4. Erika
— ? —
Erika
I’ve got the pen on the paper when the elevator dings, and I close the notebook and leave it where it is, which is my first mistake.
Isabella Lockhart walks into my workspace like she owns it, and maybe she thinks she does, because she’s been doing this for weeks now, dropping by “for Kai,” who’s always conveniently trapped in a meeting when she arrives, which leaves her to prowl the reception area like a cat deciding which mouse to torment first.
Today he’s on a call, urgent enough to keep his door closed and his voice muffled through the glass, and Isabella settles into the waiting area to wait him out.
She’s wearing designer red, a color that looks like a warning sign, and those sharp green eyes haven’t left me since she sat down.
I can feel her gaze crawling over me like insects, assessing and judging and finding me wanting in ways she’s clearly dying to articulate.
I keep my head down and wake up my computer screen, pretending to be absorbed in an email I’m drafting and pretending I don’t feel her watching, while my skin prickles with the awareness of her.
The cursor blinks at me, patient and accusing, and I type a few words just to look busy, just to have a use for my hands that isn’t strangling the woman sitting fifteen feet away.
“Busy day?” Her voice cuts through the office silence like a blade through silk, all sugar on the surface and poison underneath.
I don’t look up. “Always.”
“Must be hard.” The click of her heels against the marble floor tells me she’s standing, moving, coming closer. I can smell her perfume now, expensive and cloying, the sort you’d have to ask a salesgirl to describe. “Being the help, I mean.”
My fingers freeze on the keyboard, and I force myself to take a breath before responding because the alternative is saying a thing I’ll regret. “Excuse me?”
“Oh, I didn’t mean anything by it.” She laughs, and the sound is like wind chimes in a tornado, pretty on the surface and violent underneath.
“It’s just, you know, everyone talks. About how you went to college for journalism, had all these big dreams, and ended up as Kai’s secretary.
” She’s close enough now that I can see the perfect application of her lipstick, the way her smile doesn’t reach her eyes.
“Standing by your man. Supporting his vision. It’s sweet, really. In a sad sort of way.”
Don’t react, I tell myself, don’t give her the satisfaction, don’t let her see that her words are landing exactly where she wants them to, in the soft places I’ve been trying to protect.
“I’m his personal assistant,” I say, and I’m proud of how even my voice sounds, how steady. “And I’m very good at my job.”
“I’m sure you are.” She’s at my desk now, near enough to touch, and her eyes are scanning the surface like she’s looking for a weapon. “Is that your planner? So organized. So… domestic.”
It’s not a planner, it’s my notebook, the one I write in during lunch breaks, when the office empties out and I have an hour to myself and the words come easier because no one’s watching.
It’s full of fragments and scenes, the notes for the next one and the bones of the last, the novel I built for three years, word by stolen word, in the margins of a life that doesn’t leave much room for dreams, and put out into the world myself last spring under a name that isn’t mine, where a few hundred strangers found it and nobody in my life knows it exists.
It’s my secret and my escape and the only thing in my life that belongs entirely to me, and before I can close it, before I can even move, she snatches it off the desk.
“‘He traced the hollow of her throat, and she forgot every reason she was supposed to resist…’” She’s reading aloud, her voice carrying through the office, loud enough for the assistants two desks over to hear, loud enough for everyone, and I see heads turning and conversations pausing and an audience assembling for my humiliation.
“‘She’d spent her life being invisible, but when he looked at her…’” Isabella laughs, sharp and delighted.
“Oh my God, is this romance? Are you writing a little love story?”
“Give that back.” I’m on my feet now, my chair scraping against the floor, and my heart is going like I’ve run up the stairs.
“‘Every touch felt like a promise she was afraid to believe…’” She’s flipping through the pages now, scanning for the most embarrassing passages, and I can see her eyes light up as she finds them.
