The Substitute

Mara Ellison had exactly forty dollars in her checking account and a landlord who did not accept apologies as payment, so when the recruiter called about a three-month temp contract paying twenty-eight dollars an hour, she said yes before she'd even asked what the job was. "Executive assistant to the VP of Acquisitions," the recruiter said. "Halden Group. You'd be covering for someone on leave." "What kind of leave?" "Does it matter?" It didn't. Not at 6:47 PM on a Tuesday with an eviction notice folded into her coat pocket like a threat she was trying to forget the shape of. The Halden Group occupied fourteen floors of glass on the north side of downtown, the kind of building where the elevators asked which floor you wanted before you'd finished pressing the button. Mara arrived Thursday morning in the one blazer she owned that didn't have a coffee stain on the cuff, and a security guard named Pete looked at her badge photo, then at her face, then back at the badge photo with an expression she couldn't quite place. "You look like her," he said. "Like who?" "Elise. The one you're replacing." He handed the badge back. "Spitting image, almost. Huh." Mara laughed it off, because that's what you did with strange comments from security guards, and rode the elevator to the nineteenth floor where a woman named Priya was waiting with a stack of folders and the harried energy of someone who'd been doing two jobs for three weeks. "Thank God," Priya said. "Okay. Fast version. You're covering for Elise Vance. She worked directly under Julian Cole, VP of Acquisitions, ran his calendar, his travel, sat in on his calls, basically kept the entire floor from catching fire. She left — abruptly — five weeks ago. No notice. HR's calling it a leave of absence but nobody's heard from her, and honestly, we've stopped asking." "Is that normal? For someone to just—" "Nothing about Elise leaving was normal," Priya said, and then, like she'd caught herself saying too much: "Anyway. Here's her desk. We didn't touch anything, figured whoever came in could use her system." The desk still had a photo in the corner — Elise, mid-laugh, arm looped around a broad-shouldered man with dark hair and the kind of jaw that belonged on a magazine cover. There was a coffee mug that said WORLD'S OKAYEST ASSISTANT. A cardigan hung on the back of the chair like its owner had just stepped away and would be back in a minute to reclaim it. Nobody had come back for it in five weeks. Mara sat down in Elise's chair, in front of Elise's monitor, and opened Elise's calendar, and told herself this was just a job. Just a paycheck. Just three months of covering another woman's life until the real thing worked itself out and Mara could go back to being unemployed in relative peace. At 11:14 AM, her desk phone buzzed. Internal line. "This is Mara," she answered. Silence. Then, quiet, almost testing: "Elise?" "No — sorry, I'm the temp. Mara. Can I help you with something?" The line clicked dead. She stared at the receiver for a long moment before setting it down, and told herself it was nothing. New employee, wrong extension, someone who hadn't gotten the memo. That was all. It wasn't until that evening, walking to the train, that her personal cell buzzed with a text from an unknown number. You're doing great, Elise. Mara's stomach dropped straight through the sidewalk. I think you have the wrong number, she typed back, hands cold. Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again. I don't.