9. Thea
THEA
I speak more Russian than anyone in this building thinks I do.
I started my second week, after I sat in the lobby watching two security contractors discuss a delivery while looking directly at the delivery, and realized a meaningful percentage of this company happens in a language I don’t have.
So, I got the apps. Then the podcasts. Then a workbook I keep in my nightstand.
The plan was to make myself a more valuable asset and someday reveal it in a meeting and get a raise out of the gasp. Someday never came, because when people believe you can’t understand them, they talk.
So, when the two logistics guys by the coffee machine order their espressos in Russian and keep going, right past the sugar, into a review of the new CEO’s assistant, I stir my coffee with a face as blank as printer paper.
The bald one says my dress fits well, except not in those words. The other one says something about how the boss picked the view for his outer office, and they both laugh, and I smile at them, the smile of a woman thinking about spreadsheets.
“Could I get a medium roast when the machine’s free?” In English. Sunny as a greeting card.
“Of course,” says the bald one, warm as anything, and hands me the pot.
My accent is terrible. I practice against the podcast lady alone in my car, and even Potato leaves the room.
But my ear is good. Eighteen months of subway drills will do that, and comprehension was always the point.
I don’t need to speak it. I need to hear it, the way I hear everything else in this building while looking like furniture.
No sense letting the Russians know I know what they’re saying about me. And the gossip about my dress isn’t the valuable stream. The valuable stream is the murmurs near elevators, when men who came with the new regime think no one’s listening.
The name Sokolov has come up twice this week, low, not the way anyone says a competitor’s name.
Once, from a driver, something like he came back just in time, or maybe only just in time, my tenses are shaky.
And yesterday, two of the new security men in the freight elevator, a fragment I chewed on all night.
The old wolf will want to know who fed the dogs.
Meanwhile, upstairs, there’s the other situation. The it-never-happened pact is two weeks old, and both parties are honoring it like tax attorneys. No references. No jokes. Nothing anyone could screenshot. What the pact didn’t cover, because we drafted it in a hurry, is eyes.
There are C-suite meetings now, Monday mornings and Thursday afternoons, walnut table, division heads performing confidence at each other, and I sit against the wall taking minutes because Mr. Vernigora likes a human record instead of a transcript. And his eyes drift.
He’s subtle about it. He’s subtle about everything.
I take minutes, which means I watch the room, which means I catch it.
The CFO will be lying about receivables, and Max’s gaze will slide off him, cross the table, land on me for two seconds, and go back to the lie with a question that guts it.
Twice a meeting. Three times if my blouse has anything going on.
Which brings me to Thursday, when I lean forward to pass the Rotterdam folder down the table, and I look up, and I catch the chief executive officer of Vernigora Industries looking straight down my blouse.
He doesn’t flinch. That’s the outrageous part, and it should be in a training video if we want Human Resources to give up. Any normal man caught mid-glance performs a silent film of innocence, and this man raises his eyes to mine, unhurried, and moves the meeting to the next agenda item.
I sit there with my ears on fire, taking minutes about berthing rights. I write the word berthing four times. Thursday’s minutes are not my best work.
The pact holds and the air sizzles anyway, and I go home most nights and tell Potato about it. Potato finds my situation very funny, the lucky little bastard. He has no frame of reference for a man who can agree to forget your mouth while looking at your mouth.
The worst part is the handoffs. Papers, pens, folders, the small commerce of an office, and every one is a negotiation about whether our fingers touch.
Monday, they didn’t. Thursday, passing him the amended minutes, they did, one second, maybe less, and neither of us acknowledged it.
I retyped a paragraph afterward because I’d written berthing again.
And then there’s the anti-situation. The gum on the bottom of my week.
Klaus.
Special Projects lives on nine, two floors and one tax bracket below his old office, and for the first week of the new regime he sulked down there and I saw nothing of him but his lunch deliveries in the lobby.
Then last Tuesday, I’m in the copy room feeding the scanner, and the door does its pneumatic wheeze, and there he is. Blue suit. Man bun at half-mast.
Smile set to old times.
“There she is,” Klaus says, like I’ve been lost. “Thea. You look incredible. Did you change your hair?”