“This is adorable. Really. You sitting here at your little desk, scribbling fantasies about love and passion while your husband builds an actual empire.” She snaps the notebook closed and holds it against her chest, hugging it like a trophy.
“You know what’s funny? You actually think this matters.
You actually believe someone might want to read this someday. ”
“Give me my notebook, Isabella.” My voice comes out harder than I intended, sharp enough to cut, and surprise flickers across her face, because she didn’t expect me to push back.
“Oh, touched a nerve.” But she’s not laughing anymore, and her grip on the notebook loosens just slightly.
“Fine. Take it.” She tosses it onto my desk, the pages splaying open on impact, some of them crumpling.
“I was just trying to help, you know. Give you a little reality check.” She leans in, near enough that I can see the pores beneath her foundation, the slight smudge of mascara at the corner of her eye.
“Oh, that’s cute. You’ll never be a famous writer or anything. You’re lucky your husband saved you.”
The words hit like a fist to the sternum, and I want to scream at her, tell her she’s wrong, grab her by her perfect red hair and drag her out of this office.
But I don’t do any of those things, because I’m frozen, because my throat has closed up, because the worst part is the tiny voice in the back of my head that whispers what if she’s right.
“Get out of my workspace.”
“Your workspace?” She’s already retreating, heels clicking toward the elevator, and she tosses the words over her shoulder like a final grenade. “Honey, this is Kai’s building. You just answer phones in it.”
The elevator doors close behind her, and I’m left standing at my desk with my ruined notebook and my burning eyes and the echo of her laughter still ringing in my ears, and that’s when Kai’s office door opens.
“Hey.” His voice is warm and concerned, and for a moment I let myself hope that he saw or heard, that he’s going to ask what happened and actually listen to the answer. “You okay? You look upset.”
I don’t turn around, because I can’t, because my eyes are burning and my hands are shaking and if I look at him right now I’m going to fall apart completely. “Fine.”
“You don’t look fine.” His footsteps come up behind me and he sets a hand on my shoulder, warm and familiar, and I want to lean into it and let him hold me and tell him everything. “What happened?”
“Nothing.” I force my voice to stay steady. “I’m fine.”
His phone buzzes in his pocket. I feel him tense, feel his attention fracture, half on me and half on whatever new crisis is demanding it, and he pulls it out and glances at the screen, and I watch in my peripheral vision as his focus shifts entirely and I become secondary to whatever just appeared.
“Okay,” he says, and he’s already distracted, already elsewhere, his thumb moving across the screen. “Well, I’ve got to take this, but we can talk later if you want to…”
“It’s fine, Kai. Go.”
He nods, phone already pressed to his ear as he walks back toward his office. “Yeah, I’m here, what’s the update on…” The door closes behind him and cuts off the rest of the sentence, and I’m left alone with the wreckage of my morning.
Through the glass wall I watch him pace back and forth, gesturing with his free hand, completely absorbed, and he doesn’t look back at me or pause or seem to remember that thirty seconds ago he was asking if I was okay.
He didn’t take Isabella’s side, didn’t defend her or dismiss my feelings or tell me I was overreacting. He just didn’t see, and that’s worse.
I gather my notebook from the desk, smoothing the crumpled pages and checking for damage, and there are a few bent corners and one small tear, but nothing that can’t be fixed, nothing permanent, unlike the crack that just formed in the center of my chest.
I make it to the bathroom before the tears come, locking myself in the last stall and pressing my back against the cold metal door. They’re not sad tears, not exactly, they’re rage tears, hot and furious, streaming down my face as I clamp my hand over my mouth to muffle the sounds.
Her words echo in my head, refusing to fade no matter how many times I tell myself she’s wrong, that she doesn’t know me or what I’m capable of, that she’s just a bitter woman who gets off on making other people feel small. Knowing all of that doesn’t make the words hurt less.
I stay in the bathroom for fifteen minutes, letting the tears run their course, then wash my face with cold water and reapply my lipstick and smooth down my hair until I look almost normal again.
