Chapter Two
Margot
I've been awake since four.
For the last hour and forty-five minutes, I've stared at the ceiling while my brain works its way through everything I need to do today, then moves on to next week for variety.
My phone buzzes against the nightstand again.
I reach for it and squint at the screen.
Fourteen notifications. Two texts from Mom, one from my younger sister, Bree, and three emails from my boss, Richard.
The rest are reminders I set for myself, because apparently I can't be trusted to remember the seventeen things already keeping me awake.
At 5:45, my alarm finally goes off. I turn it off before the second chime and give myself thirty seconds before I have to get out of bed.
I shower without turning on the overhead light because it feels unnecessarily hostile before six in the morning.
Coffee goes straight into a travel mug, foundation and mascara take four minutes, and my hair gets twisted into a clip while I'm checking the first of Richard's emails.
By the time I leave the apartment, I'm dressed, caffeinated, and carrying a granola bar I eat at the first red light.
Breakfast.
Technically.
Richard is already in his office when I reach my desk at 7:15. His wife is out of town, which usually means he gets here obscenely early, gets bored, and starts finding things for me to do.
"Margie." He appears in his doorway with a coffee from the place on Fifth, the one that charges sixteen dollars for something involving oat milk and gold dust. "Did you get Linda's anniversary thing sorted?"
"It's Margot." I set my bag under my desk and pull up the confirmation. "And yes. Sorrentino's, Saturday at seven. I asked for the table she liked last time, and they have her shellfish allergy on the reservation."
"Perfect. I knew you'd handle it." He takes another sip of his coffee, then starts back toward his office before turning around. "Oh, and can you grab my dry cleaning before three? I need the gray suit for tomorrow."
His dry cleaner is fifteen minutes in the opposite direction from the office.
My lunch break is already spoken for because the quarterly deck needs another round of revisions before Friday's meeting, despite the fact that Richard presented the last version as his own work and received several compliments on it.
"Sure."
"Lifesaver."
I add the dry cleaning to my list.
The rest of the morning disappears beneath calendar changes, expense reports, emails Richard forwards to me with nothing but Thoughts?
, and two hours spent fixing slides he'll approve after looking at them for thirty seconds.
At noon, I heat up some leftover pasta and bring it back to my desk.
An email comes in before I manage the first bite, then another, and by the time I get back to it, the pasta is cold.
Richard's two o'clock cancels. At two-ten, he walks past my desk with his golf clubs.
"Taking a late lunch," he says.
I already know. Marc from the third floor sent him a calendar invitation titled Client Development, clearly unaware that assistants can read.
"Have fun."
He points at me with his car keys. "Don't work too hard, Margie." The name makes my blood boil every damn time. I've corrected him enough that forgetting stopped being an excuse a long time ago.
At 3:35, I save the quarterly deck, grab my bag, and drive across town to collect his dry cleaning. The gray suit is waiting under his name. I carry it back through the lobby, hang it carefully on his office door, and sit down at my desk at 4:02 with eight unread emails waiting for me.
At 4:08, Richard drops a bound report in front of my keyboard.
I look at it, then at him.
It's at least fifty pages. Red pen covers most of them, and there are enough Post-it notes sticking out from the sides to give the report a fringe.
"Marc needs those revisions in before the Friday meeting," Richard says. "Can you get them entered by tomorrow morning?"
For one brief, beautiful moment, I consider pointing out that tomorrow morning is in approximately seventeen hours.
Instead, I pull the report closer. "What time does he need it?"
"Nine should be fine." Richard gives my shoulder a squeeze as he passes. "You're the best, Margie."
"It's Margot."
"Yep, okay, have a good night."
He disappears into his office, leaving me with fifty pages of revisions at 4:08 on a Thursday afternoon. I pull the report closer, find the document on my laptop, and start working through his notes.
By the time I leave the office, it's six-thirty and I've made it through thirty-one pages. The drive home should take twenty minutes, but traffic has other plans, and I've barely made it onto the freeway when Mom calls.
I answer through the car speakers. "Hi, Mom."
"Oh, sweetheart, thank God. I've been trying to get hold of the pharmacy all afternoon. They said they can't refill my prescription until Dr. Dickson approves it, but I called his office twice and nobody answered. I don't know why they make these things so complicated."
