by Lisse Smith
I turned to Patrick, waiting quietly behind us. “Am I going to have to call on that particular service very often?” I asked him.
He shrugged. “That depends whether Ash here throws up in his office or mine.” That had an alarming amount of truth to it, I was sure.
“Nice to meet you, Mitch, but I sincerely hope I won’t have need of your services,” I said.
“I think Lilly has met enough of your ‘friends’, Ash.” Patrick gently extricated my arm from Ashlan’s, but was quick to drop it afterwards. “It’s time for you to find someone else to play with.”
“Hurtful.” Ashlan mocked heartache with a hand over his chest. “I was only trying to be of assistance.”
“Go assist someone else,” Patrick instructed, and with a wicked grin, Ashlan slipped off into the crowd.
“Sorry about him.” Patrick shrugged. “He can be a bit much sometimes, but he really is brilliant.”
“I like him.” I admitted. “He’s very original. True to himself.”
“He’s definitely true to something.”
My phone beeped a message. Patrick pretended not to notice as I glanced at the short text.
REPLY: Where r u?
“I’m just going to the bathroom.” I told him, as my body rippled with a shiver. “Then I think I’ll get going.” It was closer to midnight than I had expected, and there was no way I was going to be here when the clock ticked over to Christmas Day. I needed to get going. Surely I had fulfilled the required duration of attendance.
Patrick nodded. “I’ll meet you by the exit.” He nodded toward the left of the rooms. “The bathrooms are down that corridor.”
TEXT: Leaving now
It’s amazing how much of a buffer a powerful man can be in a room full of people. You get just the required amount of space when you are with him, just enough to keep the undesirables away, those people who don’t really have any business talking to you but are just curious.
I already knew the other three Managing Director’s Personal Assistants: Noreen, Sally, and Rachel. I had spent time with each of them over the last few days, enough that I could greet them warmly when we had passed through the room previously. However, there were a lot of other people throughout the organization, and I knew none of them. The instant that I escaped from Patrick, it was open slather on personal introductions.
I hadn’t made it halfway across the room before I had fielded half a dozen introductions, and these people didn’t want me to know about them; they wanted to know all about me. Who I was, where I was from, what was Patrick like, was that Ashlan they saw me talking to. There was a prejudice in large organizations that seemed to draw a line between lower-level and higher-level management. There was a no-go zone that said that you couldn’t approach anyone higher than your own boss.
It was all a bunch of crap, in my opinion. If they were that interested in knowing about Patrick and Ashlan, then they should have grown enough balls to go and introduce themselves to the men in question. I wasn’t swapping tales with anyone, and I wasn’t about to hang around being friends with any of them, not when every minute took me closer and closer to midnight.
So I kept a smile plastered to my face and gave up on the idea of the bathroom—I could wait. I changed direction and went straight to the door, not waiting for Patrick, who stood speaking with someone just inside. I slipped out and, after retrieving my coat, waited just inside the main doors for the valet to call me a taxi.
“Lilly.” Patrick’s voice, close beside me, surprised me enough to have me jump slightly. “You’re leaving?” He sounded disappointed.
“Sorry. I have to get home.” I wondered how long the taxi would take. I had twenty-two minutes till midnight. I needed to be inside my apartment before then.
“No worries. Look, thanks for coming. I know it’s a bit daunting to be dropped into the middle of something like that when you’re just new. But you did great tonight.”
“Thanks.” Just then the valet returned, holding the door open for me to go out and meet my taxi. “I’ll see you Monday.” Christmas Day fell on a Wednesday this year, and we all had Wednesday and Thursday off, but Samuel had given everyone Friday off as well, so we weren’t due back into the office till Monday. I would need every one of those days before I would be ready to venture back into society. “See you.”
Without waiting for a response, I scurried out the door and slipped into the waiting taxi.
Breathe, breathe.
Nineteen minutes.
By the time the taxi pulled up outside my apartment, I had just minutes to spare. I wasn’t able to talk; breathing was difficult enough. I paid the driver and disappeared inside my unit.
Doors locked quietly and securely behind me. Blinds drawn against the sun that would come through them sometime in the early morning, windows shut against the noise.
REPLY: Luv U. Turn ur phone on when ur ready to talk.
TEXT: Luv u 2
Phone off, alarm off, lights off, everything off.
Clothes off. I finally climbed into my bed and watched as the clocked ticked over to the hateful date.
December 25. Christmas Day.
There was no joy, no merriness. Only pain. A deep, drowning sadness that never faded. There were a few days of the year that really hurt, deeply and soulfully, and today was the worst.
I allowed the pain to take me to a place where I couldn’t feel the world around me anymore. I slept, lying basically comatose for long periods. I didn’t eat; I didn’t drink. I couldn’t, because those functions would have required thought; and if I thought, then I felt the pain. So I did nothing.
The hateful day passed, and the one after that. It was Friday before I could manage to crawl from the bed and begin to function again. I could allow the ice to thaw from my body and let the world around me back in. It was slow and painful, but like every other time before this, eventually I did recover.
TEXT: I’m ok.
