Page 5 of The CEO’s Assistant

Wren appeared at the door with her tablet. “One thing on the calendar, if you have a second.”

Cordelia looked up. “Go ahead.”

“You’ve got standing one-on-ones with three of the senior team for forty-five minutes every Thursday at four, rotating through them. It’s the most consistent block on the whole calendar.” She glanced up from the screen. “I wanted to confirm I should keep it blocked as I build next quarter, even if something bigger wants the slot.”

Cordelia went still, though it only lasted half a second and Wren was still looking at her tablet so she didn’t catch it. But in that half-second, Cordelia felt the cold drop of watching someone come up close to something without knowing it was there. Wren hadn’t asked what the Thursday blocks were for. She had only found it and noticed its consistency. But it was still more than Cordelia wanted anyone close to this early.

The answer was out of her mouth before she could consider the words and how they’d be interpreted. “Protect it. If something conflicts, the standing meetings take priority, always.”

Wren made a note with her stylus. “Understood. I’ll have next quarter to you by Monday morning.” She walked back to her desk, not probing further.

Cordelia knew Wren had seen something in the pattern, but neither of them had said anything. That suited Cordelia just fine. More than anything, she needed discretion from Wren, and that interaction proved she had it.

She turned back to this quarter’s calendar, despite not needing to. For the first time in longer than she could remember, there was nothing in front of her that needed her attention, and without that distraction, she found she didn’t quite know what to do with herself. Through the door, Wren’s typing continued, quick and unbroken; Wren didn’t need her either. Past the two lit offices, the rest of the floor was dark in every direction, and Cordelia sat in the quiet she usually had to stay very late to earn, with nothing at all to occupy her mind.

Wren’s typing stopped a little before eight. Cordelia heard the laptop close then the soft sounds of Wren leaving: a coat picked up, a bag lifted, the squeak of the chair pushed in. Then Wren was at the doorway.

“Goodnight, Ms. Hale.”

“Goodnight, Wren.”

Wren turned and went down the hall toward the elevators, and Cordelia caught herself staring at her but didn’t stop, not when Wren made the turn at the corridor or when the elevator chimed and opened its doors. Once the elevator closed and the hallway was empty again, she turned back to her desk. It had been a long week. She was tired in a way the working hours didn’t account for. It didn’t take her long to realize it was because she had spent the whole week making sure the most observant person in the office only saw what Cordelia wanted her to see and nothing more.

She tipped the laptop lid closed, then rested her hand on top of it. For a moment, she sat like that without moving as she sorted through her thoughts. She got up, put on her coat, and switched off the desk lamp.

Outside, the April air had cooled. A block over, along the harbor walk, the dogwoods had come into bloom, pale under the streetlamps, and she appreciated their beauty as she walked the three blocks home where she knew a bottle of wine and an empty penthouse were waiting for her.

4

Chapter 4: Wren

Wren finished the calendar consolidation just before 8 p.m. She saved the file, closed the laptop, and locked the lower desk drawer where she kept things she didn’t take back and forth with her each day. The bullpen had emptied an hour before, but behind the open door of the inner office, the desk lamp was still on.

She lifted Mildred’s bag off the hook by its strap. For forty years, her grandmother had carried this bag to library board meetings and places Wren would never know the inside of, and Wren had brought it everywhere with her this week. Mildred had kept nothing in there, always emptying it out each night, but there was now a pen and a folded receipt from the bodega on her corner.

The elevator took her down, and she walked out of the lobby into a cold the building’s dry warmth had let her forget. Phoenix Ridge’s harbor was ten minutes downhill from Hale Capital. Wren stuffed her hands into her coat pockets and made her way toward it. The thing she had been circling around all afternoon surfaced in the front of her mind.

It was the cadence that tipped her off. Wren had asked, before she left work, whether to keep the Thursday meetings next quarter, even with scheduling conflicts, and Cordelia hadn’t even paused to consider the question before answering. Six years of reading executives had taught her that the thing they wouldn’t let you in on was never the small thing.

