2. Cassie
— ? —
Cassie
Eight weeks of Celine, and I’m starting to lose my mind.
It’s not that she’s bad at her job, exactly. It’s that she’s bad at her job in ways that always seem to work out in her favor. Every mistake she makes creates an opportunity for Charles to rescue her, to comfort her, to spend time with her that should be spent on actual work.
She double-books meetings, and Charles has to cancel on me to sort it out. She loses files, and Charles stays late to help her find them. She orders the wrong lunch for a client presentation, and Charles laughs it off like it’s charming instead of incompetent.
I keep a running list, though I’ve never shown it to anyone.
Not the big disasters, those speak for themselves, but the small daily failures that add up to something I can’t quite prove.
The way she “forgets” to CC me on emails until a problem has already snowballed.
The way she schedules Charles’s important calls for the exact times she knows I have my own commitments, so I can’t sit in and catch her mistakes.
The way she’s slowly, methodically making herself the only person who knows where anything is, so that firing her would mean untangling months of deliberate chaos.
Maybe I’m imagining the deliberate part. Maybe she’s just disorganized. But I’ve trained a dozen assistants over the years, and I’ve never seen incompetence that worked so consistently in one direction.
“She’s still learning,” he says whenever I point out another mistake. “Give her time.”
I’ve given her eight weeks of time. In eight weeks, I could train a golden retriever to do this job better. A golden retriever wouldn’t cry every time someone corrected it, and it probably wouldn’t wear designer dresses that show just enough to be noticeable but not enough to be inappropriate.
Today’s disaster is the investor dinner. It’s the biggest night of the year, half of Charles’s world flying in, and I’ve been planning it for months. Every detail has been checked and double-checked. The catering is confirmed, the presentation is polished, the room is set up perfectly.
And then Celine orders barbecue.
“What is this?” I stare at the spread of pulled pork and brisket containers cluttering the elegant marble sidebar.
The room smells like smoke and vinegar, which would be fine for a casual Friday lunch but is absolutely wrong for a formal investor dinner.
“I ordered the French caterer. The one we always use.”
“Oh.” Celine’s face falls, and her lower lip actually trembles. “I thought you said to change it. Because of the shellfish allergy at the table?”
“That’s one guest, allergic to shellfish, not to French food. I sent you the menu with the modifications already made. I highlighted them in yellow. I wrote ‘DO NOT CHANGE’ at the top of the page.”
“I didn’t see it.” Her eyes are filling with tears, and I watch them gather on her lashes like she’s practiced this in a mirror. “I’m so sorry, Cassie. I just wanted to help. I thought I was being proactive.”
The first guests are arriving in forty minutes. I don’t have time for this.
“It’s fine,” I say through gritted teeth. “I’ll handle it.”
I spend the next half hour on the phone with the caterer, begging and bribing and eventually paying double to get an emergency delivery in time. When I finally hang up, my head is pounding and my voice is hoarse and I want nothing more than to go home and drink an entire bottle of wine.
Instead, I walk back to the conference room to check on the setup and find Celine in the corner, crying into Charles’s shoulder.
“I ruined everything,” she’s sobbing. “Cassie must hate me now. I tried so hard, and I just keep making mistakes, and she looks at me like I’m an idiot.”
“She doesn’t hate you.” Charles is rubbing her back, his voice soft and soothing. “It was an honest mistake. These things happen.”
These things don’t happen. Not to me. Not when I was the one doing this job. I never ordered the wrong catering. I never double-booked meetings. I never made mistakes that cost the company thousands of dollars and then cried about it until someone comforted me.
I clear my throat, and they spring apart. Celine’s mascara isn’t even smudged. The tears that were supposedly streaming down her face have left no trace at all, no redness around her eyes, no puffiness, no evidence that she was doing anything other than performing distress for an audience of one.
I’ve cried real tears. I know what they do to a face.
They leave you blotchy and swollen and ugly, they run your makeup into gray tracks, they make your nose red and your voice thick.
What Celine does is something else entirely, a performance calibrated to the exact threshold that makes a man want to comfort her without making her look anything less than pretty while she does it.
It’s a skill. I’ll give her that. It’s a skill I never bothered to learn because I was too busy actually doing the job.
