Chapter 10
Wren moved the place card down two seats and checked it against the list. Delacroix and Reyes couldn't sit together, not since the spring vote, and the event manager had put them one chair apart, close enough to go wrong somewhere between the second course and the wine.
She set Reyes across the corner and straightened the card in front of the plate. That was the last of it.
The board had their quarterly dinner in the private room at Elements four times a year, and Wren had been in charge of the last two.
She'd run nights like it for years before that, for other people, in other cities—handling the seating, the wine pace, the guest who ate no shellfish, the one who tried to leave early.
She had spent six days prepping it. Now the room was ready, and she had forty minutes to spare.
She walked a lap around the room once more and found nothing out of place.
The event manager came in with the wine list for a last sign-off and Wren initialed it without slowing. "Second pour after Ms. Hale's remarks. Not before. They'll run long if you fill them early." The woman nodded and went out.
She took the small table by the service door, where the assistant sat, half a step outside the light.
She had always liked being on the edge of a room.
From here she could see every seat and no one had to see her.
She could observe everyone and take notes—who said what, what Cordelia would want a follow-up on in the morning, the thing someone let drop in passing that mattered more than they knew they'd said.
The board members came in at seven, warm from the bar downstairs, in twos and threes. Wren had the pad open and the names ready. She marked them off as they sat. Cordelia walked in last, and late, which was out of character for her.
She was in a dark dress that was plainer than her usual style, and she wore small pearl earrings that caught the low light when she turned her head.
Wren could tell they were antique and real, though she hadn't seen her wear them before.
She took all of it in, the dress and the pearls and the late arrival, in the time it took Cordelia to cross to the head of the table.
Then she made herself stop looking, and she turned her attention down at the pad and uncapped her pen.
She wrote the time at the top of the page: 7:02. Down the table, the last chair scraped in, and the room went quiet for Cordelia, the way it always did. The first course went out at 7:10, right on the schedule she'd padded. She marked it and moved on.
She wrote while everyone else talked. The first half hour was the easy part of any dinner.
Everyone was still loose from the drinks downstairs and glad to be off their feet, and she captured snippets from the night on paper: who'd ended up where, who Adler had pulled in close on her right, the joke about the drive up that landed and the one that didn't. All the things they said and did that they would guard better by ten.
She had always been good at reading the room and knowing what a person needed before they knew how to ask for it. It was the thing she was surest about being good at, maybe it was the only thing, and it had turned out that people would pay for her to be useful.
She'd put Delacroix and Reyes across a corner from each other on purpose, because they'd been on opposite sides of the spring vote and neither had let it go. It wasn't far enough. Over the soup, Reyes started in.
It came in over the soup, folded inside something that sounded like nothing. Reyes was talking about a hire her division had made in April, a good one, and she mentioned she'd had to fight for the money.
"You'd know about that," she said to Delacroix in a pleasant tone, not looking at her. "You held it up long enough."
"I asked questions," Delacroix said. "That's the job."
"Sure." Reyes turned her wine glass by the stem. "The job cost me six weeks and a candidate who nearly walked. She didn't. So."
"So it worked out."
"It worked out."
Adler leaned in from Delacroix's other side before either of them found the next thing to say.
She asked Reyes how the new hire was settling in, and got two easy minutes back, long enough for everyone to compose themselves again.
Delacroix drank her water, and Reyes kept talking.
They let it drop. Wren wrote it small at the bottom of the page.
Reyes / Delacroix, April hire, not settled.
Cordelia would want it before the next meeting.
She looked up to check the wine—a beat later than she meant to, which she noticed and didn't like. The event manager was already watching for her. Wren touched two fingers to the tablecloth, not yet, and the woman set the bottle down. It was nothing. She'd been half a second slow, that was all.
Up at the head of the table, Cordelia let the board members talk and looked like she had nowhere better to be.
When Adler mentioned her daughter's wedding, Cordelia knew the date and the venue, and that the daughter had switched from law to marine biology and Adler had finally come around on it. The conversation with Delacroix was different. Delacroix was mid-story, a long one that was going nowhere, and people’s attention was starting to drift.
Cordelia asked her one question, something that made Delacroix sound more clever than she was, and Delacroix answered with a laugh and sat up a little taller for the rest of the night.
Wren noticed that Cordelia was warm to every woman at the table yet she gave away nothing of herself.
Everyone would drive home tonight feeling heard and seen.
It was the most impressive thing Wren had ever watched anyone do for a living.
With anyone else, Wren could tell the difference between someone being genuinely kind and someone who was weaponizing kindness as a motive to get something.
With Cordelia, she'd stopped being able to.
She had started to write a note about the wedding but had stopped halfway without realizing.
She finished the sentence. June. Nothing was lost. No one had been talking, so there had been nothing to catch.
But she'd stopped. She didn't stop. Writing things down was what she was good for, and she'd just gone still for no reason she could identify.
She must just be tired. She'd been up since five.
She tried to shake it off and let it go.
Two more courses went by. She kept half an eye on the event manager to make sure everything was unfolding according to plan, and when she flipped back through the pad she'd filled less of it than she would have by this point on any other night. She didn’t miss much, just a line here and a name there, but it was still unusual for her.
She turned to the next page and shook her head.
She looked up to check the room and ended up finding Cordelia instead.
Her gaze lingered on her a beat too long to justify before she looked down.
All month it had happened like this. Something bubbled up inside her when she wasn't ready to feel it, and she reached for the nearest bit of work to make herself stop feeling it.
It usually worked. She wrote the time in the margin, like a doodle, and it helped. The feeling subsided a little.
Then Cordelia set her napkin down and stood, and everyone stopped talking and looked at her.
Wren turned to a clean page. She wrote the remarks down close to word for word.
Cordelia thanked them for the year. She said what she said every quarter, that the firm was the people in the room and not the money they moved, and she said it like she'd just thought of it, and half of them believed her.
Wren kept up easily. For the length of the remarks, she was fully in the work, which was the only time all night she'd been fully in anything.
From the head of the table, in the middle of a sentence, she looked down at Wren, just for a second, maybe less. No one else turned to follow her sight line, so the glance was their private, shared moment. She stopped writing.
Cordelia finished the sentence and kept going.
Wren could hear her, but she couldn't take the words in well enough to write them down, and she sat there and missed them—a full minute of them.
She had never missed a minute of anyone's remarks before.
She made herself start again. She caught the end, the last thank you and the small laugh Cordelia gave them to finish on.
Her face hadn't betrayed her thoughts. She was fairly sure it hadn't. No one had been watching her anyway.
Cordelia sat down, the board members went back to talking between themselves.
The event manager caught Wren's eye and tilted her head at the wine, a silent ask, and Wren nodded her assent for the second pour.
She got through the rest of the night by leaning into the work.
Dessert, coffee, keeping track of who stayed and who called for a car.
She wrote up the follow-ups—Adler's wedding, the Reyes and Delacroix problem for Monday—and closed out the night.
She did it well, even though she wasn't quite present for it.
People left in ones and twos. Cordelia walked the senior ones to the door, warm and brief.
Wren stayed at her table and let herself go unnoticed, which was easy for her.
When it was down to just the staff, Wren went over the last details with the event manager.
She had her take the unopened wine off the bill so the firm wasn't charged for it, and she checked that Adler's car was still coming—it was ten minutes away—and then she thanked the woman and said good night.
The rest of the staff would go down to the bar. She was welcome to join them, though never expected, but she didn't go. She'd been up since five and she wanted to be home. That was reason enough, and she didn't look for another one.