

Vivian Park was the first, when she was twenty-three. She had spent four years of knowing what Vivian wanted before Vivian herself did, had a phone that was never off, and an apartment she'd picked for convenience. When Millie had died, Vivian sent lilies and a card that was signed with her full name.

Helena Marsh came three years after that, a novelist who needed someone to manage everything so she could write. Two years of it. In the end, the book got finished, and it sold well. Wren's name appeared in the acknowledgments, wedged between the copy editor and the woman who ran the fellowship office.

Then the consultancy, where she'd run the office for two partners who said, “we don't know what we'd do without you,” so often it stopped meaning anything to her. When Wren gave her two-weeks’ notice, neither of them asked her why.

And then, Millie. She put both hands flat on the counter. Eighteen months of it. She'd moved north, given up the lease, and learned which nurse to ask for. Near the end, Millie couldn't work the pill organizer open anymore, and Wren had done it for her every morning. Millie had watched her hands and said, “what would I do without you,” and meant it. And it felt good. It always felt good. That was the worst of it. She'd made herself necessary to her grandmother too. It was the only way she knew how to love anybody. And Millie had let her.