7. Thea
THEA
Three hours of sleep, and the day decides to get historic.
I make it to my desk on dry shampoo and a coffee the size of a fire extinguisher. My plan for today is modest. Answer the vendor emails, sign the gala closeout sheet, avoid Klaus, avoid all thoughts beginning with the letter M, and go to bed at eight like the responsible wreck I am.
That’s it. That’s the agenda.
Life has other plans. I can feel it the second I step off the elevator, because a floor full of office workers gives off a specific hum when something’s happening, and today the hum is at swarm pitch. People are clustered at the coffee machine and not drinking coffee.
A calendar invite hits every screen on the floor at once. Mandatory all-hands, eleven a.m., main auditorium, no agenda attached.
I schedule meetings for a living. A mandatory all-hands with no agenda is not a meeting. It’s a disaster.
My phone buzzes. Mandy’s text reads, “If we’re all fired, I’m taking the good stapler.”
Here’s what I’ve learned about the top of my own company after a year and a half of managing its calendar.
Vernigora Industries was founded over thirty years ago by a man referred to in the oldest records as M.
Vernigora. He built it up from nothing, went abroad years before I joined, and now it lives on as a proud signature line and a legendary name.
Klaus has run things the entire time I’ve been here, and since the email did not come from him, I’ve no idea what’s going on.
Just in time for the all-hands, I take my badge and my fire extinguisher of coffee and file into the auditorium with four hundred other people. God is a comedian, because the only seats left by the time I finish helping the AV guy find a working clicker are in the front row.
Of course, they are.
It’s barebones up there. One podium, one microphone, a projection screen showing the company logo, and the stage has the stripped look of somebody senior having asked for it to be cleared of nonsense.
Not a good sign.
The lights don’t even dim. At eleven sharp, a side door opens, and our General Counsel walks out. The man has aged since breakfast. He leans into the microphone. “Please welcome the founder and chief executive of Vernigora Industries, Maxim Vernigora.”
Maxim? Maxim is M Vernigora?
I know a shorter version of that name. I’ve said a shorter version of that name, last night, in a tone I would not use in this auditorium.
My eyes find the man walking out of the wings.
Silver hair. Black suit. Unhurried.
It takes him eleven seconds to cross the stage to the podium. I know it’s eleven because some doomed administrative part of my brain counts, and for each of those seconds I’m somewhere else. Naked and begging for more. Also, sweating in an auditorium.
One: a ballroom, a seam in the marble, wine leaving my glass in a sheet.
Two: the stain spreading across his chest while he watches it happen with zero surprise.
Three: you can clean me up.
Four: a mirrored elevator, my own mouth saying something about crying on the subway.
Five: the jacket coming off.
The seconds tick with my memory, and none of them are safe for work.
He reaches the podium. I return to my body, which is sitting in the front row, wearing his employee badge, holding a coffee with both hands. I’m back in the moment, and in this moment, I want to run away.
I want to tell him, “You know what would have been helpful last night? A last name. A hint. A company logo tattooed somewhere on all those muscles.”
“Good morning,” he says, and the room goes so quiet I can hear the HVAC.
It’s the same voice. Of course, it’s the same voice—low and unhurried, with that formal tone beneath it.
It’s the kind of voice that affects my spine at eleven a.m. under fluorescent lights just as much as it did at midnight on the twelfth floor.
That’s a little unfair, and maybe it even raises some workplace safety concerns.
“I won’t take much of your time. You have work here, and as of this morning, so do I.”
And then, while my entire nervous system is still filling out the emergency forms, he does the thing. His gaze moves across the auditorium the way it moved across that ballroom, one slow pass, corner to corner, a man counting the house. And it catches on the front row.
On me.
It stops. Not long. A second, maybe a second and a half, an eternity in stage time, and there is no question that he’s clocked me, because his eyes change when they land on mine.
Not surprise. I don’t think surprise is in his repertoire.
Recognition, fast, and then something worse, a flicker I can only call amusement, one degree of warmth in all that glacier, gone before it can be subpoenaed.
