Chapter 3
Before the office filled, while it was still dark out, Cordelia opened the file from the acquirer’s lawyers and added Wren’s name to the list of people permitted to handle the sale. Now, there were seven. She paused a beat to look at the names, then closed the file.
By seven-thirty, morning light crept through the windows, low and pale, and employees started filtering in.
Wren was already sitting at her desk in the antechamber off Cordelia’s office.
She’d been in by seven-fifteen the day before too.
Cordelia had silently noted that day one had gone smoothly, and Wren competently fielded questions and tied loose ends without needing Cordelia’s constant input.
Mid-morning, she took a stack of memos from her desk and carried them out to the antechamber. Wren looked up from her computer.
“These need review for inconsistencies in the financial assumptions.” Cordelia set the stack on the corner of the desk. “Flag anything that conflicts with the quarterly numbers I sent yesterday. I want a summary on my desk by the end of the day.”
Cordelia trained her voice to stay ordinary. The memos were confidential, the kind a senior assistant in this building wouldn’t normally see until she’d earned enough trust. But Cordelia didn’t have the luxury of slowly building trust in Wren over time, so two days of observation would have to do.
Wren rested a hand flat on the stack, as if expecting a gust of wind to blow them away. “Which quarterly numbers? The ones filed with the board or the reconciled internal ones?”
“Internal.”
Wren nodded and drew the stack toward her, and something leapt into Cordelia’s throat. She pushed it down and went back to her desk to her own work.
By six, the summary was on her desk, ready for her review.
She took her time reading through each line.
The three inconsistencies that Wren had flagged were the same Cordelia would have flagged herself.
And despite Wren not being given a template for the executive summary, she had taken initiative and put it in Cordelia’s preferred format; a detail, Cordelia noted, that not even the rest of her team did.
Wren must have worked it out from the memos or Cordelia’s own correspondence, then took care to match her summary to it—all without being told.
At the bottom of the page, there was a note. Two of the memos, Wren had written, drew on slightly different versions of the same projection, dated two weeks apart. Wren had labeled it as a process question, not a problem needing to be solved.
Cordelia read the one-page executive summary again, and her eyebrows rose automatically.
It was the quality of what her CFO would have given her, her CFO who had been with the company for sixteen years and knew the ins and outs of the entire operation.
She closed the folder and tucked it into the second drawer on the left side of her desk, then continued working.
When Wren rose at six-thirty to leave, Cordelia’s eyes flicked up to watch her shrug on her coat and shoulder her bag before walking out.
She tracked Wren’s movements until she had disappeared around the corner toward the elevators before resuming her work until what little light was left had, too, disappeared into dusk.
The weekly Wednesday meeting was a small one, the kind that Cordelia had sat through so many times she could’ve run it from the next room.
The borrower was one of Lauren’s—a regional water utility that had taken on more debt than its revenues could comfortably repay—and the new negotiated terms would take the weight off without forcing a sale that would strip the company and sell what was left.
Lauren had built the civic infrastructure division from the ground up and cared more about preservation over exploiting vulnerable municipal companies.
Lauren, like Cordelia, knew if she didn’t, it could mean a town’s water supply would be privatized or a county would lose its only hospital.
Even if it meant walking away from profitable deals, it was necessary.
Cordelia already knew the solution before walking into the room, but she had learned long ago to keep her decisions to herself until people were given time to discuss.
People wanted to feel a part of the process, that they had contributed to and reasoned their way to the outcome with her.
They usually took it better, too, however difficult it was to hear.
She let Lauren take the lead and listened as her CFO and the outside legal counsel asked questions to create a negotiation. Cordelia was only peripherally aware of Wren sitting at the opposite end of the table with her laptop open, silently taking notes as she was directed.
Halfway through the meeting, Lauren’s case turned to the utility’s cash flow for the second half of the year.
The projection looked sound and aligned with what Cordelia already knew, so she accepted it provisionally, as did the CFO and outside lawyer.
They moved to the covenants, and by a quarter to four, the meeting ended and everyone dispersed.
Cordelia walked back to her office, Wren trailing a half-step behind her.
“Can I flag one thing? It might already be handled,” Wren said.
Cordelia looked at her but didn’t slow her pace.
“The back-half cash flow is only relevant if the utility’s biggest customer renews its supply contract in the third quarter. Our model assumes the renewal will go through.” She paused. “But it’s not a guarantee. Their last status report three weeks ago shows it’s still in negotiation.”
To her credit, Cordelia’s pace didn’t falter. Her mind went to work, running through possible scenarios about what they would do based on what the customer decided. She was irked that nobody in the room had thought to question this, but she didn’t so much as twitch.