“The caterer is on the way,” I say flatly. “Crisis averted.”
“See?” Charles gives Celine an encouraging smile. “Cassie fixed it. She always does.”
He doesn’t thank me. He doesn’t acknowledge the thirty minutes of groveling I just did or the extra thousand dollars this mistake is going to cost. He just goes back to comforting the girl who created the problem in the first place.
I turn and walk out before I say something I can’t take back.
The dinner goes smoothly, because I make sure it does.
I smile at the investors and remember their wives’ names and laugh at their jokes and pretend I haven’t noticed how Charles keeps glancing at Celine across the table.
She’s taking notes, her pen moving in careful loops, looking up occasionally to nod at whoever’s speaking.
Her notes, I’ve discovered, are useless. She writes down random phrases without context and then can’t remember what they were supposed to mean. I’ve been rewriting her meeting summaries for weeks, fixing errors and filling in gaps she doesn’t even know she’s left.
She catches my eye once and gives me a small, apologetic smile.
I don’t return it.
After the meeting, Charles pulls me aside in the hallway. His expression is strange, caught somewhere between annoyed and embarrassed.
“Can I talk to you for a second?”
“Of course.”
He guides me into his office and closes the door, which is unusual.
We haven’t had a closed-door conversation in weeks.
I used to walk in and out of his office freely, consulting on decisions, sharing updates, operating as his partner in everything but title.
Now I feel like a subordinate being called in for a performance review.
“About earlier,” he starts.
“I handled it. It’s fine.”
“That’s not what I want to discuss.” He runs a hand through his hair, a nervous habit I used to find endearing. “Celine told me what happened. She said you were pretty hard on her.”
The words don’t make sense at first. I replay them in my head, trying to find the version where I’m the villain. I didn’t raise my voice. I didn’t call her names. I stated facts about a mistake she made and then fixed that mistake while she cried on my husband’s shoulder.
“I wasn’t hard on her, Charles. I was fixing her mistake.”
“She said you made her feel stupid.”
“I told her the facts. She ordered the wrong catering. I had to scramble to fix it. I didn’t say anything that wasn’t true.”
“It was an honest mistake.”
“It was an incompetent mistake.” My voice is rising, and I force it back down.
“She’s been here two months and she still can’t follow basic instructions.
If I had made that error when I was in her position, I would have been fired.
Do you remember what you said to me when I accidentally sent an email to the wrong client in my first month?
You told me one more mistake like that and I’d be looking for a new job. ”
“That was different.”
“How? How was it different?”
He doesn’t answer.
The silence stretches between us, filled with everything we’re not saying. I think about the tears that didn’t smudge her mascara, the way she folded into his shoulder like she’d known him for years instead of weeks.
“You were hard on her,” Charles says. “She’s new. She’s trying.”
“She cried on your shoulder for twenty minutes over a mistake that cost us a small fortune.”
“She’s sensitive.”
“I’m sure she is.” I hear how sharp it comes out and I don’t soften it. “Funny thing is, I’ve never once cried on your shoulder over anything. Maybe I should try being worse at my job. See if that gets me a hug.”
He looks at me like I’m the one being unreasonable, like wanting to be held the way he holds her is the strange part of this.
“I’m just asking you to ease up a little,” Charles finally says. “She’s still learning.”
“And when does she finish learning? When does she actually have to be competent at the job you hired her to do?”
“Cassie.” His voice has that edge again, the one that means I’ve pushed too far. “I’m not asking. I’m telling you.”
“It’s not a big deal, Cass,” he adds, already turning away from me. “You’re making it a big deal.”
So there it is, said right out loud in the middle of his office.
I stare at him, this man I married, this man I’ve built my whole adult life around, and I don’t recognize him.
The Charles I fell in love with cared about doing things right.
He held everyone around him to a high standard and never let anything slide.
He wouldn’t have tolerated that performance from anyone else, and we both know it.
So why is he tolerating it from her?
“Fine,” I say. “Whatever you want.”
I walk out of his office before he can see my hands shaking.
The afternoon passes in a blur of emails and reports and the constant low-grade headache of pretending everything is normal. Celine avoids me, which is fine. Charles avoids me too, which is less fine but not surprising.