REPLY: Good.
Two
A Personal Assistant takes her place in an organization from her manager, and in my case, Patrick was pretty much as high up as you could get. There were nearly five hundred employees in our company, and at least half of them were in our building alone, so there was a pretty secure hierarchy already in place when I started.
Patrick’s last assistant hadn’t been very good at her job. She was young and flighty and had spent more time worry about her own social calendar than what Patrick was doing, or so the other PAs told me. It didn’t take her long before she fell in love with a ski instructor and followed him off to Switzerland. Match made in heaven, apparently.
Needless to say, I didn’t have a lot to live up to with regard to expectations, but as a PA, I was really good at my job. Probably the main reason was that I had nothing outside the walls of this company to distract me. Patrick was my only priority, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. If he needed to me to stay late or start early, I did. If he needed me to work on weekends, that was fine too.
Out offices were on the sixteenth floor of a renovated building, ours being the highest of the office levels. The two floors above us were corporate apartments, used by visiting clients and also by the GM and the MDs when they worked late and didn’t want to travel to their own homes outside the city.
My desk sat in a small antechamber just outside Patrick’s doors. I shared the space with Sally, Ashlan’s PA. Patrick and Ashlan’s offices stood side by side, their entrances coming off the room that Sally and I shared. It made it easier to share with her, because Patrick was away a lot, and to have that space to myself would have eventually driven me insane. Ashlan, on the other hand, was in the office a lot more often, and he kept us both entertained.
I liked Sally, she was smart and funny, about the same age as I was, but that’s where the similarities ended. She was shorter, rounder and had a husband and young boy who she adored more than life itself. She was nothing like me.
By the end of the first two months, I knew mo
re about Patrick than just about anyone in his life. I knew where he liked to eat, I knew what clothes he bought, where he got them laundered, how often he called his mother and sister—and I knew he was getting divorced from his wife.
If I had known his marriage was on the rocks before I started, there would have been no chance of me taking the job, but he managed to keep that fairly secret. The only reason I learned the truth was that he engaged his lawyer to draw up divorce papers. Every e-mail Patrick got came through me, so it was hard to miss when it came through late one evening.
He buzzed me into this office about half an hour after the e-mail came through. “Lilly, can you come in here please?” His voice sounded strained over the intercom.
It was just past 9:30 p.m. when I entered Patrick’s office that night. We had just sold a large corporate venture to a Danish company, and it was due to be handed over the following morning. There were a million last-minute details to work out, which was why Patrick and I and probably a handful of other people were still in the building.
“Yeah?” It was pretty obvious that he wanted to talk to me about the divorce. Instead of sitting behind his desk, where he normally would have been when he was working, he was standing by the window, gazing out at the lights of the city beyond us.
“You saw.” He didn’t elaborate.
“Sorry.” It wasn’t any of my business what he and his wife did, but opening his e-mails was my business, so I didn’t feel any guilt, just sorry that he was having to explain it to me. “I don’t need to know about it,” I told him.
“No.” He shook his head and huffed in quiet amusement. “I want you to know. Ashlan is the only other person I’ve talked to about it, and he’s useless.”
I could only imagine his helpful support. “Yes, he can be a bit like that,” I agreed. I went to stand beside him at the window.
“Claire and I have been on the rocks for a while now,” he admitted. “Probably for longer than I realized. Maybe a year or so. She’s Spanish, and she misses it very much. She’s been spending more and more time back there, taking the kids with her.” Patrick had two boys, Henry and Luke, who were about ten and eight. “She wants to move back there, but I don’t.” He shrugged. “That’s pretty much it. She thinks that I love my job more than her, and I can’t say that she isn’t right.”
He turned to look at me. “I should want to pick them,” he admitted. “I should want to be with them and move to where they are happiest. They are supposed to be my life, but I don’t feel that.” I could see the regret in his eyes. “I love my boys; they are wonderful and special, but I like who I am when I’m in this office. I like what I do. I’m good at what I do. I wouldn’t be a good stay-at-home dad. That I do know.”
I was quiet for a few minutes. “I don’t give relationship advice.” That was as much as I would say on his marriage. “But what I can tell you is that you should never have to change who you are for someone else.” That I knew, that I believed, and I lived it. “You are who you are, and people either accept it and love you for it, or they don’t. But you shouldn’t have to change to make someone else happy.”
His gaze didn’t turn from the lights outside the window. “And that’s what I’d be doing if I left with them,” he said sadly. “I’d be changing who I am, making myself unhappy to make them happy.” He turned sad eyes toward me. “Is that selfish?” he asked.
I don’t do sad. Not well. I struggled to keep myself functioning some days, and I found it difficult to take any more upon myself. But at the same time, I couldn’t walk out on Patrick, not right now.
“It’s no more selfish than her asking you to do it in the first place.”
“So now I’m getting divorced, and my soon-to-be ex-wife is moving to Spain and taking my two children with her.”
“It seems that she is.”
“You don’t mince words, do you, Lilly?” He turned his full attention back to me, but this time it was my turn to gaze out at the lights.
I rocked my head to the side in a shrug. “Not really.”
