Page 2 of Her Surrender

"Thank you, Peter."

He nodded and went. It was the correct choice, and they both knew he'd made it, and that was as close to comfort as either of them was prepared to traffic in on a Wednesday.

Emily Altford rang at eight that evening, when Serena was home with her shoes off and a glass of wine she'd poured and not touched, standing at the window because that was where she ended up in any building she owned or occupied. The city ran out to the ocean in a grid of lights. Somewhere down there, Diane Marsh was explaining her day to someone, or to no one.

She answered on the second ring. "Emily."

"You sound like a woman standing at a window," Emily said. "Sit down, I want ten minutes."

Serena sat down. There were perhaps three people alive she'd do that for, and the other two were dead.

The timing was almost offensive. Emily couldn't have known about Diane. Nobody outside the building knew, and yet here she was on a Wednesday night with her warm voice, like a barometer that doesn't know about the storm and announces it anyway.

For ten minutes they talked about nothing that mattered, which with Emily was its own pleasure. A restaurateur they both knew who'd taken up sailing and made it everyone's problem. A wine Emily had sent over that Serena admitted she was at that moment failing to drink. Emily's garden, which was at war with the gophers and losing with dignity.

"You could hire someone for the gophers," Serena said.

"I could. But then I'd have nothing to be furious about, and a woman my age needs a project." Ice moved in a glass on Emily's end, sixty miles up the coast. "How was your day? You've got the flat sound."

"The flat sound."

Serena turned the stem of the wine glass a quarter rotation on the side table, not drinking it.

"You get a certain flatness when something's cost you and you've decided it hasn't. I've known you twenty years, darling, I can hear it through a phone."

Serena let a breath out through her nose. She hadn't planned to say it, and then she was saying it, because that was the entire function Emily Altford served in her life and they both knew it.

"I dismissed Diane this morning. Embezzlement. Eighteen months of it."

Emily didn't gasp, because Emily never gasped. "Oh, Serena."

"It's handled. The money comes back through the agreement, the exit was clean."

Her own voice was doing exactly what Emily had described, flat as a dial tone. She pressed on anyway.

"I'm not asking about the money."

"I know what you're asking about."

The city lights ran on below the window, indifferent.

"I'm fine. I'm always fine, it's one of my more reliable features."

"Mm," Emily said, and audibly put the answer away for later use. Serena let the day wind down a notch at a time and listened to her oldest friend grant her the mercy of pivoting back to a hole in a lawn, describing it as though it were a hostile acquisition.

Then Emily said, "I have a favour to ask."

Serena straightened without deciding to. Twenty years, and she could count on one hand the times Emily had opened a sentence that way, and have fingers left over.

"There's a young woman I'd like you to meet. Charlotte Phillips. She was made redundant three weeks ago, a restructuring, nothing she did, and she's in LA because the rest of her life hasn't caught up with her yet. She's wasted where she is. She's the kind of person you build around, and nobody's noticed, because she's not the kind who makes them." A small breath. "I see a future in her, Serena. The way I once did with someone else, if you'll forgive the lack of subtlety."

"You're never subtle. You're patient, which people mistake for it."

Serena was sitting forward now, elbows on her knees, the city forgotten behind the glass.

"Yes, well. Is there any chance you'd take her on? Anything. A desk. A trial."

Serena looked at the wine she wasn't drinking. "My assistant was dismissed this morning."