Chapter 4
Patrick
She’s charming, I’ll give her that. She has a quality that makes people, the mailroom guy, the woman from the twelfth floor who has no reason to be on the fortieth, stop and talk to her for longer than they meant to.
She smiles at them like she already knows them, and they leave looking pleased with themselves.
It’s a skill. It has absolutely nothing to do with the job I hired her for, but it’s a skill.
It’s also a disaster. The filing system she built yesterday exists within a taxonomy that’s entirely her own and which I have not been able to decipher.
The calendar has been updated with such enthusiasm that several entries appear twice, at different times, on different days, without any apparent logic.
She takes every call now without hanging up on anyone, which is progress.
Still, she has a tendency to engage the callers in conversation, which means the Tokyo office spent eleven minutes yesterday listening to her thoughts on the best ramen spots in Midtown before she transferred them to me.
I have no one to blame for this but myself. That is the fact I keep arriving at and keep having to set down again.
I call Margaret at nine.
“Patrick.” Her voice has the particular quality it gets when she already knows what I’m going to say and has prepared accordingly.
Margaret Hayes has been running HR for this company for eleven years.
She is, in the most literal sense, a building block of what we’ve built here. “I was wondering when you’d call.”
“I need you to begin the search for a new assistant.”
“I’ve already sent Elena Brown a message so we can start the standard onboarding documentation.” A pause, precise and deliberate. “You and I established specific protocols for how this company handles hiring, Patrick. I’d like to think we put those in place for a reason.”
“The situation was urgent.”
“Most situations feel urgent when we’re in them.
” I can hear her choosing her words with the care of someone defusing something.
“I trust your judgment. I’m hoping it wasn’t entirely unsound.
But before we can consider letting her go and bringing someone new in, I need evidence that she’s unable to perform the role.
If she fails the standard competency assessments, we won’t be able to formalize the hire, and we part ways cleanly. If she passes—”
“She won’t pass.”
“If she passes,” Margaret continues, unmoved, “she stays. Unless there’s a documented and valid reason for termination. Those are the rules. We wrote them together. They exist so this company runs on compliance and not on whoever had a bad morning.”
I say nothing.
“Send her down to complete her assessments tomorrow. Let the process run. That’s all I’m asking.”
I hang up and sit with the specific displeasure of a man who has just been told, correctly and professionally, that he made a mess and has to clean it up through the proper channels.
Margaret is right. I knew she was right before I picked up the phone.
I called her anyway because I needed someone to tell me there’s a faster solution, and there isn’t one.
Elena isn’t going to pass those assessments.
She doesn’t know the industry, doesn’t know the systems. I can tell that she has never worked in a corporate environment by any evidence I can see.
A few days of phones and filing isn’t going to prepare her for the competency review Margaret’s team runs on every hire.
She’ll fail, it’ll be on record, and I’ll have a qualified replacement within the week.
And then it occurs to me.
She’s going to walk into that assessment and not know what this company makes, fuck, not even the industry we’re in. I’ve never given HR a reason to question my judgment. Until now. Until her.
I need to fix at least part of that before tomorrow morning.
I walk out of my office and put a folder on her desk.
She looks up. The eyes, I notice this reluctantly and with absolutely no intention of acting on it, are an unusual shade of blue, darker than you expect, the kind of color that makes you look twice because you’re not sure you saw it right the first time. I look at the folder.
“Read that,” I say. “Today. It’s a company overview, our current portfolio, the major accounts. I’d like you to be able to answer the phone without referring to us as a consulting firm.”
She looks at the folder. Looks at me. “Sure, I’m sorry I keep doing that.”
“We are a luxury furniture company. The largest in the country.”
“Yes.” A beat. “I know.”
“Read it.”
I go back to my office and close the door.
Ten minutes later, I need a file from the cabinet in the reception.
She’s already deep in the folder, chin propped on one hand, occasionally mouthing something or tilting her head like she’s having a small internal disagreement with the text.
She doesn’t notice me. At one point, she laughs at something, quietly, to herself. I get the file and go back to my desk.
She puzzles me. That’s the word for it. Most people I can place within a few minutes of meeting them, what they want, how they operate, what they’re actually doing underneath what they say they’re doing.
Elena Brown is four days in, and I have no clear read on her.
She isn’t trying to impress me, exactly, or if she is, she’s doing it in a way I don’t recognize.
