The Assistant She Made Cry

I do not answer her out loud, because there is a girl behind frosted glass eating a sad sandwich and a building full of people waiting to catch Cosima Wilde talking to herself. But I answer her. Inside, where the two names live, I set my own down on top of hers like a hand over a mouth, and I think back at the patient thing under my breastbone the only thing I have: Then we'll both be tired. And only one of us gets to drive.

It does not reply. It does not need to. It has said its piece, the way she always said her piece, once, gently, and then let you carry it around for the rest of the day like a stone you swallowed. I unhook one hand from my own wrist. The fingers are steady. They are always steady. That is the cruelty of this body, that it never once shakes the way I am shaking inside it, that it could be doing this to me and look, in any mirror, perfectly calm.

The screen on the wall is just a screen again. Black, sleeping, showing me a flat appalled woman in dark grey and nothing else. I make myself believe that. I have a meeting in under an hour and I cannot walk into it haunted.

I open the door.

Lacey jumps, sandwich half lifted, and I watch her do the calculation every person in this building does when I appear, the fast frightened arithmetic of what mood, what does she want, what did I do, and I hate that I am the cause of it even wearing a face that is not mine. She is twenty-three, maybe twenty-four, with a cardigan buttoned one hole out of true and a lanyard she has chewed the corner of, and Cosima made this girl cry. I know it the way the body knows the route to the office and the taste of the espresso. There is a memory just under the surface, not mine, of Lacey in this exact spot with her face coming apart and Cosima watching it happen with the cool interest of a woman timing an egg.

"Lacey." She comes to attention. "Before two. I need the Lantern materials. Everything we're putting in front of Meridian on provenance."

"It's, it's all in the deck, Ms Wilde, the slide, I formatted it the way you," she falters, because the way I asked was not the way Cosima asks, "the way you wanted."

"Not the slide." The slide is the lie. The slide is internal teams. "The source. The actual project history. Version control, the old directories, dated files, anything from the early development." I keep my voice in the cello register, cool, bored, a founder doing housekeeping, and underneath it my pulse is going because I am asking my own assistant to fetch me the evidence of my own existence and I cannot let her see that it is the most important sentence I have said since I woke up dead. "I want to know exactly what's in the building before legal does. I don't like surprises in a room."

That last part is true of Cosima, and Lacey relaxes a half inch into it, because it is the kind of thing the woman she knows would say, control disguised as caution. She pulls the keyboard toward her. And then she stops.

"The early stuff's mostly archived off," she says. "The first year, before the rebrand. Mr Wilde had it moved to cold storage last," she thinks, "last month? He said it was a cost thing. Storage costs." She looks up at me, and there is a flicker in her, the small wrongness she has learned to ignore. "You signed off on it. The migration. I have the email."

Last month. Damien moved the basement off the live archive last month, and got Cosima's signature on it, and called it storage costs. I think of the file browser an hour ago, the hand sliding fluent and cold toward Delete, the body that had been here before, hovering, planning. The body did not need to delete those files this morning. The body knew they were already most of the way gone, packed off into cold storage where no one looks and no one audits and a single instruction can wipe a year of truth in a night. Cosima was not going to make sure there was nothing left to find. She had already started. Three months out, with the deal closing, she was tidying the basement before she tidied me.

"Show me the email," I say.

Lacey turns the screen. There it is, dated five weeks ago, Cosima's name on the From line, a forwarded approval, two words and a signature: Yes, proceed. The hands that typed it are the hands I am holding in my lap. I read my own enemy's instruction to bury me and I feel the cold satisfaction try to rise again, that's clever, that's clean, and I put my own hand over its mouth a second time.

"Who has access to cold storage," I say.

"IT. And, um." Lacey chews the lanyard. "Mr Wilde. And you. It's locked down, it needs two of the three to pull anything, it's a, it's a controls thing, from the audit." She says audit like a word she has been told not to enjoy.

Two of three. So I cannot get to the basement without Damien, or without IT, who answer to Damien, and Damien moved it there precisely so that no one could reach it alone, least of all a junior designer with a grievance and a long memory. He built the lock himself. He just does not know that the person it was built to keep out is now the person holding one of the three keys.

"Ms Wilde?" Lacey is watching my face do something. I take it back, smooth it.

"You did well to know that," I say. "The two-of-three. Most people in your seat wouldn't."

And Lacey, who has been braced for a cut since the second I opened the door, who flinched at eat something this morning because kindness from this face does not compute, goes pink to the ears and looks down at her keyboard and says, very quietly, "I read the controls memos. Nobody else does. I thought, if something ever went wrong, somebody should know how the locks work."

I file that. I file it carefully, in the place where I am building, slowly, a different company than the one I woke up running. Somebody should know how the locks work. The bullied girl at the desk has been quietly reading the security architecture of a place that treats her like furniture, because some part of her was getting ready for the day it would matter. She is not nothing. Damien said I was nothing, and Cosima made this girl cry, and the two facts are the same fact, the house style of this whole building, and I am so tired of it that for a moment the tired feels like the thing under my breastbone, and I have to check which of us is feeling it.

Mine. The tired is mine. I claim it.

"Lacey." She looks up. "When the provenance meeting starts, I want you in the room. Taking notes for me. Not the official minutes, IT can do those. I want yours. What people actually say, who looks at whom. Can you do that."

"You've never," she starts, and stops. Cosima never let Lacey in a room above a certain altitude. Lacey fetched and carried at the door of rooms. "Yes," she says. "Yes. I can do that."

The phone on her desk lights. She answers it in the bright careful voice, says of course, I'll tell her, hangs up, and her face has changed, gone tight.

"That was reception," she says. "Mr Wilde's brought the meeting forward. It's not two anymore." She swallows. "He's moved it to now. They're all in the glass room. Meridian's people too. He said," and here she goes carefully, because she is repeating a thing she knows is a trap, "he said to tell you he didn't want to give you time to overthink it. He said you do better off the cuff."

He does not think I do better off the cuff. He thinks I do worse. He has watched me be strange since Friday, watched me walk toward provenance instead of away from it, and he has decided to take the ninety minutes of preparation away from a sister he believes is having an episode, in front of the buyers, in a glass room, so that whatever is wrong with Cosima can show itself where it costs the most. It is a beautifully clean move. It is exactly what I would do, if I were her, and the recognition of how well I now think in her grammar is its own small horror.

I have no notes. I have no rehearsal. I have a slide that lies and a basement I cannot reach and a brother who has set a fire to see how I burn.

I straighten the dark grey column of the suit. I put the cello in my voice. I become, in the four steps it takes to cross to the glass room, the woman who walks in late on purpose so the room is already waiting, and I am late by the exact margin she would choose, and through the glass wall I can see them, the assembled faces of the board and three strangers in better suits who must be Meridian, and Damien at the head with his hands folded and his eyes on the door, on me, waiting for the seam to show.

Lacey falls into step half a pace behind me with a tablet and her chewed lanyard and her one job, and I think, you and me, kid, we are going to learn how the locks work.

I put my hand on the glass door. It is cold. The room turns to look.

And on the long polished table, dead centre, where everyone can see it, where it has been set out for me like a place card, there is a single object I was not expecting and could not have prepared for, the one thing in this building that is unmistakably, undeniably mine, that no version history and no cold storage and no internal teams could ever explain away, and Damien is watching my face to see if I recognise it.

I recognise it. God help me, my whole body recognises it, both of us, the sleeper and the self, lurching toward it at once.

It is my notebook. The one with the takeaway menu folded inside the back cover. The one I last saw on a desk in a basement two years and one whole life ago.

And it is open to the page where I first drew Lantern.