Chapter 2
Patrick
I hired her without even seeing her resume.
I’m aware of how that sounds. I run a company with four thousand employees across three continents, and I have sat across the table from people who have spent entire careers preparing for the moment I’d consider working with them.
I hire people through a process that involves background checks, panel interviews, and a probationary period with clearly defined metrics. That is how I hire people.
And then there’s today.
Today, I saw a stunning woman in red heels who had just delivered flowers and told her to sit at my assistant’s desk, and I was back in my office before she had time to object. No name. No resume. No reference. Just “sit there, answer phones, I’ll pay you.”
The dishonest version of this story is that it was purely practical.
The honest version is that I noticed her, and I’m going to stick with the dishonest one because it’s cleaner.
She needed a job. I needed a warm body at that desk.
Those two things lined up fast enough to not require further thought.
Julie called from the airport at eight this morning, not a resignation letter, not even a conversation, just a voicemail from a gate at JFK saying she was going back to her hometown.
She was sorry, and she hoped I understood.
Her aunt died. I did understand. I understood completely.
I had sent a message through HR with my condolences and ordered flowers.
It was a small gesture and probably a useless one, but it was what I had.
But the fact was, I had no assistant, a full calendar, and a promise I had made to my son four weeks ago that I was not going to break.
Donuts with Dads. That’s what the school calls it.
An hour on a Tuesday morning where fathers are supposed to show up and sit in small chairs and eat from a box of glazed donuts while they watch their kids explain what they do for work to a room full of other four-year-olds who don’t care at all.
Erick has been talking about it since the invitation came home.
He told his nanny, Maria. He told the doorman.
He told me every morning at breakfast for two weeks, unprompted, with the particular intensity of a child who has identified something as important and will not let it go unacknowledged.
You’re coming, right, Dad? You promised.
I promised.
Sarah died three years ago, and the life I had planned died with her.
I was thirty-seven. I thought thirty-seven was supposed to feel settled, like something had been decided.
What I have now is the version I built from what was left, and I keep it running the only way I know how, by not stopping.
People say grief softens over time. Maybe it does.
For me it’s a door I keep closed because the four-year-old down the hall still needs a father, and a father is the one thing I can actually be.
Everything else is just making sure I’m still standing when he needs me.
What the door doesn't fix is the fact that I still miss his bedtime more often than not.
I know this. I know it the way you know things you’ve stopped arguing with because the argument never changes anything.
The company runs on my attention. If I step back, things slip.
If things slip, we lose ground. If we lose ground, everything I’ve been building in her absence, for Erick, for the future gets smaller. So, I stay. I always stay.
The assistants are supposed to be the mechanism that makes leaving possible.
Someone who knows the calendar, holds the calls, and keeps the operation running long enough for me to get home before eight.
That’s all I need. It is, objectively, not a complicated job.
And yet in three years, I’ve burned through six of them.
Oliver couldn’t handle the pace. The temps couldn’t handle the phones.
Julie lasted eight months, which was the longest, and even she left without a conversation.
They all have reasons. I don’t fault the reasons. I just need someone who stays.
So I hired her in sixty seconds. The calculation was fast and not entirely rational, and I stand by it: she was there, she was willing, and Erick had been waiting four weeks. Whatever she broke while I was gone, I could fix when I got back. Some things can’t be fixed at all.
She won’t last a week. I could see it in her face the moment she realized what she’d agreed to, the flicker of pure panic behind the composure she was performing for my benefit.
She’s not an assistant. She’s something else entirely, something that came through my office on its way to somewhere more interesting.
A week, maybe two if she’s stubborn, and then Margaret in HR will have found me someone qualified, and this will just be the strange Tuesday I hired a flower delivery woman because I needed to get to my son’s school.
But today she bought me the hour I needed, and that is enough.
Erick spots me from across the classroom before I’ve fully come through the door.
He doesn’t wave. He stands up from his small chair and points at me with the focused urgency of someone flagging an incoming aircraft, and then announces to the entire room: That’s my dad.