He knows. He knows I’m here. He knows what’s under my professional face and my professional clothes. He knows where my birthmark is, and I know he knows, and he knows I know he knows, and I’ve less than three hours of sleep with which to manage this, and my coffee has stopped helping.
I do not look away. Every instinct I own is screaming at me to study my shoes. But I hold the eye contact for the full second and a half, chin level, face composed, like a woman who has never begged a stranger for anything in a penthouse.
His mouth doesn’t move. The amusement flickers once more, in the eyes only, and then his gaze slides on down the row and releases me, and I let out a sharp breath.
“Four years ago, I went abroad to build this company’s future,” he tells the room. “That work’s done. This morning, with the board’s unanimous support, I’ve resumed the office of chief executive.”
The auditorium detonates into a murmur.
“The details are in your inboxes as of this moment. The summary is simpler. This company was built on logistics, and it will run on logistics again. The standard is about to change. Those of you who do excellent work are going to enjoy the next year very much. That’s all the vision statement I have. The rest is execution, as you’ll see.”
Phones light up all over the auditorium as the announcement email hits. Mine buzzes against my leg, and I don’t reach for it, because the screen behind him has changed.
The new slide’s an updated org chart.
The top box says Chief Executive Officer: M. Vernigora. Below it, a clean row of divisions, half with new reporting lines, one small box labeled Special Projects floating off to the side, attached to the structure by a line so thin it reads like an apology.
N. Vernigora, Director. Klaus got demoted. In public. Via slide.
My eyes fix on the small box tucked beneath the CEO, resembling a barnacle—an unnoticed detail for anyone else in the auditorium.
Nobody else here has spent a year and a half in that role.
As an Executive Assistant in the Office of the CEO, there’s always been a connection between my job and that top box.
Now, there’s a new connection between me and the CEO. The one that I met last night.
My job serves the CEO. The CEO is Max. Max is Maxim Vernigora, my one-night, no-names, nothing-follows-me-out-that-door stand, and starting today I manage his calendar, his coffee, and his correspondence. I already know things about this man’s preferences that HR does not have a form for.
So that’s not awkward at all. Totally sustainable. No pressure.
I take a sip of coffee with a hand that has suddenly developed a tremor, and my brain, my traitor brain, hands me the memory of that mouth sealing our little contract between my thighs twelve hours before an org chart made the contract null and void and hilarious.
And then the last piece drops, the one my sleep-deprived head has been fumbling since the general counsel said the name, and it drops with the delicacy of a piano through a skylight.
Vernigora. Maxim Vernigora. Niklaus Vernigora.
Klaus’s father. I slept with Klaus’s father.
The room tilts. I set the coffee on the floor between my feet before I drop it. I run the tape one horrible time to be sure, because I need it to be wrong. I’ve never wanted to be… wronger.
The height. The jawline, which I registered last night as familiar and wrote off as handsome men looking alike. The way both of them swear in the same language under their breath. The bristle across the ballroom that I watched happen and misread as business.
Klaus didn’t send me across that room to handle a party crasher. He sent his ex-girlfriend to intercept his own father, because he was too scared to cross the floor himself, and I handled the assignment.
Breathe. Not optional, I struggle to remind myself.
Nope. No panic attack. Not here. Not in the front row, where, if I think about it, I’ll make a sound this microphone picks up. That one waits until I’m home tonight with Potato and something strong in the big cup.
Onstage, Max, Maxim, Mr. Vernigora, my boss, wraps up without ceremony. “Department heads will have meetings on their calendars by end of day. Everyone else, thank you. Go do good work.”
That’s when I let myself look two seats down the front row, stage left, where the executive team was seated for display purposes. I’ve been aware of the blue suit in my peripheral vision this entire time and unwilling to give it attention.
Klaus is not looking at his phone, which for Klaus is unheard of.
He’s staring up at the org chart, and his jaw is set.
A muscle in his cheek is jumping, and his hands grip his knees, white-knuckled, holding onto himself in front of four hundred people who have just watched his title walk out of the wings and take the podium away from him.
He looks pissed. He looks beyond pissed, actually.
A little voice inside my head pipes up. Good.