Page 33 of The CEO’s Assistant

"Can I ask you something, and you're allowed to tell me it's none of my business?"

Wren's stomach flipped then sank. "Okay."

"How long have you known that my mom's selling the firm?"

It came out soft, nearly gentle, and went straight through her regardless. Wren looked down into her drink.

"Since this morning," she said.

That got her. Remy's eyebrows went up a fraction. "This morning?"

"I saw something I wasn't meant to see. I wasn't told, Remy. I don't think anybody was told."

"No." Remy sat back on the stool. "No. That tracks." She let out a long breath, and her shoulders lowered a fraction, as if she had put down whatever heavy load she was carrying. "I've been here for two hours feeling like I made it up. Like I'm the paranoid daughter who's decided her mother's vanishing into thin air. I worked it out three weeks ago, and I have not said it out loud to one single person until this exact minute." She looked at Wren, close to helpless with it. "You just confirmed it, and now it’s a real thing that's actually happening."

"How'd you work it out?"

"Small stuff, mostly. She rewrote my whole comp package so it'd hold up with her gone. She's been walking Lauren and Veronica into meetings she used to run herself and calling it development. And three weeks ago, she asked me, completely out of nowhere, whether I'd want the house on the coast someday." Remy turned the ring again. "My mother does not ask hypothetical questions. She was doing her estate planning over brunch and pretending it was something else."

Wren almost smiled. "That's very her."

"Right? God." Remy shook her head. "Here's the stupid part." Her voice stayed level, which was worse than if it had broken. "I'm not even surprised. She's had one foot out the door for eight years. Since my mama died she's just been… going. A little further out every year, disappearing further into the work, and I kept thinking if I was only patient enough, she'd come back around at some point. And now she's found a way to make leaving official, and I'm meant to be a grown-up about it because it happens to be genuinely excellent succession planning." Her mouth twitched upward, not quite a smile. "And it is excellent succession planning. That's the part that gets me."

Wren had spent her whole life on the other end of a conversation like this one. She was the fixer, the one who found the right person to call, who said the thing that made everyone feel like the situation was manageable, even if it was just because they had a hot cup of tea. Everything in her was already reaching for the next step that would turn Remy's grief into a problem with a clear-cut solution.

But there wasn’t a plan, and Remy wasn't asking for one. She'd said the hard thing out loud to another person, and now she only wanted company while she sat with it. She had switched bar stools because she had chosen Wren to be that person. Wren couldn't remember the last time someone had done that for her. Made room, instead of asking.

She thought, absurdly, of the fern. Her second week at the firm, a small potted fern had appeared on the corner of her desk with no note, and she'd assumed it was some onboarding thing until she caught Remy watering it one afternoon without a word. Wren had buried her grandmother a couple of months before she ever set foot in Hale Capital and had told no one there. She never worked out whether Remy somehow knew, or whether Remy was just a person who put plants on the desks of people who looked like they needed them. Either way, the fern was still on her desk, flourishing. And here was Remy again, handing her something she hadn't asked for and hadn't known she needed. It was almost more than she could take.

Because she'd wanted it to be simpler than this. She'd wanted Cordelia to be a woman who had just used her, start to finish, so she could be justifiable in her anger and go home to sleep it off. Instead, she was sitting next to Cordelia's daughter, who had been left first and longest, and who was being gentle with her. There was no simplicity anywhere in it. There was just this loud, bright room, and Remy turning that loose ring around and around, and Wren being taken care of by the wrong Hale woman. Or maybe the right one. She honestly couldn't tell anymore.

Remy looked at her a second too long. Whatever she saw—Wren on a Monday night in her work clothes, more undone than a leaked deal could account for—she let it be. She bumped her shoulder into Wren's, once, and left it there for a beat.

"You okay?" she said. "And I mean the kind of okay where you're allowed to lie to me."

"Yeah, I'm okay," Wren said.

Remy accepted it, and Wren didn’t explain further. After that, they didn't have to fill the quiet. Remy went back to her book, present without hovering. Wren drank slowly and let the place go on around her. People signed receipts, the women at the community table broke out in raucous laughter, and Lavender continued to work the length of the bar, refilling a water here, sliding a plate there, saying something low that made one of the regulars tip her head back and grin, her eyes lit up.

Under all of it sat the prospect of tomorrow. There was a version of tomorrow where she went into the office, sat down across the desk from Cordelia, and the two of them pretended like they had all day. The deal would close in October. Cordelia would leave, and Wren would continue being the executive assistant to whoever bought it. And there was the other version of tomorrow where she didn't go in at all, where she wrote the short and honest email announcing her departure.

Both versions were real, sitting side by side on the bar like two glasses. She certainly wasn't going to choose between them right now. Some things you had to sleep on, or walk off, until your own body told you which way it had already leaned. Hers hadn't yet.

She finished the drink and left a folded twenty on the bar, more than one drink would ever have come to. Lavender caught her eye from down the bar and gave her a small nod. Wren stood and shouldered her bag.

Remy looked up from her book. "Get home safe.” And then, lower: "Thank you. For making it real. I know that's a strange thing to thank somebody for."

"It's not strange," Wren said with a rueful smile, then left.

She stood on the sidewalk a moment while the door settled shut behind her and the bell went quiet, and she truly did not know whether she'd walk through the doors of Hale Capital in the morning. But she wasn't the only one carrying it now, and she felt a little lighter for that. She turned toward home and started walking. She'd decide when she got there or maybe she wouldn't. The morning would come regardless and find her wherever she was.

17

Chapter 17: Cordelia

Cordelia had walked to the office from her penthouse at half past five, down the length of the avenue while the streetlights were still burning then up to a darkened floor. There was nothing for her to do at six in the morning. Nothing would come through from the correspondence desk before eight, and the senior meeting was not until ten. She sat down in the small light of her desk lamp, and did not pretend, even to herself, that she had come in to work. She had come in to be at her desk when Wren either did or did not walk in.

Whatever Wren did this morning would tell her what kind of life she was going to be living from here on. If the elevator stayed quiet, that was one answer. If it came up, that was another, and she could not have said which of the two frightened her more.