“You’re also the most private person that I’ve ever met.” I wondered where he was going with this; I had a bad feeling I wouldn’t like it.
“Is that a question?” I asked.
“You hide from everyone.”
That wasn’t a question either, so I chose to remain silent.
“What is your secret?”
That was a question, and it definitely wasn’t going to be answered.
“Lilly?” I’m not sure why I turned back to face him—maybe because he sounded so lost—but I did, and my eyes met his for a long moment. He gently reached out a hand to touch my face, but I jerked back away from him.
“Sorry.” I whispered as I backed up further. “Sorry.”
“No.” Patrick shook his head. “My fault. I’m sorry. It’s just that sometimes you look so unbelievably sad and lonely that I want to hold you and make it all go away.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, and luckily I didn’t have to think of anything. Patrick’s phone started ringing, and with a sigh he turned to answer it. I escaped while I had the chance.
When he came out of his office later, neither of us spoke about the incident. As far as I was concerned, it would be as if it never happened. I did that a lot.
“Michael is bringing up the finalized sale documents with the amendments that the Danes requested,” he said. “Can you fax them off tonight and leave me the originals? Then you can go home.” He turned back to go into his office, then paused. “Oh, and Lilly? Thanks for listening. You’re much better at it than Ash.”
The next day was Saturday, and it was my day off. Patrick hadn’t asked me to work, and I hadn’t volunteered, either. I was sure both of us needed some time apart. Besides, I had promised Sally that I’d meet her and her family in Kensington Gardens for a picnic lunch. I really didn’t feel up to it, but there are a few things in life that normal people can’t understand or forgive, and telling someone like Sally that I didn’t want to meet her husband and baby son would be one of those unforgivable things. I had to work with Sally every day, after all. I would just have to deal with my own issues and get on with it.
I shoved a sandwich in a paper bag, wrapped my iPod in its case around my upper arm, and set out for the park. It was maybe a ten-minute walk, but it wouldn’t take me that long.
I was a runner. It’s sometimes hard for people who don’t run to understand, but running was a release, the only moment when I felt absolutely, totally free. I ran to stay sane—and I was sure that after this lunch, I was going to need some of that feeling, so I dressed in my gym clothes, put my running shoes on, and ran my ass to that park.
Sally gave me an amused once-over when I jogged to a stop beside her at the entrance to the Gardens. Sally lived just out the city and had caught the train in with her family.
“Lilly.” Sally’s voice had a gentle laugh to it as she juggled her precious son in her arms while she tugged on her husband’s arm to get his attention. “Gerard, this is Lillianna Owen. Lilly, this is my husband, Gerard.”
I nodded to him and gave a small smile. “Pleased to meet you.” I didn’t offer to shake his hand. That would be touching.
You’d think it was strange that I loved the underground, but yet I wasn’t a touchy person. I liked my own space, but it seemed like the underground it was another world. It wasn’t voluntary touching, it was do-or-die touching. You held on to whatever you could, or you died. I liked the simplicity of it, the forced, almost animal interaction.
I tried not to see the family walking beside me as we entered the gardens. I tried not to see how Gerard pushed the pram while Sally carried her child. I tried not to see the oneness of the moment and the way they connected. I focused on anything else I could to take my mind away from them. This was such a bad idea.
Sally kept up a constant chatter while we walked, seemingly oblivious to the rumpled state of my mind. Gerard finally parked us by the big lake, finding a quie
t place just away from the other masses of families that clogged the area.
Sally and Gerard’s son, Liam, was nearly two. He was a solidly built little boy with blond curls, and he delighted in running screaming toward the water, so that his father would have to run and intercept him at the last minute. He loved it, his father loved it, and Sally took a hundred photos of them.
I hated it.
“You don’t have family?” she asked me, as she sat watching Liam chase the birds, his sturdy little legs plowing through the grass, Gerard close behind.
“No.”
“Is something wrong?” she asked cautiously, concern evident in her gaze.
How to answer that without offending her? By now I knew her well enough to know that in addition to being a light, cheerful person, she had more tenacity than anyone else I’d ever met. She was like a little pit bull, and when she got her teeth into a problem, she wouldn’t stop until she had it fixed.
“I like you, Sally,” I told her. “I really do, and I hope that you don’t take offense, because it isn’t meant that way, but I need you to understand that you can’t fix what’s wrong with me. I know that you want to.” We shared a sad smile. “I know it’s part of what makes you special—that you want to fix everything that’s wrong with everyone—but I’m broken in a way that can’t be fixed.”
“And being around my family is making that broken part of you hurt?” she asked with surprising clarity.
“Very much.” I turned away from her understanding gaze.
“I like you too, Lilly,” she told me, after a few silent minutes. “I think that we are going to be good friends, just you and me. We’ll leave the boys to fend for themselves, and we can have our own girly times.”
“I’d like that,” I admitted a little more calmly.
“But for now,” Sally continued, “how about you finish that run you were so eager for this morning? Go.” She shooed me with a wave of her hand. “Go and do what makes you happy, and I’ll see you at work on Monday.”
