The Office Contract

Chapter 2: Headcount

The message came from the doorway. A man in a company fleece stood there with one hand on the frame, the way people did when they had no intention of coming in. "Renee's looking for you."

"Okay," Willa said. "Give me a minute."

She finished the line she was on, saved the signature-page sheet to the shared folder, and moved the two flagged packets to the corner of her desk, where she would see them when she came back. The folder came off the shelf on her way out; the quarterlies would need somewhere to go. Tessa had her phone propped against the base of her monitor and didn't look up.

The offices on five were glass-walled, blinds up or down depending on how much each manager wanted to be seen. Renee's were up. Her laptop was turned half away from her and her fingers were going, and she lifted a hand without lifting her eyes, so Willa went in and stood at the near side of the desk.

"The quarterlies," Renee said. "Performance and the work plans. Done?"

"Done."

"Print them for me. Then put the rest of your morning aside." Her eyes stayed on the screen. "I need a headcount report. Every position in the company, filled or vacant, and the agency people on their own tab so they don't get counted in with the rest."

Willa had her hand on the back of the chair. "The department, or the whole company?"

"The whole company." Renee looked up. "Is that a problem?"

"No."

"I need it by eleven."

"Okay."

Renee sat back. "You're about a month in now."

"Twenty-six days."

"How's it going?"

"It's going well."

"Ask when you don't know something. Me, or anyone out there." She moved her hand, taking in the corridor and the suite beyond it. "Don't sit on it."

"I won't. Thanks."

Renee picked up her phone, read it, and put it down. "The minutes are fine the way they are. Send them to the group."

"Okay."

What the report was for, Renee had not said, and there was no way to ask that didn't sound like she thought she was owed an explanation. Willa took the folder and went.

Behind her, through the glass, Renee watched her go and then looked back at her screen. Renee had not wanted her. The placement had come through the corner office before anyone interviewed her, and in Renee's experience that meant a laptop that never got opened and a resignation by May. This one answered when she was asked and finished what she started; the work came back done, and done was the whole of what Renee asked of anybody. The girl was easy to look at, which had no bearing on anything. Renee moved on to the next item on her screen.

The operations suite ran the length of the corridor with its blinds up, and the men at the two desks nearest the glass looked up as Willa went past. One of them said something to the other, too low for her to catch.

She was, in fact, very good-looking. The ponytail swung against the back of her neck, and she kept her pace. The report was already arranging itself behind her eyes — name, title, cost center, filled or vacant, agency or direct — and the agency people would sit on Renee's second tab and not the first, which meant the two would have to be made to agree.

Before she reached the turn, a group of men came around it and took up the corridor.

Six of them, all tall, all in jackets except one in a fleece. They were walking fast and using the whole width. In front were two. She knew one of them: Derrick Cole, who ran operations. The other she had never seen.

He was half a head taller than Derrick. Black shirt with the cuffs buttoned, black trousers, no jacket and no tie, and he was moving faster than the men around him, who had arranged their pace around his.

The corridor was not wide enough for six. Willa stepped in against the wall, past a fire extinguisher and the frame of a supply closet, and turned her shoulder so the folder was between her and them.

The ceiling in that stretch was the old kind, panels yellowed at the edges, and under the fluorescents his face came clear a step before he reached her: dark eyes, dark brows, his mouth set, his face doing nothing at all.

"Morning, Mr. Cole," she said, because Cole was the only one of them she could put a name to.

Derrick smiled. "Willa."

Then the man in the black shirt looked at her. There was no greeting in it, no dismissal, not even curiosity, and then his eyes went back to the corridor ahead and he was past her. The others came after him in ones and twos, and she was still working out what she should have called him when they were gone.

She went on to the printer room.

It was empty and cold and the machine took its time waking up. She sent the quarterlies first, one file the way Renee liked them, and stood with her arms crossed while it thought about it. Renee had asked for the printout before she had asked for the report, and Willa had learned in her first week that the order people said things in was usually the order they wanted them.

While the machine ran she looked down at the folder and saw what her hand had done to it: the bottom corner folded over in her grip, a crease the width of her thumb. She pressed the corner flat against the edge of the table and held it there, and let go, and it came up again, whitened along the fold.