THE BILLIONAIRE’S SECRETARY WHO WOULD NEVER BOW

The elevator to the 88th floor takes forty-one seconds. Evelyn Marlowe knew that because she had timed it once, at nineteen, riding up in the service car with a mop bucket between her feet and a headache from the floor polish. This morning she took the glass one, the express. It had a little brass plate by the buttons that said EXECUTIVE SUITE, and nobody else got in with her, which she decided to take as an omen, though she couldn’t have said which kind. She was wearing the navy blazer. It had cost her three months of small savings and one long argument with herself in a shop on Fifth Avenue, and it still sat on her shoulders like it wasn’t sure it was allowed. At six o’clock that morning, in the bathroom mirror, she had decided that it was allowed. Her phone buzzed in her bag. Tasha. TWELVE. Half of accounts has money on you not making it to Thursday. Don’t you dare make them rich. Evelyn typed with her thumb. Thursday is generous. Then she turned the phone face down against her hip, because the doors were opening and the entire floor had gone very interested in its own keyboards. The 88th was quiet the way expensive places are quiet. Carpet that swallowed footsteps. A long wall of glass with all of Manhattan laid out behind it, like something Damian Kingsley had ordered and was still deciding whether to keep. Six or seven people sat at their desks pretending to work, every one of them with a clear view of hers. A man by the printer, who very much did not belong to this floor, gave her a look that was half pity and half arithmetic. Evelyn nodded at him like they were old friends and kept walking. She knew this stretch of carpet. At nineteen she had pushed a cart with a squeaky wheel along it at one in the morning, and she had learned which of these desks kept chocolate in the bottom drawer. It was strange to walk it in daylight, with a name badge that said something else. Hers. The desk outside the corner office was pale wood and glass, and whoever had sat there last had left a little of themselves behind. A coffee ring. A dried-out highlighter. Half a packet of tissues. Dana, Evelyn thought, remembering the name from the file. Dana had lasted nine days, which was the record. The tissues had probably done a lot of the work. She dropped them in the bin, put her bag under the desk, and sat. Seven forty-one. The door to his office was shut, but there was a line of light along the bottom of it, so he was in. He’d probably been in for hours. She had read the files on all eleven of them. That was the part nobody on this floor seemed to have thought of, because nobody up here ever went down to the records room on the 22nd unless something was on fire. Evelyn had gone twice, on her lunch break, with a sandwich she forgot to eat. What struck her, reading eleven separate resignation letters, was how alike they sounded. Not one of those people had been fired. Every single one had quit, and when you scraped off the polite language, the reason was always the same. They had been right about something, and they had been made to feel that being right was rude. Well. She had never been much good at doing it the other way. She woke the computer and opened his calendar, and it took her four minutes to find the first problem. At ten o’clock he had a call with Aubert & Fils in Geneva, the biggest supplier deal on the table this quarter. At ten o’clock he also had the quarterly operations review on the fortieth floor, with fifteen department heads already booked in. Somebody had put the two on top of each other weeks ago, and each of the eleven before her had either not noticed or noticed and not dared. She kept going. His sent folder next, because a secretary who didn’t know what her boss had already said was a secretary waiting to be embarrassed. Three emails had gone to Aubert’s office in the past ten days, and all three began Dear Mr. Obert. Evelyn said the name out loud, quietly, and then again the way a Swiss ear would hear it. Oh-BAIR. The dictation software had been writing down whatever Damian Kingsley said, and what Damian Kingsley said was wrong, and apparently nobody had ever told him. She looked at the clock. 7:58. She printed the revised schedule, squared its edges against her knee, and stood up. At exactly eight o’clock she knocked. “Come in.” His office was bigger than she remembered. She had only ever seen it at night, with the desk lamps off and the city doing all the lighting. In daylight it was a different place. Grey and black and glass. No photographs, nothing on the walls at all, the office of a man who did not want to be remembered by his furniture. Damian Kingsley sat at the far end of a desk the size of a small boat, with a folder open in front of him. Dark hair. Shirtsleeves pushed to the elbow. A pen moving steadily across a page. He did not look up. “You’re the new one.” “Evelyn Marlowe.” “I didn’t ask for your name.” “No. You said I was the new one. I thought you’d want to get it right.” The pen paused for perhaps half a second and then went on. Fine. She had not expected a warm welcome. She crossed the carpet, set the schedule on the corner of his desk, and stood where she could be seen if he ever decided to look. “Your day. I’ve made one change.” “I didn’t ask you to change my schedule.” “Your ten o’clock was double-booked. The Aubert call and the operations review. I’ve moved the review to two this afternoon. I’ve told all fifteen department heads, and I’ve told their assistants too, because the assistants are the ones who actually have to move everything around.” Nothing. The pen kept going. “That’s not your job.” “It is now.” The pen stopped. She kept her face still and her hands where they were. Inside her chest her heart was doing something like a drum solo by a person who’d never had lessons. She had practised this in the mirror, not the exact words but the feeling of it. Don’t apologise for being competent. Don’t explain more than you need to. Let the silence be his problem. “One more thing,” she said, “and then I’ll leave you alone. It’s Oh-BAIR. Not Obert. The client’s name. It’s been going out in your emails for ten days, three so far. His assistant has been very polite about it, but I wouldn’t count on that lasting.” Nothing moved in the room. Somewhere outside the glass a helicopter crossed the river, small and slow and very far away. Then Damian Kingsley put down his pen. He did it carefully, the way you put down something that might go off, and he lifted his head. Grey eyes. That was the first thing. Not cold, exactly, which was what she’d been told to expect. Alert. The look of a man who has just heard a sound in a house he thought was empty. She had seen his face a thousand times, on magazine covers and the lobby screens and the back of his head across long conference tables. She had never once had it pointed at her. “Say that again,” he said. Evelyn had two options, and she picked the harder one. “Which part?”