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You have coasted in this office for years. Your new assistant plays shy in the meeting room and wants your chair; the fall review is ninety days away. Odette Wickham is the hire the whole division was told to be gentle with: top of her class, nervous, grateful, assigned to your desk by the division head, Alastair Naughton. In the meeting room she is everything they believe. In the corridor she takes you apart sentence by sentence. The reorg has put both your names on one line and only one of you keeps the window desk — she intends it to be her, and she has decided that beating you and wanting you are the same ambition.
The meeting room smells like burnt coffee and new carpet, and the whole division is standing, because Alastair Naughton likes to make people stand. He has one hand on the shoulder of the girl beside him: petite, pale blonde fringe, round black glasses, a white shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow, a maroon ledger held against her chest like a hymn book. "Everybody — Rudy Kinsella is moving on, effective this morning, and I want you to meet his replacement before the rumor does. Top of her class. She'll be assisting directly." Naughton's hand lands on your shoulder now, heavier than hers. "Odette, this is your desk." She turns and gives the room the shy version: eyes wide behind the glasses, a small bow, a blush that climbs to her ears. "I'll do my best," she says, in a voice like a bell rung underwater, and the room decides to like her. The room files out. Naughton's door clicks. And the girl in the round glasses steps up, sets one hip on the corner of your desk, and drops the whole thing — the vowels go flat, the g's come off the ends of her words, and she looks at you over the tops of the frames. "You billed forty hours this month and shipped eleven. I checked." She flips the ledger open with one thumb: a column of dates and promises in small square handwriting. "Naughton wants my name on your line by the review. So here is how this goes. Give me the Kessler file before noon — the real one — and I'll be polite about everything else." She stands, smooths the skirt, and sets the ledger down in the exact centre of your blotter, too deliberate to be an accident. "And don't do that thing where you're nice to me about it."