By the time I walk back to my desk you’d never know I’d been crying, because that’s the thing about being invisible, you get very good at hiding.
The rest of the afternoon passes in a blur of emails and phone calls and mind-numbing administrative tasks that require just enough attention to keep me from spiraling but not enough to actually engage my brain.
Kai stays in his office with the door closed, his voice a low murmur through the glass, and I don’t try to get his attention or knock on his door or interrupt whatever important work is keeping him from noticing that his wife is quietly falling apart ten feet away.
At six o’clock, he emerges, jacket over his arm, keys in hand. “I have to head out for a dinner meeting. You okay getting home?”
“Fine.” I don’t look up from my computer. “Have a good night.”
“You sure you’re okay? You seem off.”
For a moment I consider telling him, saying, actually, the woman you keep having dinner with came in here today and read my writing aloud and called me pathetic and told me I’d never amount to anything, and you walked out of your office two minutes later and asked if I was okay and then immediately forgot about me when your phone buzzed.
But what’s the point, when he’s already halfway out the door with his mind on wherever he’s going, and I’m tired of having conversations that don’t go anywhere.
“I’m fine,” I say. “Just tired. See you at home.”
He hesitates, like he knows there’s a problem but doesn’t have time to figure out what, and then he nods and leaves, and I’m alone in the empty office with the hum of the air conditioning and the weight of Isabella’s words still pressing down on my chest.
That night, after the cleaning crew has come and gone and the building has emptied out, I sit at my desk in the darkness and open my laptop. The screen glows blue in the dim room, and I navigate to a website I’ve visited a hundred times but never had the courage to actually use.
INDIE VOICE PUBLISHING AWARD: SUBMISSION PORTAL
The page loads, all clean lines and professional fonts, and I read the description for the thousandth time.
It’s open to self-published and independently published romance novels, judged blind, with no consideration given to the author’s name or background or how many followers they have, and first prize is ten thousand dollars and a meeting with a top literary agent.
You’ll never be a famous writer or anything.
I think about the book I wrote in stolen moments over three years, before dawn when Kai was still asleep and the house was quiet, during lunch breaks when my coworkers gossiped about reality TV and I escaped into a world where the heroine got to be the center of her own story, late at night when the city glittered outside the window and my husband was working late again and I poured all my loneliness into sentences that a few hundred strangers have read and no one I love ever will.
Seventy thousand words and three years of work, a story about a woman who starts out invisible and ends up seen, sitting on a website under a name I made up so nobody could trace it back to the wife of Kai Channing.
You’re lucky your husband saved you.
My finger hovers over the submit button, trembling slightly, and I think about what Isabella would say if she knew I was doing this, the smirk and the laughter and the absolute certainty that I’m wasting my time, that girls like me don’t get to have dreams that actually come true.
And then I think, fuck her, and I click submit.
The confirmation appears almost immediately, a simple message in a simple box: Thank you for your submission. You will be notified of results within eight to ten weeks.
I stare at the screen, heart pounding, half expecting it to disappear or throw an error or give me some sign from the universe that I’ve made a terrible mistake, and nothing happens.
The message just sits there, calm and certain, proof that I tried, proof that somewhere out there my words are waiting to be read by someone who doesn’t know me, doesn’t know my husband, doesn’t care that I’m just an assistant who answers phones in someone else’s building.
I close the laptop and sit in the darkness for a while, letting the feeling wash over me, fear and hope and what might be the beginning of pride, all tangled together in my chest like threads I can’t quite separate.
Tomorrow, I’ll go back to being the dutiful wife and the competent assistant and the woman who smiles through the pain. Tomorrow, I’ll pretend Isabella’s words didn’t hurt and Kai’s obliviousness doesn’t matter and everything is fine, just fine, nothing to see here.
But tonight, just for a moment, I let myself imagine a different future, one where I’m not invisible anymore, and Isabella Lockhart is wrong about everything.