She looked at the week as a whole: the memos a first-week assistant wouldn’t be asked to work on and the twelve-page NDA that was far more extensive than the job warranted. None of this was an assistant’s job. Sure, there was evidence of the restructuring she was told about, but underneath, there was something else that was being concealed.

Wren forced herself to stop following the mental thread. She had signed her discretion and intended to keep it. She certainly wasn’t going to walk into that office next week with a theory no one had asked her to have. Whatever Cordelia was hiding would surface in its own time or it wouldn’t; either way, she would keep doing her job the best she could.

At the bottom of the hill, the wind whipped off the water with nothing obstructing it. The dogwoods along the path had opened in the last few days, showing off their white and dusty pink flowers, and she caught their scent when the air shifted downwind. She turned east and continued walking.

The working docks ran east for a few hundred feet before the waterfront gave way to the town. She walked them, the wind stronger on her back now. The fishing boats were in for the night, tied off and dark. She passed the marine supply store, still with its lights on, someone at the counter going over something on a clipboard. Past it, a small seafood restaurant kept its windows lit, and two women sat at a table by the door with a bottle of wine between them as they leaned in toward each other. Wren didn’t slow down. She eventually came to the end of the docks and turned up away from the water and onto the cobblestone streets.

Downtown started a block up from the harbor. The brick buildings rose three and four stories. The shop fronts along the bottom, the independent bookstore and wine shop, were closed and shuttered for the evening. The street was wide and lined with maples just starting to leaf out, the old lamps along it throwing warm light down the block. A few people were out milling around, but not many.

Wren came to the corner. The building on it was Victorian in style with two stories, the only one of its kind on the whole block—white clapboard with deep green trim, the trim peaking out around a wide bay window, and a painted-ladies house wedged in among the brick. Flower baskets hung along the front, and a chalkboard stood out on the sidewalk with a looping script that Wren didn’t stop to read. The door was a deep, dusty purple that reflected the lamplight, and above it, on a brass-edged sign in small letters: Lavender’s Cafe. Wren had passed it three times since February and never had a reason to go in, but she pushed open the purple door anyway.

The bell over the door chimed a short note. She noticed the warmth first, then the smell—homemade bread and coffee, with soft notes of cardamom and lavender underneath it. She let the door fall shut behind her as she stepped fully inside.

Inside, the cafe was one long room with the bar running down the right-hand wall. The floor was old wood gone soft underfoot. The tables were mismatched and none of them ornate, but every one of them was in use. Two deep armchairs sat at the bay window with a low table between them. A long communal table ran down the middle of the space. Plants hung from the exposed beams at uneven heights, real ones, grown a little wild. The walls were lit low and warm, the bar brighter—dark wood with a brass rail along the bottom, a row of taps, and bottles ranged on the shelves behind it without the squared-off precision of a chain. At the near end stood a glass case with what was left of the day’s baked goods in it: two scones and the heel of something dense and dark. Behind all of it, from a kitchen Wren couldn’t see, came the smell of freshly baked bread.

It was past eight, and the Friday crowd had whittled down to the people with nowhere else they needed or wanted to be. Five women sat at the communal table, a board of bread and cheese between them and a bottle of wine going around. One of them laughed in the way that turned the other heads to look and smile at her. A couple had the armchairs at the window, the two women leaning in close over the low table, a hand resting on a knee, talking too quietly to hear. Another woman sat near the back with a paperback held up to the light. Two stools down the bar, a woman read a hardcover with a glass at her elbow. One stool was empty, and Wren took it. She set her grandmother’s bag against the rail at her feet then unbuttoned her coat.

The woman behind the bar finished pouring a drink at the far end, counted change back in a waiting hand, and came down to greet Wren. The woman was somewhere near sixty, broad through her face, and graying auburn hair pinned up loose with a pencil run through it. She wore a sweater the color of wet moss, and she had silver rings on most of her fingers.