He was picking up his glass when she said, "You caught the error in the appendix." He put the glass back down. She was looking at him. She'd known he was there. I did, he said.
How long were you going to sit there before you said something? He turned toward her then cuz not doing so felt actively ridiculous. I was planning not to say anything. You're I didn't want to intrude on your evening. She looked at him for a moment with that evaluating expression seed in her office.
What are you drinking? Bourbon Woodford Reserve. She looked at Dennis. I'll have what he's having. Dennis nodded and moved to pour it.
And then she picked up her glass of water, walked the three stools down and sat beside him. Just like that, Adrien Cole, who had spent 3 years mastering the art of invisibility, suddenly couldn't figure out what to do with his hands. She looked at her phone one more time, then turned it face down on the bar. The gesture was deliberate. He noticed it.
Buy me a drink. He stared at her. I'm sorry. The bourbon. She nodded toward Dennis.
I'd like it if you bought me a drink. It was the most socially ordinary thing he could have imagined her saying, and it was precisely the last thing he'd expected her to say, and he couldn't tell from her expression whether it was a joke. " Of course," he said. Dennis set the bourbon down. Adrien nodded at him.
Dennis nodded back and moved away with the tact of a bartender who understood what his job sometimes required. Victoria picked up the glass. She looked at it for a moment. Then she set it down without drinking and looked at him directly. How long have you actually been doing this job?
This specific job? 3 years 2 months. Before that, I was in operations at what I'm asking. She looked at him. How long have you been doing the job?
That's actually your job. Not the job title. The actual job. He considered this. The job that isn't in my job description.
Yes. Since about 2 weeks after I started when I realized the prior system wasn't catching things it should have been catching. And you just started doing it. Someone needed to. She picked up the bourbon and drank.
A silence settled between them that was not uncomfortable in the way he would have predicted. It had a weight to it, but a manageable weight. Nobody knows you do that, she said. It wasn't a question. No.
Does that bother you? He thought about lying. Not about the fact he was incapable of lying convincingly and had more or less given up attempting it, but about the degree of it. Whether to give her the honest, complicated answer, or the clean, professional one, he gave her the honest one. It used to, he said.
When I first started, I thought I thought if I did good work, eventually someone would see it. That's how I believed things worked. He looked at his glass. I was wrong about that. How do things work in your experience?
People see what they're looking for. If they're not looking for you, they don't find you. No matter what you do, she didn't respond immediately. He wondered if he'd said too much. How did you end up in this position?
She said. Operations assistant. You're clearly overqualified for it. Life intervenes. That's not an answer.
No, it isn't. He wrapped both hands around his glass. My wife died 3 years ago. I had a 4-year-old daughter. I needed a job that was stable and had consistent hours and benefits and didn't require me to be ambitious because I didn't have any ambition left to give.
He paused. Your company offered all of that. She was quiet for a moment. I'm sorry about your wife. Thank you.
He waited for her to say something else. Or to change the subject or to do what most people did when he mentioned Nora, make a small sound of sympathy and then look somewhere else because grief made people uncomfortable and the safest thing was to move past it. Victoria didn't do that. What was she like? She said.
And something about the directness of it, the simplicity of it, the absence of performance stopped him. Nobody asked that. People said, "I'm sorry for your loss, and she sounds like she was wonderful, and you must miss her terribly." All of which were ways of talking about death without actually acknowledging the person who died. Nobody asked what she was like, as if Nora was still someone who could be described.
Someone with specific characteristics worth knowing. Stubborn, he said, opinionated. She had very specific views about the correct way to make coffee. And she was not shy about them. She laughed too loud.
And she always knew when I was lying, and she had this ability to walk into any room of strangers and make friends with three of them in under 10 minutes. He stopped. She was better at people than I'll ever be. Victoria looked at him for a moment. So is your daughter, I'd guess.
He let out a breath that was almost a laugh. God. Yes. Maya could make friends with a traffic cone. The corner of Victoria's mouth moved.
Just slightly. Just enough, Maya, she said. How old? Seven. Going on 35.
What does she want to be when she grows up? Paleontologist. Possibly a race car driver. She's keeping her options open. Victoria actually smiled.
Then it was brief and it was contained, but it was entirely genuine and it changed her face in a way that he found briefly disorienting because it was the face of someone he didn't know. Someone who had apparently existed behind the CEO this entire time without his noticing. She picked up her bourbon and held it. " Can I tell you something?" She said.