Page 52 of The CEO’s Assistant

By the ninth day of her two-week break, Wren had cleaned the oven, descaled the kettle, carried four bags down to the donation bin on Main Street, walked the harbor every afternoon at four whether she wanted to or not, and finished the novel Lillian had quit at page sixty. She was sleeping seven hours every night. She had eaten three real meals a day since Sunday, which was more than she'd managed in any week since February. And before the first week had even ended, she had been secretly working, writing a document nobody had asked for.

What had begun as a one-page document to train the next assistant to take over became thirty-one pages now. Which of Etta Iverson's legal associates picked up on a Sunday and which had to be emailed twice. Which board member wanted her deck two days early, would say nothing if she didn't get it, and would remember for a year. What the standing Tuesday four o'clock had actually been for since October. Petra's habit of confirming meetings she had already confirmed. All of it out of her head and onto a page in the order somebody would need it.

She was at the counter with the laptop open when Remy texted at eleven asking for her address. Remy came up the two flights fast, a banker's box on her hip and her hair coming out of its tie, and she was talking before Wren had the door all the way open.

"I know it's your time off," Remy said, half out of breath.

"Come in."

"I brought coffee but I drank it on the way, which I feel is probably worse than not remembering to get any at all." Remy set the box on the counter and stood there with her hand flat on the lid. Then she took the hand off. "Okay. I'm going to ask you for something."

"All right?"

"The board meets on the third, and then Lauren and Veronica and I are running the firm. Veronica's forgotten more about that building than I'll ever learn." She pushed her hair back. "But I've got my mother's succession file and it's forty pages of org chart, and none of it tells me how she actually did it. Who she called first. What she'd never put in writing. All the parts that lived in her head."

"Some of it did," Wren said. "The rest she never had to think about, because I did."

"Yeah. That's what I thought. That's why I'm standing in your kitchen on your time off."

"You could have emailed."

"I could have emailed. Then you'd have written me forty pages by Sunday, on your time off, and it would have been my fault."

Wren stood still for a moment with her hand on the back of a chair. "Sit down," she said. "I'll make coffee, since you drank yours."

They worked standing at the counter. Wren stayed on the other side of it with the milk still out, answering while she wiped down the counter. Remy wrote down the information longhand, fast, her fingers going gray along the edge.

Somewhere in the second hour Remy got up to stretch and stopped at the shelf beside the green chair, where the library discards stood with their pockets still glued in the back, and the photograph in front of them.

"Millie. My grandmother," Wren said. "And her sister Iris."

Remy looked at it a while longer, then came back and picked up her pen.

Remy was going through the file back to front, and she stopped with two fingers on a page. "This is mine."

Wren came around the counter. It was a four-page development plan, her mother's handwriting in the margins, half of which Wren had been putting on a calendar for months without knowing what it was. Board exposure the first year. A book of her own at eighteen months. And near the bottom, the civic infrastructure division, the assignment Remy had made a case for in her mother's office and won and had been unbearable about for a solid month afterward.

"I asked for that," Remy said. "I went into her office and I asked for it."

Wren looked at the date on the first page and did the math twice. Cordelia had signed it two years ago, eighteen months before she hired Wren. Cordelia had walked away from a signed deal, and Wren had spent nine days afraid she was the reason for it. But she now knew she wasn't. You couldn't hand a firm to three women who weren't ready to take it, and Cordelia had started getting them ready eighteen months before she hired Wren.

"Two years." Remy said it to the page. "I thought I talked her into it."

"But she'd already written it down. She let you make the case so it would be yours."

Remy pulled out a stool and sat down with the page still in her hand. They finished at two. Remy took the file and left the box on the counter. "More in there than I can carry," she said at the door. "Also I want a reason to come back."

She was down the first flight before she leaned back around the rail. "You'd tell me. If you were leaving? Wouldn’t you?"

"Yeah, I'd tell you."

"Okay, good." And she left, taking two steps at a time, the same as coming up.

Wren pulled the pages that answered Remy's questions out of the handoff document and sent them. Then she opened her drafts. The resignation had been sitting in there since the Monday after the leak. “Full transition documentation will be ready before my last day.” Two hundred and forty words promising Cordelia Hale that losing her would cost her or the company nothing. She read through it once, then deleted it and closed the tab. She went back and deleted the rest of the handoff document and closed the laptop.

Remy texted twice on Friday, once about a presentation deck for the board and once with a photograph of a handwritten note, asking what the word in the middle said. On Saturday, Remy wrote to say she and Astoria would be at Lavender's around six. No pressure, she added, and then, absolutely pressure.

Wren left at half past six. The light came in low off the water at that hour and turned the whole front of the café the color of weak tea. The tables were full, and Lavender was behind the counter with her sleeves pushed up. She saw Wren come in and tipped her head toward the back without stopping what she was doing.