Visiting Hours

My alarm goes off at 5:10 a.m., and for the first four seconds of every day, I don't remember anything. Then it all comes back at once: the board deck that needs new fonts, the flight to Midland that needs a window seat, the dry cleaning that has to be picked up before Josh's dinner with the Saudis on Thursday, and the mother I forgot to call back, because I always forget to call my mother back. Underneath all of it, the way it has been underneath everything for nine years, I remember Saturday. I lie still and let the list scroll through my head until it starts to hum. That's the trick. If I can hear the hum, I can get up, and if I can't, I'll spend the next hour staring at the water stain on my ceiling that looks like Oklahoma, wondering how a woman who can run a CEO's entire life can't figure out how to run her own. My apartment in Montrose is the only place where the truth about me shows, which is why nobody ever comes over. There's a chair in the corner buried under clean laundry I keep meaning to fold, three half-read books on the nightstand, a dead basil plant on the windowsill, and a sink full of mugs, because buying new ones feels easier than washing the old ones. My closet is a war zone and my car smells like gas station coffee. My calendar, on the other hand, is perfect. It's color-coded, cross-referenced, and backed up to two different clouds. My work bag is packed the night before, my blouse is steamed, and my lipstick is a shade called Quiet Rose that I've worn every workday for eight months, because the first rule of being an executive assistant is that nobody should ever notice you've changed. I learned that rule a long time before I learned the job. By the time I've showered and pinned my hair into the low knot that makes me look older than twenty-seven, there are two missed calls from my mother and one text. Saw Tessa's mama at H-E-B. Nine years in May. She asked about you. Call me back, Ellie Bean. I read it twice, then turn the phone face down on the counter like it bit me. My mother is the only person who still calls me Ellie. She named me Eloise after her own mama and says that earns her the right to shorten it however she likes, and she has no idea why it makes my throat close. She doesn't know a lot of things. She thinks I'm single. She thinks I moved to Houston for a fresh start and a better job, and that I'm doing great. I let her think it, because it's easier for everyone, and because that's the other rule I learned a long time ago: keep the peace. Smile, say yes, and make yourself small enough that nobody trips over you. If you do it right, nobody looks close enough to see what you're carrying. I'm very good at it. I'm a professional. Calloway Energy owns the top eight floors of a glass tower on Louisiana Street, and at 6:45 in the morning, the lobby is so quiet that my heels echo off the marble. Marcus lifts two fingers from his coffee at the security desk. He's sixty-something and retired Navy, and he's the only person in the building who has never once asked me about my husband. I ask about his granddaughter's recital, and he tells me solemnly that she was a tree, the best tree on the stage, and I tell him I believe it. The executive suite on twenty-two is dark except for a strip of light under the kitchen door, where someone has left the coffee maker on again. I turn it off, switch on the lamps in the waiting area, fluff the throw pillows nobody sits on, and straighten the framed magazine cover beside the reception desk. THE NEXT GENERATION OF TEXAS OIL. Josh Calloway, thirty-five, arms crossed, smiling like the future already belongs to him. He's the firstborn son, the heir, groomed since the day he was born to take the wheel from his father, Franklin, who built Calloway Energy from a single leased rig. Last year, when forty years of cigarettes finally took Franklin's lungs, Josh got the keys. I used to look away from that photo. Now I look straight at it every morning, as a kind of training. My desk sits outside his office like a moat around a castle, and nobody gets to Josh without getting through me first. He told me that's how he liked it on the day he hired me, eight months ago, in an interview that lasted eleven minutes. I still don't completely understand how I got the job. Before Calloway, I spent six years temping, bouncing between law firms and hospital billing departments and one memorable summer at a pet insurance company in Sugar Land. Then one Tuesday night, a recruiter I'd never heard of messaged me out of nowhere about an executive assistant role for a downtown CEO, at a salary so high I read it three times and assumed it was a typo. It wasn't. I almost didn't apply, because I knew the name. Everyone in Houston knows the name, but I knew it the way you know a scar, and I told myself that was exactly why I should say no. Then I told myself something else: that this was the closest I would ever get, and that if anyone still had the answers I'd been chasing for nine years, it was the people inside this building. So I said yes. Saying yes is the thing I do best. The interview was strange. Josh barely glanced at my résumé. He asked if I could keep a secret, and I said yes. He asked if I minded long hours, and I said no. He asked where I was from, and I said Pearland, which is close enough to be true that I didn't even blink. I watched him the whole eleven minutes, and I was almost certain he didn't recognize me. Why would he? Josh is eight years older than Jim. By the time I was a sophomore with a crush on his little brother, Josh was already living in Houston, learning to run his daddy's company and coming home to Alvin maybe twice a year in a black Tahoe that made the whole town stop and stare. I was a girl in braces at the edge of the picture, nobody he'd ever bother to remember. At the end, he leaned back in his chair, smiled, and said, "You come highly recommended." I never asked by whom. A braver woman would have. The assistant before me left without notice. That's all anyone in HR would say: personal reasons. She cleaned out her own email, walked out one Friday, and never came back, and three weeks later, I was sitting in her chair. I try not to think about her. I have enough ghosts. By 7:30, I've confirmed Josh's lunch, rebooked his flight, and ordered his coffee from the place on the corner, oat milk and one pump of vanilla, extra hot but not scalding, timed to land on my desk at 7:58 so it's perfect when he walks in at eight. I am very good at my job. I am very good at making sure nothing surprises anyone. The email comes in at 7:42. I know the time because I check it four times, the way I check everything, because if I don't, my brain will hand me the number at three in the morning and ask if I'm sure. The subject line is a single word, Saturday, and there's no sender name, just a string of letters and numbers ending in a domain I've never seen. My whole body goes still. Not scared still, but prey still, the way a rabbit freezes when a shadow crosses the grass. It's spam, I tell myself. A phishing scam, a coupon for a mattress. A normal person would delete it, but I keep a lint roller, three phone chargers, a sewing kit, Advil, Tums, and backup heels in my bottom drawer, and I have never once in my life deleted an email without reading it. So I open it.