“You saw me every day for a year and a half, Klaus. This is my hair.”
“It looks different.” He leans against the copier. “Listen, I feel like things got weird between us, and I hate that. We had something real, and I was an idiot, I own that, I fully own that.”
“You own that,” I repeat, feeding the scanner, watching him fully own it in the sheen of the paper tray, where he’s also checking his hair.
“Completely. And now with everything upside down around here, I keep thinking, the one person who ever really got me is right upstairs.” He drops into the register he thinks of as intimate.
“How is it up there, by the way? The old man settling in? I hear he’s doing one-on-ones with the division heads.
Is there, like, a list? An order to it?”
And there it is. Weeks of silence after the breakup, not one message, and the first conversation he starts is fishing for his father’s calendar before the copier finishes warming up.
I’d be insulted if it weren’t so purely Klaus.
He isn’t even good at it. He asks about the meeting list the way a kid asks what’s for dessert with his dinner still full.
“The calendar’s confidential,” I say. “You know that. You used to be the calendar.”
“Come on. It’s me.”
“That’s the confidential part working as intended.”
The pattern continues throughout the week. He arrives at my desk with two coffees, one being my outdated order from a year ago, which he never noticed had changed.
In the elevator, he compliments my dress loudly enough for two legal colleagues to hear.
At ten p.m., he texts me saying he misses talking to me, followed by another message four minutes later asking whether my dad prefers mornings or afternoons for a meeting.
That brief self-awareness is the most he’s shown all month. Probably more self-awareness than he’s ever shown.
I tell him to stop texting. I tell him at my desk, in plain English, that we are not friends, that I work for the CEO’s office and not for him, and that the next coffee goes to HR.
He laughs like I’ve said something flirty. In Klaus’s world, rejection is foreplay, because no has never once meant anything to him, since nobody ever made it.
Thursday night I’m at my desk past seven, alone on the floor, finishing the minutes with the four berths, when he does his wheeze routine on the executive level itself, where he has no business being, and perches on the edge of my desk. On the corner where my files live.
“Working late for him now, huh.” Something has curdled in his voice tonight, the charm sitting loose on top. “You never stayed this late for me.”
“I stayed this late for you every quarter close, Klaus. You just weren’t here to see it.”
“He’s not what you think he is, you know.” He picks up my stapler, clicks it once, empty, puts it down wrong. “My father. All that discipline, the accent, the suits. There’s stuff you don’t know. Stuff nobody in this building knows.”
Two weeks ago, that would have gone in one ear and out the other as Klaus being dramatic. Tonight it doesn’t. There’ve been too many shenanigans around here not to pay attention.
But if I make it too easy, he’ll get suspicious.
“Then request a meeting through the portal,” I say, “like a director. That’s what directors do.”
He laughs, wounded and charming, aiming for both and hitting neither. Then he leans in, too close, cologne and champagne memory, and says, “I always liked you better than anyone knew, Thea,” and leaves. I sit at my desk listening to the elevator swallow him.
Objectively rejecting him isn’t working. Fine. I can’t fire him. I couldn’t even get him to return the good stapler he borrowed in March.
But I know a man who can, and there’s more he should know. Months of meeting logs, signed packages, travel that didn’t match calendars, invoices I flagged and got waved off of, all of it in archive boxes and shared drives that nobody knows better than I do, because I built the filing system.
Max wants his audit. I want Klaus out of my building and off my desk corner. For once, the smart thing and the satisfying thing are the same thing.
I check the floor. Empty. Elevator quiet.
I pull up the archive index I made my first month, the one with color coding legal called adorable right up until they needed it, and I start a new folder on my secure drive and name it, “CLOSEOUT, GALA, MISC,” because boring names are camouflage. Another thing this place taught me.
Then I start pulling files.
Right away, in the first box, there it is again. Meridian Atlantic Services. Invoice after invoice, paid on time, every month, to a company with a letterhead and a logo and not one employee I’ve ever met.
I pull every one of them. Then I keep going, because if there’s one ghost in this filing system, there are more, and I’m the only person alive who knows where they sleep.