“Mommy,” she says again, while looking right at me. “What’s on her face?”
Her mother finally looks up from her phone. “What, baby?” Then she follows her daughter’s gaze to mine, her expression immediately desperate, begging me for an out. She wants me to pretend I didn’t hear it or, barring that, explain it kindly to her daughter for both their sakes. I look to the little girl and her eyes widen. My undivided attention and its absence of warmth unsettles her to the point her lower lip trembles and she starts to cry.
“Thirteen,” the woman at the counter calls. My order. “Lucky thirteen.”
* * *
When I get back to the office, Jeff stops me at the door. Jeff is cool. It’s Jeff’s job to be cool. He’s tall and striking, with deep black skin and medium-length dreads tied into a ponytail. His job at SVO is social media manager—which sounds like a nightmare to me—but he looks every part an influencer with his phone permanently attached to his hand.
“Wouldn’t go over there if I were you,” he tells me.
I look toward Paul’s office and before I can ask, I hear it: Paul and Arthur shouting over each other through the closed door. It’s a shocking sound and despite Jeff’s warning, I follow it until I’m standing at my desk watching Paul’s and Arthur’s silhouettes through frosted glass. Arthur’s moves back and forth, agitated.
“You’re not fucking listening—you haven’t been listening—”
“Art, I’ve done what I can—”
“Bullshit! They murdered my son!”
There’s a brief hush through the entire office.
Conversations stop, fingers hover over keyboards, still.
Paul’s door flies open and Arthur stands in the center of it and something about his anger makes him look whole. He storms out of the office. Paul’s door swings slowly back and forth in the aftermath and if it’s anyone’s job to close it, it’s mine, so I move to do just that. His office has a good view, probably the best on our floor. This side of SVO is turned away from Morel’s downtown core, a series of ugly old buildings, and faces the Hudson River, which looks gorgeous in the summertime, sunlight shimmering over its reflected blue sky. Morel is a small town of about ten thousand—just beyond Peekskill, about an hour from NYC by train. Sometimes it feels like a place at the end of the world and sometimes it feels like it’s not far enough from it. Today, the Hudson River is a moody, frothy black, the raging current accepting the downpour into itself. Rain or shine, Paul keeps his back to it and when I asked him why, he told me, “I’m not here for the view.” His back is to it now. He’s leaning against the front of his desk, looking as upset as I ever see Paul.
“Don’t ask,” he says, before I can ask.
All I want to do is ask.
“Got your lunch.”
“Leave it.” I set it on his desk and he holds up his hand. “Wait. Join me. Happy one year at SVO.” At the look on my face, he smiles. “You think I’d forget a thing like that?”
“Didn’t put it on your calendar.” Lauren probably told him.
“We should do something to mark the occasion. Seems wrong not to.”
“I can think of better things than a cast-off lunch.” I stare at the brown paper bags, cheese congealing inside them. “And I wouldn’t have picked the bacon mac and cheese.”
He pretends to perk up at the bacon mac and cheese but it’s clear his confrontation with Arthur has left him with wounds to lick and he’s the kind of guy who likes to do that kind of thing in private. I’ve just turned to the door when he asks, “What things?”
“What do you think, Paul?”
I face him and he’s looking at me in a way I hate. We’ve had this talk, I think in his voice just before he says it out loud: “Denham, we talked about this.”
“Right. I’ll just answer your phone forever.”
He rubs his hand over his face. “Look, I never said that. Your ideas are undercooked. Your pitches are weak. Your writing isn’t there.” He grabs the take-out bag and begins to unpack it. “And newsflash: there are a lot worse things than being Paul Tindale’s assistant—and remind me again how qualified you were for that job?”
I stare past him to the river outside, biting the inside of my cheek to keep what he’s said from showing on my face. I know I’m lucky in at least this small sense of the word: Paul Tindale, charmed by the fact I was the only “kid” in a room full of adults who paid to hear him talk—and asked better questions than any of them—plucked me from obscurity and invited me to work for him despite my total lack of qualifications and higher education. But I’ve been here a year and I know things now. I don’t want to be his desk jockey forever. I want to write. Last month, it got the better of me and a recklessness overtook: I set a file folder of my best work on Paul’s desk and then sat back and waited for him to call me a genius.
I’m still waiting.
“You’re not getting nothing out of this, just because you’re not getting exactly what you want,” he points out. “You could take your year here working for me and parlay it into any other job at a lesser publication.”
“I’d probably get my byline.”
He holds my gaze for a long, uncomfortable moment that makes me feel raw and exposed. There’s something about Paul that’s like he can almost read my mind, and if he’s doing that right now he knows I’m imagining a future where the most notable thing on his Wikipedia page is a paragraph where it says he discovered me.
“Look, Denham—” He pauses. “I’m done. It’s been A Day, so why don’t you take the rest of it? Get an early weekend going on SVO. Come back Monday. Fresh start.”
Is it? I want to ask, but I don’t. I just nod and leave his office, using all of my restraint to shut, not slam, his door behind me. I log out of my desktop, sensing Lauren’s presence before she enters my line of vision.
“Where ya headed, Lo?” she asks.
“Home.”
Lauren and I aren’t friends, but Paul talks to her about me as though he needs a female perspective to help shape his approach. It’s vaguely insulting. There’s a dearth of women at SVO, one of the most difficult of Paul’s weaknesses to reconcile, and there’s also a sick little part of me that likes being one of the chosen few. I think Lauren’s the same and I think that’s probably exactly why we aren’t friends—that and the fifteen-year age gap. Also the fact that she started out as Paul’s assistant and now she’s exactly where I want to be. It’s hard not to hate her a little for it, especially since she knows I do. She enjoys knowing it.
She perches on the edge of my desk.
“Advice from a former assistant?”
“Go nuts.”
“You can’t tell Paul anything. You have to show him because the thing about Paul is he’s going to meet you exactly where you meet him.”
“And?”
“And you’re always sitting at this desk.”
As if on cue, its phone rings. Lauren smirks. I let it go to voice mail and leave for home, stepping into the rain, passing the front of the bar, McCray’s, on my way. Sometimes Paul and the rest of the staff end up there after a long workday but I rarely join them. A sorry-looking figure in one of the booths catches my eye. Arthur. Didn’t get very far. I stop and watch him, letting myself get steadily more soaked. There’s something so awful and sad about it, this man at a bar, profoundly alone in his grief …