Page 53 of The CEO’s Assistant

They had the corner table. Remy had a plate in front of her and was mid-sentence, and the woman across from her was an older woman who looked like she was in her fifties, with a phone face-down beside her water.

"Wren." Remy moved a chair out with her foot. "Astoria Shepry. Astoria, Wren Davies."

Wren recognized the name. She had put it on the calendar twice a month for four months, always the same slot, always a dinner Cordelia never moved. It had never occurred to her to wonder what the woman looked like.

Astoria took her in for a second longer than was comfortable. "So you're Wren," she said, and moved the plate of bread toward her.

Lavender set down a glass of whiskey and a plate of food without being asked. For a while, the talk was easy and about nothing much. Remy had rehearsed her first all-hands meeting in front of her bathroom mirror and faltered in the middle of it. Astoria said she'd made the same speech her first year as CEO, and it had gone worse. Lavender came past with the water carafe and shared that Diana had cornered a raccoon in the houseboat storage that morning and radioed it in like a felony. Remy laughed so hard she had to put her fork down.

Wren ate half her pasta, which was more than she'd managed at a table with other people in a month. It was too warm in the room, and the whiskey went to the backs of her knees. She looked around the room. The noise was loud enough that nothing said at this table would carry to the next one.

Remy's phone lit up beside her plate for the third time that hour. "It’s Lauren." She was already standing. "Two minutes. If I don't call her back, she does the thing where she gets passive-aggressive for two weeks then pretends like it never happened."

She went out through the propped doors and walked a slow circle on the sidewalk with one arm across her middle.

Astoria moved her glass a quarter circle on the table. "Remy told me about you," she said. "Ten days ago, during a visit to my home. Twenty years I've known Cordelia, and I had to hear it from her daughter."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be. It isn't your doing." She said it without malice, and then she was quiet for a moment. "I'm going to tell you something. You can do what you like with it."

"All right."

"At Eleanor's funeral, she did all of it. The church, the readings, the food, the cars. She worked out where a hundred and forty people would sit so nobody who'd fought would have to look at each other." There was a tinge of sadness in her voice. "She stood at that door for two hours and thanked every person who came, by name, and asked after their children. She never sat down. Not through the service, not after."

Wren didn't say anything.

"I found her in the car at nine that night, engine off, answering emails." Astoria stopped. She moved her water glass another quarter turn and looked at the table long enough that Wren thought she'd finished.

"I sat in the passenger seat for forty minutes. She was perfectly pleasant to me the whole time, but she was not present in that car." She turned the phone over and back. "I asked if she was all right. She said yes. I accepted it because it was taking the easy way out. I have never told her what I saw in her eyes that night, and then I watched as the next eight years passed her by."

The room had gone gray at the front and somebody behind the counter started stacking plates.

Astoria looked up. "You've seen her do it. Haven’t you? Gone somewhere else in her mind."

Wren looked at the table. "Yes."

"Recently?"

"Yes."

Astoria didn't ask what it had been, or when, or what it had cost her. She turned her glass again and let the noise of the room come back in. "She isn't going to stop, you know," she said. "It kept her alive for eight years. It isn't going to stop being true because she's happy."

She had been rehearsing it for three weeks, what she'd say when she finally said it. If she finally said it. The opportunity to talk about it hadn’t come up yet, but now that the moment was finally here, Wren found herself struggling over her words. How she would say it that actually conveyed what she meant. She wasn’t much for grand, sweeping speeches, but she wanted to get this one thing right. She untangled the mess of thoughts. She wanted Cordelia anyway. All of her, including the woman in the car with the engine off, escaping into work instead of feeling grief.

Forty minutes, Astoria had said. Wren had done ten hours. She had spent three weeks believing that Sunday was Cordelia deciding what Wren was to her. It hadn't been a decision at all. Cordelia had gone off somewhere and left behind a woman who was courteous and got a great deal done, and Wren had stayed in the room with her the whole day being useful, waiting for her to come back.

She could still say all of it. Cordelia would listen to every word and agree with her, because Cordelia was fair and would want to be fair about this too. And at the end, Wren still wouldn't have the thing she actually wanted, which was for that day not to have happened the way it did.

Remy came back and sat down and said Lauren wanted the deck reordered, all of it, tonight. Wren waited patiently for Remy to vent about the phone call and how long it’d take for her to finish the work. Then she took a deep breath.

"I love her," Wren said.

Remy went very still. "Okay." Then, too fast: "That's… okay. Good. Well, I knew. Obviously I knew, I'm not an idiot." She sat back. "God, she's going to be so weird about this."

"Remy," Astoria said.

"I'm being normal."