Page 18 of Baby for My Ex’s Dad

How much I enjoy her is going to be a problem. I sit back and study her across the desk, and she bears the study the way she bore it in the ballroom, measuring me right back, and the air in this office has picked up a charge the building’s systems can’t account for.

“Miss Rider. I asked you here to determine whether you and I can work together, given that the role serves my office. I’ve read your file. The file says yes. The file is also missing a chapter, which both of us have read.”

“I’ve been thinking about that chapter all morning.”

“As have I. Which is the difficulty.” I fold my hands on the desk. “So, please propose something.”

She takes a breath. I watch her assemble the language, and I know what she’s going to propose, because it’s what I’d propose, because it’s the only functional option either of us has.

“It never happened,” she says. “That’s the proposal. Clean slate, full stop. You’re the CEO, I’m the EA, and the twelfth floor of the Meridian is a place neither of us has ever been. No looks, no references, no jokes. We’re two professionals with no history, because the alternative is I transfer to facilities and spend my career in a position beneath me, and you lose the only person in this building who knows where everything is.”

A fair offer. “Agreed. It never happened.”

“Great.”

“Excellent.”

Neither of us believes a word of it. Her voice sits a half tone low, and she can see I’m looking at her mouth while agreeing to forget her mouth, and the pact dies on the desk between us in the same moment it’s signed. It’s still the correct fiction. Civilization runs on fictions. So do companies. I’ve signed treaties with less sincerity and honored them for decades.

“Then let us proceed as strangers.” I open the file. “Walk me through the office I’ve inherited. Calendars, correspondence, standing meetings. Assume I know nothing, which this morning is close to true.”

“Absolutely.” She flips the folio open, clicks her pen, and pauses. “Do you take coffee in the afternoons, or is that a morning-only situation? Asking as a stranger. For the file.”

“Black. One sugar after four o’clock, never before.”

“After four. Sure. Very disciplined.” She writes it down without looking up. “No comment.”

“You had a comment.”

“Strangers don’t have comments, sir.”

And she does it.

For twenty minutes Dorothea Rider conducts a tour of my own company that’s better than the briefing the board gave me, and I stop taking notes early, because notes would slow her down.

At one point she says, “The Monday ops call is a waste of everyone’s morning, and I can prove it,” and then flips to a page where she has proven it. A column of attendance against a column of decisions reached, and the decisions column is empty for six straight weeks. She doesn’t wait for me to react. She’s already on the next page.

She possesses detailed knowledge of which division heads tend to inflate their forecasts, including the approximate extent of such exaggerations. Additionally, she’s familiar with the Rotterdam file, specifically the authentic version, down to the birthday of Aertsen’s wife—a detail that our commercial team has never sought to learn.

She knows the building well and demonstrates a precise manner. Her humor, which she can no longer suppress during a formal meeting, has become evident, and she has ceased making efforts to do so. Remarkably, I find myself enjoying a personnel briefing, a situation that has not occurred previously.

Then I ask the question the morning was always going to reach. “Tell me about the previous administration. You ran my son’s office for eighteen months. I need to understand what he was doing with this company, and the reporting I’ve been given doesn’t add up, and I suspect you know where it doesn’t add up better than the auditors do.”

Her face changes. Not guilt. A calculation, and then a decision, and I watch her take it.

“Okay. Before I answer that, there’s a second chapter missing from my file, and you’re going to hear it sooner or later, because this building runs on gossip like other buildings run on electricity. You should hear it from me.” She sets the folio aside. The shield, coming down.

“Very well.”

“I dated Klaus. It recently ended by text, while I was at the dentist. So, when you ask me about his office, you should know the source has a bias, and the bias is that he’s my ex, and I’m telling you that up front so you can weigh it.”

My son had her.

I keep it off my face. My hands stay folded on the desk. Below it, my right foot has gone still in a way that would tell Lev everything. But she doesn’t know how to read me, and I’m not saying a thing out loud.

Unlike Thea.

Unprompted, against her own interest, first meeting, because she’d rather hand me the weapon than have me find it. I’ve vetted men for thirty years. The ones who volunteer the damaging thing first are the only ones I’ve ever trusted all the way down.