Page 9 of Charmed by the Obsessive Boss

"I'd noticed the temper," Roman says. "Just now hearing where it came from."

I turn away to dig out the Tupperware, because my face is doing the thing. I crouch to the fridge with my knees complaining and pry the lid up. Chicken and rice from Thursday. I make it every week, double batch, because Fridays we eat at the mill. The hot plate has a permanent ring from years of this.

I pour the soup into the dented saucepan and the smell comes up fast. Onion, thyme, the long slow comfort of something that's simmered in a kitchen. Behind me Roman breathes in like he's been punched gently.

While the soup heats I make my tea, strong enough to stand a spoon in, and let the honey go in off the dipper one spoonful at a time. I feel him watching every bit of it.

"That smells like somebody's grandmother's house."

"It smells like chicken."

"I'd like to put in a formal request for the chicken."

By the time I've ladled it into three bowls, the low iron heartbeat I've lived inside since I was seventeen has stopped. I don't notice the quiet until it's there. Four o'clock.

The shift bell rings once. The Drapers wind down through the floor in a long falling note, and then there's only footsteps and coats coming off hooks. People pass the glass on their way out. Every one of them glances in, sees the man from Chicago hunched in my guest chair with a bowl in his hands and his tie loosened, and carries that image out the door like a plate of hot gossip.

By morning Mae will know what kind of bowl.

Charlotte sets up beside him at the window with her backpack unzipped and her legs swinging. She watches him eat for a full minute.

"You eat really fast."

"I forgot to eat."

"You can't forget to eat. That's, like, the main thing."

"So I'm learning." He tries to slow down. I watch him try. His spoon goes into the bowl with great deliberation, and then he lifts his eyes to me over the rim. "I'd had a great deal of respect for you before the soup. This is veering into something I'd have to disclose to HR."

"We don't have HR. We have Ruth."

"Then I'd have to disclose it to Ruth."

"Ruth just went home."

"Then I'm going to have to live with it." He smiles into his spoon. Charlotte looks from his face to mine, and I'm suddenly extremely interested in the shortbread tin.

"Why's your face red, Mom?"

"It's hot in here."

"It's not. It's cold. I can see my breath at the window."

"Eat your soup, Charlotte."

Charlotte scowls. "Sorry."

"The whole apology, please."

"Sorry I said your face was red. It's your face and you can have it any color." Roman coughs into his napkin.

It's nearly five by the time the bowls are empty.

We haul the whole operation up the forty-two stairs because Charlotte's homework needs a real table and my desk is buried. The conference room is full of low gold light. The long window looks down onto the empty floor, where the safety lights have come on in rows and the idle looms stand like black animals in the half-dark. Charlotte spreads her homework at the far end of the table. Spelling words, a worksheet, a pencil with a chewed top. Roman takes the chair next to mine without asking and rolls his sleeves up his forearms in two neat turns. I see the line of his wrist and the open cuff and look quickly at the legal pad.

"Okay," I say. "Harbor & Pine."

"I don't know who that is."