Wren rushed to fill the silence. “I might have it wrong. The report could be out of date.”
“I’ll look into it,” Cordelia said, then went into her office and closed the door.
At her desk, Cordelia pulled the report. The renewal was buried three folders into the file, in a place where nobody had asked Wren to look, much less memorize the contents of. Something about that unsettled her.
She wrote a note to Lauren to confirm the Q3 renewal with the utility’s CFO before finalizing any deal, then sifted through her inbox.
Less than ten minutes later, Lauren replied informing her the renewal had been cleared that morning and the report was out of date.
Which meant the new terms were sound, and there was nothing to fix.
The relief she expected didn’t come. What came instead was more challenging: the sharpest eyes in the building belonged to the one person she could least afford to be seen by.
Thursday passed in the ordinary churn of the week, and by Friday, Cordelia was carrying the particular tiredness the end of a full week always left her.
The floor emptied by a quarter past seven, the senior team gone and the bullpen beyond her office dark.
The only sounds left were the building settling into evening and, through her open door, the quick, even rhythm of Wren typing in the antechamber.
Cordelia was at her desk with next month’s calendar open, reading it through for the first time since Wren had restructured it for her.
The changes were small but noticeable. Wren had given her forty-five minutes of unstructured time before every board call where before there had been none.
Nothing stacked against anything else, and the block on Thursday afternoons that Cordelia bookmarked was left intact.
Only now, after the week had finished and she looked at her calendar, did she realize why she had had the smoothest week in years.
It pleased her, some of it anyway. The rest she liked less the longer she thought about it. A stranger came into her office and observed her enough in such a short time to be able to improve upon her week. And Cordelia had given her the access to do it.
Wren appeared at the door with her tablet. “One thing on the calendar, if you have a second.”
Cordelia looked up. “Go ahead.”
“You’ve got standing one-on-ones with three of the senior team for forty-five minutes every Thursday at four, rotating through them.
It’s the most consistent block on the whole calendar.
” She glanced up from the screen. “I wanted to confirm I should keep it blocked as I build next quarter, even if something bigger wants the slot.”
Cordelia went still, though it only lasted half a second and Wren was still looking at her tablet so she didn’t catch it.
But in that half-second, Cordelia felt the cold drop of watching someone come up close to something without knowing it was there.
Wren hadn’t asked what the Thursday blocks were for.
She had only found it and noticed its consistency.
But it was still more than Cordelia wanted anyone close to this early.
The answer was out of her mouth before she could consider the words and how they’d be interpreted. “Protect it. If something conflicts, the standing meetings take priority, always.”
Wren made a note with her stylus. “Understood. I’ll have next quarter to you by Monday morning.” She walked back to her desk, not probing further.
Cordelia knew Wren had seen something in the pattern, but neither of them had said anything. That suited Cordelia just fine. More than anything, she needed discretion from Wren, and that interaction proved she had it.
She turned back to this quarter’s calendar, despite not needing to.
For the first time in longer than she could remember, there was nothing in front of her that needed her attention, and without that distraction, she found she didn’t quite know what to do with herself.
Through the door, Wren’s typing continued, quick and unbroken; Wren didn’t need her either.
Past the two lit offices, the rest of the floor was dark in every direction, and Cordelia sat in the quiet she usually had to stay very late to earn, with nothing at all to occupy her mind.
Wren’s typing stopped a little before eight. Cordelia heard the laptop close then the soft sounds of Wren leaving: a coat picked up, a bag lifted, the squeak of the chair pushed in. Then Wren was at the doorway.
“Goodnight, Ms. Hale.”
“Goodnight, Wren.”
Wren turned and went down the hall toward the elevators, and Cordelia caught herself staring at her but didn’t stop, not when Wren made the turn at the corridor or when the elevator chimed and opened its doors.
Once the elevator closed and the hallway was empty again, she turned back to her desk.
It had been a long week. She was tired in a way the working hours didn’t account for.
It didn’t take her long to realize it was because she had spent the whole week making sure the most observant person in the office only saw what Cordelia wanted her to see and nothing more.
She tipped the laptop lid closed, then rested her hand on top of it. For a moment, she sat like that without moving as she sorted through her thoughts. She got up, put on her coat, and switched off the desk lamp.
Outside, the April air had cooled. A block over, along the harbor walk, the dogwoods had come into bloom, pale under the streetlamps, and she appreciated their beauty as she walked the three blocks home where she knew a bottle of wine and an empty penthouse were waiting for her.