The other kids turn to look. I wave. Erick is already moving toward me.
“You came,” he says. Like it was in question. Like I didn’t promise.
“I came.” I crouch down to his level. “Where do I sit?”
He takes my hand and pulls me to his table with the proprietary confidence of a child who has already decided how this is going to go.
There’s a box of donuts in the center, a small paper cup of orange juice, and a worksheet that says My Dad Works As A ___, with the blank filled in by the teacher with whatever Erick told her this morning.
I look at it. It says: chairs but the fancy kind and he is the boss.
“Accurate,” I say.
“I know.” He takes a donut. “Tommy says furniture is boring.”
“Really. And what did you say?”
“I said no, it isn’t, because chairs can be really beautiful and our chairs are in hotels and fancy houses and places where important people sit.” He pauses. “Tommy still said it was boring.”
“Tommy’s entitled to his opinion.”
“He’s in trouble?”
“No. Entitled means he gets to have his opinion.”
“Oh.” Another bite. “I am it-touble that he’s wrong.”
I smile and let it go.
People say he looks like me. I never correct them, but I don’t agree. Every time I look at him I see Sarah, her nose, her mouth set like she already knows she’s right. Then the empty space where she used to be follows everything.
All I have is him. And he has me. I don’t get to reach for anything beyond that. I owe her that much.
I nod along and pretend this tiny chair built for someone half my size isn't trying to turn me into origami as he explains to the table that the difference between regular furniture and his dad’s furniture is that his dad’s furniture is for people who care a lot, which is not inaccurate and certainly the most generous framing of luxury goods I've ever heard.
Tommy remains skeptical. Erick remains unconcerned.
I stay the full hour.
Back at the office, the elevator opens to the fortieth floor, and Elena Brown turns the color of her heels.
The reaction is fast and unguarded. She controls it immediately, but not before I’ve seen it, the sudden straightening, the expression of someone recalibrating at speed.
Heat goes through me. Low, direct, the kind that tightens the muscles at the base of my spine and does not ask permission.
My pulse finds a new rhythm in my throat.
I have not felt any of that in three years.
I had assumed I was never going to feel it again, and the fact that it is happening now, over a woman whose last name I can't remember, is so absurd my first reaction is to be angry about it.
The second reaction, which I like even less, is to look at her mouth.
I drag my eyes back to her face. It is the face, I conclude, because she is not ordinary beautiful.
She is the kind of beautiful that would hit any man in the exact same place.
I will get used to it. By Friday this will be a non-event.
“You can leave at five,” I say.
She blinks. “I… sorry?”
“Five o’clock. That’s the end of your day.”
I don’t elaborate. I walk to my office and close the door.
I sit down. Open my laptop. Pull up the afternoon’s contracts.
I stay at my desk until five-fifteen. It isn’t a conscious decision exactly, just an awareness that I’m not going to walk back through that reception while she’s still in it and cause that reaction again.
Five-twenty. I open the door.
The desk is empty. The computer is off.
The orchids are still on the coffee table. I should have told her to take them, and now they’re standing there like a monument to the most impulsive decision I’ve ever made.
I look at them for a moment.
Hoping she comes back tomorrow anyway.
The next morning, I step out of the elevator at six fifty-eight and find Elena already at the desk.
She has a coffee cup in one hand and the phone manual in the other, hair pinned up and already slipping free. The dress is blue, not remotely corporate, and it makes her eyes look brighter than they have any right to.
She looks up and smiles. “Good morning. I made coffee and ran through the phone system. I think I finally understand hold versus transfer.”
She didn’t quit.
“It’s seven o’clock,” I say.
“I wanted a few minutes with the phones before they started ringing.” She sets the manual down. “How was your morning?”
“Fine.”
I could ask about hers but one more question means one more answer, and one more answer means standing here long enough to look at her mouth again.
“I’m glad,” she says, like she means it.
She reaches for the coffee pot. “Coffee?”
I keep my eyes on the stack of folders. “Black.”
“Got it.”