"Did you leave a message?"
"I think so. There was a beep."
I close my eyes for half a second as traffic comes to a complete stop in front of me. "Okay. I'll call the doctor's office tomorrow morning and make sure they send the approval through."
"Would you? You're so much better at this stuff than I am."
"Yeah. I'll handle it."
"I don't know how you manage everything." There's a rustle on her end, followed by what sounds like a cupboard opening. "Have you eaten?"
"Yep."
The granola bar and cold pasta counts. Right?
"Something proper?"
"Mom."
"I'm only asking. You work too much." She pauses. "Have you spoken to Bree today?"
"She texted me this morning. I haven't had a chance to reply yet."
"You should call her. She sounded stressed when I spoke to her yesterday."
Of course she did. I've been avoiding opening the message all day because I have a pretty good idea what's waiting for me.
"I'll check on her when I get home."
By the time Mom lets me go, traffic has only moved half a mile.
I check Bree's message when I get home.
Bree: I know I said last time was the last time but my card got declined and rent's due Friday and I just need $300 I swear I'll pay you back this time
I stand in the entryway with my bag still hanging from my shoulder and read it again, although there's nothing in it I haven't read before.
Then I open my banking app and transfer three hundred dollars.
I don't reply. There isn't much point. Bree will send a string of hearts and promise to pay me back as soon as she gets paid, and I'll tell her not to worry about it, and next month we'll do some version of this again.
My apartment is cold enough that I keep my coat on while I put my bag down. I consider turning up the heat, remember last month's bill, and change into a sweatshirt instead.
Dinner is cereal. I eat it standing at the kitchen counter with my laptop open beside me and the show my oldest friend Tess Moran recommended playing on my phone.
I'm four episodes in and couldn't tell you the name of a single character.
Every few minutes I realize someone new is on-screen and wonder if I'm supposed to know who they are.
Eventually, I give up pretending to watch and take the laptop to the couch.
Page thirty-two becomes thirty-eight. Thirty-eight becomes forty-three. At some point the empty cereal bowl ends up on the coffee table, my feet end up tucked beneath me, and I promise myself I'll stop as soon as I finish the next section.
The next thing I hear is my alarm.
I open my eyes to a stiff neck, a dead phone on my chest, and pale morning light coming through the blinds.
My laptop is still open beside me, the cursor blinking halfway down page forty-six.
The blanket is still folded over the back of the couch.
I didn't even make it far enough into falling asleep to reach for it.
5:45 a.m.
Friday.
I plug in my phone, brush my teeth, make coffee, and finish the report before I leave for work.
By eight, the revised file is in Marc's inbox.
Richard doesn't mention it.
Tess finds me outside the office at five-fifteen that evening, halfway through zipping my coat and trying to remember where I parked.
She takes one look at me and sighs. "You look like you need wine."
"I need like twelve hours of sleep."
"Wine is better." She hooks her arm through mine before I can argue. "Come on. You can leave your car here and I'll get you home."
Tess has been my best friend since freshman year of college, when she sat beside me in Introduction to Statistics and waited until halfway through the lecture to tell me I had blue pen across my cheek.
Fourteen years later, she's still one of the few people who can take one look at my face and decide whatever I had planned for the evening is no longer happening.
She takes me to a wine bar six blocks from the office, the kind of place with low lighting, tiny tables, and glasses large enough to hold a goldfish.
By the time she slides a sauvignon blanc across the table, I've taken my hair out of its clip and stopped checking my work email every time my phone lights up.
"Drink that," she says, settling back with her own glass. "Then I want to show you something."
I pause with the wine halfway to my mouth. "The last time you said that, I ended up in Lisbon with food poisoning and no sunglasses."
"You had a great time before the food poisoning."
"The bartender stole my sunglasses."
"He was very attractive."
"He was still a thief." I take a drink, and Tess smiles into her glass like this proves her point.
Halfway through my second glass, she reaches for her phone. "Okay, I need you to look at something and I mean really look at it, before you decide it's ridiculous."
"That sentence isn't helping your case."
"I know. Just shut up and look."