Delete My Number (But He Didn't)

Chapter Three: The First Day

She told herself it was just a job.

She said it out loud in the mirror that morning while she was getting ready, like saying it to her own face would make it stick. It's just a job. Eight weeks. Three thousand dollars. Get in, get out, don't make it weird. She'd even texted it to Priya, who responded with a single: girl you're cooked already and then immediately sent a voice note that Zara did not listen to because she was not ready for whatever Priya's face sounded like right now.

She got to the thirty-second floor at seven fifty-eight.

Elena was already at her desk, tablet in hand, dressed like she'd been there for hours, which she probably had. She looked up when Zara stepped off the elevator and did that thing where her expression stayed completely neutral but still somehow communicated everything.

"Good morning," Elena said.

"Morning," Zara said.

Elena held out a tablet. Zara took it.

"Seventeen items on the task list. Priority items are marked in red. Mr. Voss expects the top four completed before noon." She paused. "He does not follow up. He checks."

Zara looked down at the screen. Seventeen tasks. She scrolled through them fast, already sorting by type in her head. Vendor confirmations, two scheduling conflicts, a document that needed formatting, venue correspondence, a call that needed to be placed to a catering company about dietary requirements for sixty-three guests.

She looked up. "Where do I sit?"

Elena pointed to a desk just outside Luca's office door. It was smaller than her old one but had a direct sightline to the main room, and more importantly it had a phone with a full external line and a second monitor already set up.

Someone had set it up already.

She didn't think about that. She sat down, opened the task list, and started working.

The first hour was fine. She made the catering call, handled the dietary list, reformatted the document which had been done by someone who didn't understand that tables were not the same as paragraphs. She sent the vendor confirmations and flagged one of the scheduling conflicts with a suggested solution attached because that's what she always did on her old floor and old habits are hard to break.

By eleven she had done five things.

She knew she'd only been asked to do four. She did five anyway because the fifth one was sitting there and it took twenty minutes and leaving it felt wrong.

At eleven forty-five, Luca came out of his office.

He walked to Elena's desk first, said something quiet she couldn't hear, and then he came to her desk and picked up the tablet she'd left with the completed tasks marked off. He scrolled through it. She kept her eyes on her second monitor and pretended to be reading something very important.

He didn't say anything.

She heard the small sound of him setting the tablet back down. Then he went back into his office and the door didn't fully close, which she was choosing not to read anything into.

But she'd seen it. Just for a second, she'd looked up at the right moment and caught his face while he was reading through her work. His expression had done something. Not a smile, not approval exactly, more like a very quick internal recalibration. Like he'd expected one thing and gotten something slightly different.

It was one second. Then it was gone.

She went back to her screen.

The floor itself was strange to navigate. It wasn't unfriendly, exactly, but it had that specific energy of a place where everyone knows something you don't. People looked at her the way you look at something new that you haven't decided about yet. A couple of them smiled. Most just looked.

She went to the small kitchen on that floor around two to get water and two women she didn't know were already in there having a conversation that stopped when she walked in. They smiled. She smiled back. She filled her glass and left and stood in the hallway for exactly two seconds telling herself not to be paranoid about it.

Then she got in the elevator to go down to the main floor printer because the thirty-second floor's printer was apparently broken and had been for a week, and two men got on at the twenty-eighth floor mid-conversation and didn't notice her standing in the corner.

"That's her? The PA?"

"Yeah, she just started."

"The one who sent the text?"

"Nobody actually knows what the text said."

A small laugh. "Doesn't matter. She won't last anyway. He goes through assistants every season."

The elevator opened at the main floor and Zara walked out and went to the printer and collected her documents and stood there for a second looking at the stack of papers in her hands.

She won't last anyway.

She thought about three thousand dollars. She thought about Danny's last text, which was a meme with no caption because that's how he communicated that he was having an okay day. She thought about her mom's voice the last time they'd talked, tired in that slow way that had become her baseline.

She went back to her desk and kept working.

At six o'clock, Luca came out of his office with a printed document in his hand. He set it on the edge of her desk. She picked it up.

It was the venue correspondence she'd sent out that morning, printed, with three small corrections marked in pen. Not red pen. Just blue, like it was a note to himself rather than a grade. The corrections were real, small formatting things she'd genuinely not caught. Nothing that changed the content. Just things he'd noticed.

He didn't say anything about them. He turned to go back to his office.

She was putting her bag on her shoulder when his voice came from behind her.

"The venue for the first gala."

She turned. He was standing in his office doorway, one hand resting on the door frame.

"There's a step issue at the entrance," he said. "Three stairs. No ramp visible on the floor plan. It needs to be corrected before we send the guest confirmations."

She looked at him. "What kind of correction?"

"A ramp. Or an alternative accessible entrance clearly marked. Either works, but it needs to be confirmed by end of week."

She added it to her list. She already had her phone out. She was typing before she'd fully decided to.

She wanted to ask him why. It was a charity event, sure, accessibility was standard practice, but the way he'd said it didn't sound like standard practice. It sounded like something specific. Something that mattered to him in a way that didn't come from a corporate checklist.

She didn't ask.

She wrote it down. She said, "I'll have it confirmed by Thursday," and he nodded once and went back into his office.

She got in the elevator.

She got on the bus.

She found a seat near the back and dropped into it and pulled out her phone, not to text Priya, not yet, but to open her notes app because her brain wouldn't stop turning the day over.

She typed: He noticed the stairs before anything else. Why?

She stared at that for a second.

Then she typed under it: Don't make this interesting. It's a job. Finish the eight weeks. Get the bonus. Go home.

She read it back.

It was very good advice. Very sensible. She had written it for herself as a direct instruction and she intended to follow it completely.

She looked back at the first line. He noticed the stairs before anything else.

The elevator men's voices were still in her head too. She won't last anyway. He goes through assistants every season.

So he did this regularly. Took on PA's for the gala season, rotated them out. This was nothing personal, this was nothing significant, she was just the latest person sitting at that desk and she'd been put there because of a text that shouldn't have been sent and not for any other reason.

That was fine. That was actually good. It meant this was simple.

She put her phone in her bag.

Outside the bus window Hartwell City was doing its thing, everyone rushing somewhere, all those lives pressing up against each other without touching.

She closed her eyes.

The stairs thing sat in her chest like a question she hadn't earned the right to ask yet. And the way his face had moved when he'd seen she'd done five tasks instead of four, that quiet flicker she probably wasn't supposed to catch.

Don't make this interesting.

She was already making it interesting.

She just didn't know yet that she wasn't the only one.