Page 56 of The CEO’s Assistant

Cordelia looked up from her screen. "Has she asked you to look at it?"

"She has."

"And?"

"It's better than it needs to be."

Remy walked in with her sleeves pushed up, holding a piece of paper. "Petra wants to know if we're doing anything for lunch. I said no. Do we have plans?"

"Good. No, we don’t."

She put the page down on the desk. "That's the note. If you hate any of it, now's the time to tell me so I can revise it. I’m emailing it to everyone in the company in—” she checked her wristwatch—”thirty-five minutes."

Cordelia scanned it first, then read it line by line. It was only four paragraphs, but Cordelia had taught her to choose every word with intention. People didn’t want long, rambling notes with no substance. She smiled in approval after she finished reading it. Remy had named seven people and put beside each name the project that person had actually done, and she hadn't used the word team anywhere in it. Cordelia instinctively grabbed a pen to sign the memo, but she paused mid-air after clicking the cap. At the bottom of the page, there were already three signatures neatly written and stacked on top of each other: Remy, Lauren, and Veronica. There wasn’t any space for her name, of course there wasn’t, and she mentally chastised herself for falling into old patterns. She adjusted in her chair and put down the pen.

"It's good," Cordelia said.

"You can put something on the end. If you want to," Remy said. No doubt she had noticed the automatic action.

The document Cordelia had written on Tuesday was still open behind her. She closed it without reading it again.

"No. It's yours. It’s important that it’s your voice."

"Okay." Remy picked the page back up.

"Together or after?" Veronica asked.

Cordelia almost spoke up, but noticed Veronica had turned and directed the question to Remy instead.

"After," Remy said. "Give people a few moments to read the memo and let it sink in." Remy was already talking to somebody in the corridor before she was fully through the door. Veronica went after her, tapping the folder twice against the frame on her way out.

The press release went at nine, and four minutes later, Remy's email arrived in Cordelia's inbox with everyone else's, addressed to the whole company. She read it a second time. Nothing in it had changed. Thirty years of writing these, and she had never once been on the receiving end of one.

Petra put four calls through to Remy and two to Veronica. At eleven, she came in to ask whether Cordelia wanted anything brought up, and Cordelia said no. Petra stood there a moment as though she had expected a different answer before she went out again. The press coverage was accurate and dull. A woman on the Cultural Foundation board wrote to ask, very gently, whether this meant that she was ill, and Cordelia wrote back that she was in excellent health and would see her in September.

At twenty past eleven, she opened her calendar to find out what was next, but the afternoon was empty and so was the following week and so was the week after that. Veronica had cleared them in June after Cordelia had asked her to.

Wren's message had come on Sunday afternoon: Friday, your coastal house, I'll drive myself. Cordelia had written back that she'd be there. Nothing had come since. Seven words, and not one of them said whether Wren was driving up to start something or to finish it, and she had decided on Monday to stop reading it and had read it most days anyway. She read the message again now and put the phone in her pocket.

At half past eleven, she walked down to the room that had been the dedicated conference room for the sale negotiations since October. Remy had paper laid out in piles along the whole long table. Lauren was at the far end with a phone cradled against her shoulder and somebody's breakfast going cold in its paper beside her.

"I'm going," Cordelia said, poking her head into the conference room.

Remy looked up. "Okay. If anything comes in this afternoon, Veronica can handle it."

"I know," Cordelia said.

Lauren stood up with the phone still against her shoulder, which nobody had asked her to do, and which she had plainly meant as a courtesy and which came out closer to a salute. Cordelia nodded at her, and Lauren sat back down and went on with her call.

She could have gone without saying so. She had, for years, and it had never once occurred to her that anybody in this building noticed. She stayed in the doorway a second longer than the conversation needed, and Remy came around the end of the table and hugged her, hard and fast, and was back in her chair before Cordelia reached the corridor.

She lifted her coat off the back of her own door and pulled open the top drawer of the desk out of habit. There was nothing in it she needed. She looked back once, then walked to the elevator bay. She went down to the garage and drove away into the middle of a working Friday.

The cliff road ran dry and nearly empty. She left the radio off. The last time she had made this drive, she’d had a call scheduled for the whole trip and she didn’t pay attention to the view of the coast on her left. Come to think of it, she couldn’t remember a thing she’d said on the call either. She drove north for two hours with the sun reflecting off the water hard enough to hurt, and she stopped in the next town over for crab, bread, and a bag of lemons.

By twenty past four, she had every window on the water side open, and the house was still colder inside than out. Out on the south side of the house, the parsley had gone leggy. The beans she'd put in ten days ago were sprouted and starting to lean, so she tied them to the stakes she'd driven in back in June. Weeds had come back through the far garden bed. She pulled them and left them in a pile at the end of the row. The trowel lay under the eaves where she'd left it on Wednesday, out of the rain. She went inside, leaving her dirty shoes by the back door, and washed her hands in the kitchen sink.

At five, she carried clean bed sheets up and stopped at the door at the end of the landing. Her hand went to the handle and stayed there long enough that she felt foolish standing in her own hallway, and then she carried the sheets back downstairs, put the kettle on, and stood in the kitchen while it boiled.