The CEO’s Secret Secretary

Chapter 2The Advance

The money arrived at 11:52, eight minutes early, which Emma took as a bad sign.

She was sitting on a bench outside the tower with a paper cup of lobby water going warm in her hand when her phone chimed. She read the bank's notification once, then again, the way she used to reread a restaurant check with a zero too many. The advance was not an advance. It was three months of the salary Alexander Black had named, deposited in full, with a reference line that read Prepaid.

Three months. Nobody gave a stranger three months.

She thought about calling the bank and asking them to send it back. Then she thought about the woman at St. Aldric's and her careful, sorry face, and about twelve days that were now eleven and a half. She put the phone in her pocket without moving the money anywhere and sat for another full minute, hating how much she needed it.

The plant on the billing office counter looked no better. The woman behind the desk processed the payment without comment, but her shoulders came down an inch when the screen turned green. She printed the receipt and slid it across with both hands, the way you hand something to a person who has just been through something.

"The hardship program stays active," she said. "Your mother's next cycle is Thursday."

"Thank you." It came out smaller than Emma intended. "Do I need to sign anything?"

"No. Just go be with her."

Upstairs, Emma stopped outside her mother's door to rehearse a face. Not the interview face, not the billing office face. The one that said everything was ordinary and good.

Grace was awake, and she had apparently eaten the pudding, because the empty cup sat on the tray with the spoon laid across it like an exhibit.

"I did it," Grace announced. "Under protest."

"A medical miracle." Emma pulled the chair close and took her mother's hand. It was too light. "I got the job."

"Of course you did."

"It's with a company called Black Meridian. I'm the personal secretary to the CEO. The pay is—" She stopped, because saying the number aloud felt like tempting something. "It's very good, Mom. The money's already in. I paid the hospital. Your treatment is covered through the end of the month, at least."

She waited for the happy noise she had been picturing all morning.

It didn't come. Grace's hand went still in hers.

"Black Meridian," her mother said.

"You know it?"

"Everyone knows it. It's on half the buildings in the city." Grace turned her face toward the window, where gray October light lay flat across the bedcovers. "Who's the CEO?"

"Alexander Black. He's—" Emma searched for the word. "Unpleasant. Young. He looks at you like he's reading the fine print. But the job is real, and I think I can do it."

"Alexander," Grace repeated, so quietly Emma almost missed it. Then, in a brighter voice that sounded slightly rehearsed, "Well. Fine print beats no print. What did he ask you?"

"The usual. Experience, references." Emma hesitated. "He asked about Dad."

The monitor beside the bed kept its even tick. Nothing in the room changed, and yet Emma had the odd sense that something had been set down very carefully and was now being watched.

"What did you tell him?"

"That he left when I was ten and I don't talk about it. He noticed the bracelet and asked who gave it to me."

"And?"

"I said I didn't remember."

Grace closed her eyes. "Good."

"Good?" Emma let go of her hand. "Why is that good? It's Dad's bracelet, Mom. His last present. I lied because it's the thing I always say, but it felt like—" She laughed once, awkwardly. "It felt like he was asking for more than he was asking."

"Emma."

"What?"

Grace opened her eyes. They were the same warm brown they had always been, but there was something sharper behind them than Emma had seen in months, a woman standing guard at a door. "Take the job," she said. "You need it, and I won't be the reason you walk away from it. But if he asks about your father again, you tell him what you told him today. Nothing more. Not what you remember, not what you've heard. Not even if he's kind about it."

"Why would he be kind about it?"

"Men like that are very kind when they want something." Grace smiled, and the smile was so tired and so entirely her own that Emma's throat closed. "Humor your mother. Nobody's dying today."

It was a joke. It was almost a joke. Emma laughed anyway and kissed her forehead, and neither of them mentioned that the monitor had quickened by a few beats.

---

Lena's apartment, their apartment, technically, though Emma paid a fraction of the rent and all of the apologies, smelled of burnt garlic and cinnamon candle. Lena Park stood at the stove in an oversized sweater, stirring something that had begun as pasta and become more ambitious.

"Tell me everything," Lena said without turning. "Do not skip the part where he's handsome."

"He's not—" Emma dropped her bag. "Okay. He is. In an aggressive way."

"I knew it." Lena spun, wooden spoon aloft. "Is he nice?"

"No."

"Terrifying?"

"A little."

"Is he paying you three months up front, per your hysterical voicemail?"

"Yes. That's the problem." Emma climbed onto a counter stool and pulled her knees up. She told Lena all of it: the folder, the date from before the call, the way he had known about the hospital and the deadline she'd never mentioned. By the time she finished, the pasta had gone cold on the spoon.

"That," Lena said, "is either a very romantic stalker or a very organized one. Have you looked him up?"

"This morning. Billionaire, thirty-one, hates interviews."

"Look him up properly."

They sat on the sofa with Lena's laptop between them, the screen turning the room blue. The first dozen results were what Emma expected: rankings, profiles, a magazine cover where Alexander stood with his arms crossed in front of a glass wall, looking as if the photographer had personally offended him. The caption read, Black Meridian's youngest chief executive inherited the company at twenty-three.

"Inherited from whom?" Emma said.

Lena clicked. The article was eight years old, grainy at the edges. RICHARD BLACK, FOUNDER OF BLACK MERIDIAN, DIES IN COASTAL ROAD CRASH. A photograph showed a twisted guardrail and a tow truck against a gray sea. Below it, a smaller picture: a younger Alexander in a black coat at a graveside, his face turned slightly from the camera, as if he couldn't bear to have it seen.

Emma looked at that face for a long time.

"Poor guy," Lena said softly. "Twenty-three."

"Eight years ago," Emma said.

"What?"

"Nothing." She didn't know why she had said it. She didn't know why her skin had gone cold. She knew only that the date, the gray sea, the black coat, tugged at a memory she could not reach, the way a word sits on the tip of your tongue and refuses to be spoken.

She closed the laptop. "Early start tomorrow."

Lena studied her, then let it go. "Wear the blazer."

In the dark of her small bedroom, Emma lay awake turning the bracelet slowly around her wrist. The sparrow's chipped wing caught the streetlight. Her father had pressed it into her palm the night before he left and told her something she had spent fifteen years trying not to remember. She had never repeated it to anyone.

She was nearly certain she had never told Alexander Black.

But he had looked at that sparrow like a man seeing a ghost.