She isn’t deferential. She pushes back when she thinks she’s right, which is more often than is strictly comfortable.
She seems genuinely unbothered by the chaos she creates, not because she doesn’t care, but because she moves through the consequences of it with a forward-facing practicality that I find simultaneously irritating and difficult to dismiss.
She’s going to fail Margaret’s assessment.
She has to. Because the alternative, that she stays, that this continues, that I spend the foreseeable future watching her read my company overview with her chin in her hand and her eyes doing whatever they’re doing, is not something I’m equipped to think about clearly.
I keep my office door closed for the rest of the afternoon.
David pulls up at five forty-five, and I get in the back seat with the specific fatigue of a man who has spent the day working very hard not to look at his employee.
“Long one?” David asks, pulling into traffic.
“They’re all long.”
“You say that, but you’re out an hour earlier than yesterday, which was two hours earlier than Tuesday.” He meets my eyes in the rearview mirror with the easy familiarity of a man who has driven me home for four years. “I’m starting to think someone’s making your life slightly less terrible.”
“The new assistant is a catastrophe.”
“Mm.” He changes lanes. “Those are the interesting ones.”
I don’t respond. David has an opinion about everything and the confidence to share it, which I tolerate because he’s right often enough to be worth listening to and funny enough to be worth keeping around.
Tonight I’m not in the mood for his version of wisdom, which tends to arrive through observation rather than direct statement and therefore can’t be easily deflected.
We ride the rest of the way in silence that David seems perfectly content with.
I know my mother is there the moment I step inside. Her bag is on the console table in the hallway, the large structured one she carries everywhere, sitting where it always sits when she’s decided to stay for dinner without being asked.
Maria meets me in the entryway. She is around my mother's age, from the Dominican Republic, and has been with us since Erick was born. She knows where everything is and how everything works. She watched me fall apart after Sarah’s death and watched me reassemble into something functional without ever commenting on either process.
She is the reason the house runs. She is, in ways I rarely articulate, the reason Erick is okay.
“He’s in the living room,” she says. “Your mother made comments about the dinner menu, but we prevailed.”
“Thank you, Maria.”
“Mr. Aldera.” She hands me the mail and goes back to the kitchen.
Erick is on the living room floor, surrounded by the wreckage of what appears to have been a very ambitious block structure, now largely collapsed. He looks up when I walk in with the expression he reserves for things he’s genuinely pleased about.
“Dad. Look what happened.”
“What happened?”
“It fell. But I’m going to build it again and make it stronger.” He says this with complete certainty, the way he says most things, as a statement of fact rather than an aspiration. “Sit down.”
I sit on the floor. My mother, from the couch, watches this with the expression she wears when she has something to say and is deciding whether tonight is the night.
“You’re home early,” she says. Not a compliment. More of an observation she’s filing.
“Long day.”
“You always say that.” She sets her book aside. “You look tired, Patrick.”
“I’m fine.”
“You work too much. You’ve always worked too much. Sarah used to—” She stops. The room shifts the way it always shifts when Sarah’s name arrives unannounced. “I just think Erick needs more of you. That’s all I’m saying.”
“I know.” Because I do know, and because the conversation is four words old and has already arrived at the place it always arrives, and there’s no productive response to it that I haven’t already given.
Erick, who has the social awareness of someone who has been surrounded by adults his entire short life, looks between us and hands me a block. “Here. You can help.”
We build until dinner.
My mother leaves after we eat. Erick has his bath, and then I sit on the edge of his bed and read him two stories, one about a boy who builds a rocket, and one that wasn’t supposed to happen but that he requests with such specific logistical precision (just one more, the short one, Dad, it’s short, look) that I can’t locate a solid argument against it.
By the time his eyes close, I’ve been sitting in his room for forty-five minutes.
I lean down and kiss his forehead, already thinking about the emails. He doesn’t stir.
He likes his door at a precise angle, enough light from the hall so he won’t wake in complete darkness.
I close it that way and check my email. Midway down the screen, between a supplier update and a board memo, there’s one from Elena Brown sent at eight forty-three from her new company address. Subject line: Questions re: the folder.
Six questions. Specific ones. The questions of someone who read the whole thing and found the places where the material didn’t fully add up.
I read it twice.
Good. Margaret won’t think I’m entirely reckless. That’s something.
I put the phone down and close my eyes.