Chapter Eight
"TODAY YOU'LL BE MEETING with the wives of the board members."
"Got it."
"That's for luncheon, and after that, we have a short podcast interview with a local influencer."
"I understand."
"And after that, we'll be eating sawdust and caterpillars."
"Amazing."
Silence. A long stretch of it, and that was when Chelsea belatedly realized Kelly might be on to her at last.
"I'm sorry." Chelsea met the other woman's gaze in sheepish apology.
It had been over a week since Kelly had been assigned to her, and in that time Chelsea had learned two things: Kelly was terrifyingly good at her job, and Kelly had absolutely no idea what to do with a boss's wife who wanted to be her friend.
Chelsea adored her.
Kelly did not yet know what to do with being adored by Chelsea, which was part of what made the whole thing so enjoyable.
"Do I even want to know why you're unusually distrac—-" Oh no. The moment Kelly saw Chelsea's face light up, she knew right away she had said the wrong thing. "Forget it," she said quickly. "I don't even—-"
"But you already asked," her billionaire boss's wife argued, "and I already heard you, and so you can't take it back."
Kelly looked at her watch. "Oh, will you look at that? I just remembered I have another meeting to attend to."
She was already turning around and heading to the elevator, but since she was wearing three-inch heels while the younger woman, like always, was so much more mobile in her comfortable pair of Mary Janes—-
"You have to hear me out, Kelliebear."
Not only was it impossible to outrun Chelsea—-
"I don't know who Kelliebear is—-"
But so was freeing herself from Chelsea's arm that was suddenly tucked around hers, which was like trying to get away from a mousetrap.
"He agreed to read it, Kelliebear!"
"I'm really busy—-"
"Sienah told me that he's always politely turned them down, but he said yes right away, and that means something, right? It does, right? We can hope, right?"
Chelsea was beaming, and Kelly made the mistake of looking at her directly, which was always a tactical error because the girl's happiness was so uncontained and so genuine that it did something to Kelly's reserve that she would never, under any circumstances, admit to.
And that was the thing about Chelsea Cannizzaro that Kelly had never figured out how to defend against. Most people who were relentlessly nice were performing.
Kelly had spent fourteen years in corporate communications and she could spot a performance from three floors away.
But Chelsea wasn't performing. Chelsea was simply, bafflingly, inconveniently sincere, and the sincerity wasn't a strategy, it was a condition, like her limp or her inability to pass a person without making them feel like they mattered.
It was, professionally speaking, the most disarming thing Kelly had ever encountered. And she had no protocol for it.
It was also the reason Kelly had, three days ago, done something she had never done in fourteen years of working with executives and their families: she had gone home and told her cat about her day.
Not the meetings or the briefings or the schedule.
The fact that Chelsea Cannizzaro had noticed Kelly rotating her wrist during a long briefing, and the next morning there was a small tube of arnica cream on Kelly's desk with a sticky note that said For the wrist!
I used to get those cramps too in rehab.
This brand is the best, I promise!! with three exclamation marks and a smiley face.
Kelly had stared at that note for a long time.
Then she had put the cream in her desk drawer and used it every day since and told absolutely no one.
The elevator doors opened, and Chelsea was still beaming as she pulled Kelly inside, and the last thing anyone on the floor noticed before the doors closed was Kelly's expression, the long-suffering, slightly bewildered look of a woman who had built her entire career on composure and was watching it get dismantled, daily, by a girl who called her Kelliebear and meant it.
The elevator descended, and in its wake, the floor settled back into its usual rhythm.
Rhea watched Ms. Nobody from Nowhere disappear behind those closing doors with her assistant.
Her assistant. The one that should have been Rhea's, if things had gone the way they were supposed to go.
Because things were supposed to go a certain way.
Rhea had made sure of it. Two years of positioning herself at this desk, two years of arriving early and staying late and making sure she was at her post, impeccable and camera-ready, for the ninety-second window each morning when the boss crossed the lobby toward his private elevator bank.
She had studied what he liked. She had dressed for it. She had done the work.
And instead, he had ended up with a girl who had done nothing.
