Page 9 of The CEO’s Assistant

“That would be me,” Cordelia said.

Wren looked at her then, a beat longer than the moment warranted. “I figured,” she said. There was no edge in her voice. If anything, it was kind, and her kindness was harder to sit with than an edge would have been. Cordelia picked her pen back up to give her hands something to do.

Cordelia’s gaze flicked down. The watch on Wren’s wrist was too large for her and too vintage to be a fashion statement. The band was a size too loose so it rode down near the heel of her hand, yet Cordelia had noticed that, despite this, Wren had worn it every day.

“That isn’t yours,” Cordelia said before she had fully committed to saying anything at all. “The watch, I mean.”

Wren glanced down at it as if she had forgotten it was there. “It was my grandmother’s.” She caressed the watch face. “She raised me.” She didn’t elaborate, but she turned the watch a half-turn around her wrist with one finger.

“It suits you.”

They went back to the file, and Wren found the second problem in the part that dealt with timing.

“There’s a sign-off here you need before this can move to the next stage. Someone official has to sign it.” She found the row. “It’s set to come through the same week you close your books for the quarter. That’s already your worst week of the year. Everything is due all at once, everyone’s stretched thin, and now on top of it, you’re waiting on information from people who don’t care about your calendar.” She looked up. “And these come late. They always come late. So picture it landing three days behind, right in the middle of your worst week, while you’re signing your name to papers that aren’t finalized yet because its dependencies haven’t been finalized yet.”

Cordelia looked at the dates. “It’s tight,” she conceded. “But it isn’t an emergency.”

“It never is. Until it is. Moving it costs you nothing.” Wren lifted a shoulder. “Ask for the sign-off early and get it in your hands three weeks ahead of schedule to just sit on it. Then your bad week is only a bad week without a gaping hole in it.”

Cordelia turned it over, debating silently. “Early,” she confirmed. “We’ll ask early.”

Wren made the note. By half past nine, they had worked down through most of the document. The plates had already been pushed back, and their wine was low. Far away, Cordelia could just make out the slow sweep of the lighthouse beam. Wren had stopped writing. She was reading the last of it with her chin propped on one hand, the lamplight warm down the side of her face. She had the loose, unguarded look of someone who had long since stopped performing and was only thinking.

Then, she said, half to herself, “You know, you could be out from under all of this a lot sooner than you’ve got it planned.”

“Could I?”

“You’re the bottleneck—on purpose, mostly. We’ve already said that. But it cuts both ways.” Wren turned on her stool to face her directly. “Half of what’s in here is only waiting on you to sign it, and half of that is daily things that don’t actually need you at all. They need someone steady and consistent, which you already have in Pike and Kepling. Hand the reins over to them now instead of holding on until the very end, and you could take a year off this timeline. Maybe more. You’d be free of the day-to-day minutiae, and you could give the rest of it the part of you it actually needs.” Wren said it gently, like an offering, like it was good news to celebrate. “You don’t have to carry the whole thing all the way to the end by yourself.”

Cordelia stopped writing mid-sentence. Wren’s words were kindly meant. That was the worst of it. She was exactly right about it, too, and it was one of the truest things anyone had said about any of this in six months. Somehow that it came from a woman who had been in her business for less than a month made it that much more significant. Hand the running of it to Pike and Kepling, step back, be done a year early. Wren had read all of it as a reshaping Cordelia would stand at the center of when it was finished—the same firm, reordered, with Cordelia still its head and her hands finally free. She didn’t know the thing on the page was a smaller scope than the thing underneath it all. She didn’t know that Cordelia wouldn’t be coming back, that there was no version of this that would play out where Cordelia was still at the head of the company or anywhere the people in this file would even think to come look for her.

But she couldn’t explain all that to Wren now. Or possibly ever.

“That’s further off than tonight,” Cordelia said. “When we’re closer, I’ll want that exact conversation, but not yet.”

Her voice had come out level. She was getting good at that. Wren held her eyes a moment, and Cordelia watched her silently decide to not push it.

“Sure,” Wren said, then wrote two words on her notepad that Cordelia couldn’t make out.

Cordelia forced herself to let it go. There was nothing in that notepad that actually mattered. There was nothing anyone could do with two little words.

They finished a little before ten. Cordelia squared the pages back into the file and closed the cover, the evening coming back into the room around them—the late hour, the cold plates, the wine gone down to nothing, the woman beside her who would now leave.

Wren bent down and reached for her bag. Cordelia walked her to the door where she held open the coat closet for Wren to grab her coat. She reshouldered the bag. At the threshold, Wren stopped for a second, as if there were something to add to the evening, but then she only said, “Thank you for dinner.”

“You earned it. You found two things I would have completely missed otherwise.”

“I’ll have the comparisons to you before Monday.”

Already back to work, already being useful. Cordelia appreciated that about her.

“Good night, Wren.”

“Night, Ms. Hale.”

Cordelia stood at the door until the elevator doors had opened to carry her down, and then the apartment was hers again. The chairs weren’t quite pushed in and there were still two plates left to clear and the scent of lemon and herbs was going stale in the rooms. She started clearing the island, and she had a plate in each hand when the phone rang. Astoria.

“It’s late,” Cordelia said in lieu of a hello.