The morning newsflash on Audrey's monitor said Blackwood Corporation had just acquired another media firm. She already knew. She'd drafted the acquisition memo at eleven the previous night, cross-referencing the due diligence report Sebastian had needed on his desk before dawn. She scrolled past the headline without reaction and moved on to the market summary.
The executive secretary office was empty at eight forty-five. Audrey sat at the largest desk - the one positioned directly beside the door to Sebastian Blackwood's private office - and sipped from a plain white mug. No name on it. She'd never bothered with one. In five years, she had never brought in a potted plant, hung a personal photo, or left a lipstick in the communal drawer. The desk was a workspace. That was all it needed to be.
She heard Tessa before she saw her. The click of heels on marble, quick and purposeful, then the soft rush of the glass door swinging open.
"Good morning, Audrey." Tessa Fairfax swept in, her blond hair perfectly blown out, her wrap dress a shade of coral that cost more than most people's rent. She dropped her designer bag on her desk with the casual ease of someone who was very aware of how it looked and turned around. "Have you heard? New girl starts today."
"I scheduled her onboarding." Audrey didn't look up from her monitor.
Tessa made a face that acknowledged she already knew that and didn't care. She pulled open her desk drawer and retrieved a compact mirror, checking her lipstick with the focus of someone conducting surgery. "What do you think she looks like?"
"I haven't thought about it."
"I have." She snapped the compact shut and tilted her head. "Every time someone new comes into this department, they're gorgeous. Remember the woman from the Singapore office? Legs up to here, spoke four languages. And before that, the one from the London branch? Mr. Blackwood has - a type." She said it with a slight emphasis that made clear she considered herself included in that category.
The door opened again. Celeste Forsythe came in: dark wine blazer, heels that struck the marble with measured precision, coffee already in hand. She sat down, looked at Tessa, and said without preamble, "You're discussing the new one."
"Obviously."
"She'll be trouble." Celeste opened her laptop with no particular urgency. "They always are when they come in from outside the immediate department. She'll spend a week mapping alliances and then she'll start positioning." A pause. "The question is which direction she moves."
Tessa's gaze drifted toward Audrey's corner and stayed there for a moment. "She won't come for Audrey."
"No." Celeste's voice was definitive. "She won't."
Audrey kept her eyes on the screen.
She had heard variations of that conversation more times than she could count. It always reached the same conclusion, with the same certainty, and it never required any input from her. That was the design.
It had taken her three months to perfect this particular version of herself: the deep brown frames she'd bought at a drugstore on Eighth Avenue, thick-armed and slightly wrong for her face in a way that was easy to miss but effective over time. The matte foundation two shades too heavy, applied broadly without any attempt at sculpting, eliminating the natural depth of her cheekbones. The dark mauve lipstick she'd sourced specifically because it made a mouth look thinner, less inviting. The wool jacket from a consignment shop in Queens - a dull charcoal cut that communicated competence the way a filing cabinet communicated competence. Hair pulled back so tightly it created a faint pinch around the eyes, which combined with the frames gave her a slightly severe, no-nonsense appearance that read as somewhere between forty and ageless.
She had stood in her bathroom mirror on the first morning of her new role and asked herself: what does a woman look like when no one needs to think about her appearance?
Then she had assembled that woman, piece by piece.
The logic had been clean. Women who drew a certain kind of attention in professional settings generated a certain kind of friction. Friction cost time. Time was the one thing she could not afford to waste. So she had removed the variable.
It worked. Nobody asked Audrey about her weekends. Nobody leaned over her desk to whisper about who was seeing whom. Nobody gave her the sidelong look that meant they were calculating where she fit in some invisible social hierarchy. They gave her their problems and their deadlines and their early morning crises, and she solved them, and that was the arrangement.
Five years. Clean, simple, unremarkable.
She had not once questioned the logic.
"I just hope she doesn't immediately start acting like she outranks everyone." Tessa was checking her hair now, angling the compact toward the window. "Last time Mr. Blackwood brought someone in from outside the department, that Singapore woman had everyone rearranging their calendars within a week."
"She lasted three months," Celeste said flatly.
"They all do."
Audrey forwarded a confirmation email to the executive dining room, made a note about the eleven o'clock board meeting, and began drafting Sebastian's afternoon agenda.
At eight fifty-five, the door from the corridor opened.
The office went quiet. It wasn't dramatic - just that fractional pause, that slight collective recalibration, that happened every morning when Sebastian Blackwood arrived. He walked in the way he always did, like the room had already been cleared for him before he entered. Dark suit, open collar, coat already gone. He reached for the newspaper on Audrey's desk without breaking stride, and she'd already lifted it to meet his hand, the coffee following half a second later.