Who had simply walked into this lobby with a limp and a Bible and a cotton dress covered in flowers, and smiled, and the whole building had rearranged itself around her like she was magnetic north and everyone else had been pointing in the wrong direction.
That was the thing Rhea couldn't swallow.
Not that Chelsea was rich now, or married, or living the life Rhea had mapped out for herself.
It was that Chelsea hadn't even tried. She hadn't strategized or positioned or dressed for it or done any of the things Rhea had been told mattered.
She had just been herself, and apparently that was enough, and the unfairness of it, the sheer senselessness of a world that rewarded accidental warmth over calculated effort, was enough to make Rhea's vision blur with fury.
Her hand found her phone under the counter. Her fingers moved over the screen with the sharp intensity of someone who had been waiting for an outlet and had finally found one.
She was unaware of how her older colleague had been studying her from the other end of the desk.
Amanda knew that look. She had worn a version of it herself, once, ten years ago, when this job had still been new enough to wound her.
Back then, she had been like Chelsea, all smiles, looking at everyone with rose-colored glasses.
But because this job had her dealing daily with people who were rich and full of ego, her bruised pride had eventually made her bitter, and Amanda had ended up mirroring the very people who had hurt her in the first place.
She had feared for her job when she found out the girl she'd dismissed on that first morning was actually the boss's wife. But instead it was as if nothing had happened, and whenever there was a chance, Chelsea would greet Rhea and her like they were friends.
Genuinely like they were friends.
Not the way rich wives greeted staff, with a smile that said I see you while their eyes said I see through you.
Chelsea greeted them the way she greeted everyone: like they were the most interesting person she had encountered that day, and the greeting was not a formality but a small gift she was offering without any expectation of it being returned.
Amanda's unease grew as she watched the emotions playing over the younger woman's face. Rhea's jaw was set, her eyes narrowed, her thumbs jabbing at her screen with a viciousness that went beyond venting.
"Everything alright, Rhea?"
"Everything's fine." Rhea didn't even look up, her expression rigid with fury as she continued to type.
She's just ranting, Amanda thought uneasily. Girls who were Rhea's age loved to rant. They'd fire off messages to their group chats, get it out of their systems, and move on.
Could it?
Afternoon came, and Chelsea remained cheerfully unaware of the resentful envy she had unknowingly stirred as she left with Kelly for their next engagement.
The luncheon with the board members' wives had gone well. Better than well, actually, and Kelly was still trying to make sense of it.
Because Chelsea had done it again. She had walked into a room full of women who had spent decades perfecting the art of the strategic lunch, women who could fillet a reputation over a Caesar salad and smile while doing it, and Chelsea had done the one thing Kelly had explicitly told her not to do.
She had been herself.
She had asked the chairman's wife about her garden.
Not the estate, not the new wing they'd built, but the actual garden, the one the woman tended herself on weekends, the one nobody ever asked about because it wasn't impressive enough to mention at these things.
And the chairman's wife, a woman Kelly had watched reduce junior executives to tears with a single raised eyebrow, had talked about her tomatoes for twenty minutes with the kind of unguarded happiness that Kelly had never once witnessed in three years of working with these people.
Kelly had spent fourteen years learning the rules of these rooms. Which topics were safe.
Which compliments landed. How to navigate the invisible hierarchy of who spoke first and who laughed at whose jokes.
She had built a career on understanding these systems, and Chelsea Cannizzaro had walked in and rendered all of it beside the point by the simple, completely unteachable mechanism of actually caring.
You couldn't train someone to do what Chelsea did.
You couldn't put it in a briefing document or a bullet-pointed email.
You couldn't schedule it or strategize it or reproduce it.
It was just her, being her, and the rooms kept surrendering, and Kelly kept watching it happen with the quiet vertigo of a woman realizing that the rules she had spent her career mastering might never have been the point.
Kelly had confirmed it had gone well with a single nod, which in Kelly's vocabulary was the equivalent of a standing ovation, and Chelsea had glowed, and Kelly had looked away because the glowing was doing something to her professional objectivity that she was not yet ready to name.