Surviving is mostly administrative.
You file the right papers. You answer the phone on the second ring. You learn which coffee pods belong to which machine, and you don't reach for the wrong ones twice. and
And you call this, privately and without irony, professional progress.
I'm back at my desk when Finn's office door opens. I don't look up but I register it anyway: the particular click of that handle, the shift in air pressure, the measured tap of heels across marble.
Gwen passes my desk without acknowledging it exists. The elevator at the end of the corridor opens, swallows her, closes. I return to the spreadsheet I've already memorized and stare at the columns until the numbers stop meaning anything.
The bathroom breakdown scraped me hollow. That's the most accurate word for it—hollow. The way a fever leaves you after it breaks: functional on the outside, cleared entirely on the inside.
I texted back Daniel with apologies and moved through the rest of the day on that memory.
Filing, scheduling, answering calls with a voice that sounds almost like mine if you don't listen at the register beneath the words, where everything is fraying at a speed I can't afford.
Don't think about his hand on your neck.
Don't think about his fingers on your skin.
Don't think about the way he said your name.
I don't think about it. At all. Really. At least that’s what I’m telling myself. I file the Alderton projections, confirm tomorrow's nine o'clock with Mr. Reeves, answers emails in language so professionally neutral it might have been generated by a machine.
Which, in a meaningful sense, it was.
It's nearly five when I see them when my eyes drift toward the far side of the floor.
Finn is leaning against the edge of a desk near the glass partition, his jacket still off, arms crossed at the chest. His posture is different. The architecture of him has loosened into something I recognize from a different decade.
And he's… laughing.
Actually laughing with head tilted back and shoulders moving at whatever the sandy-haired man beside him just said.
The man is gesturing broadly, clearly in the middle of a story requiring full-body commitment, and the woman standing beside him has one hand pressed to her mouth to contain her own laughter while the other rests on his forearm.
They look like an advertisement for lives that turned out correctly.
I'm aware of the specific bitterness of this observation and catalog it anyway.
The sandy-haired man's gaze drifts across the floor, landing on me, and Finn turns too. "Aubrey, come."
His voice carries across the open plan with quiet authority. He inclines his head toward the group and now refusing is not an option. I know this, pretending otherwise would cost more than the alternative.
I gather the composure I have left—which is less than I'd like and more than I deserve credit for, given the afternoon—and I walk toward them.
My secondhand shirt. My bitten nails. A new layer of foundation sitting over what it always sits over. Every marker I carry that announces, to anyone paying close attention, the precise category of life I've crawled out of to stand in this building.
I am always paying close attention.
"Timothee Harris," Finn says warmly, "my COO. And his wife, Sarah. She’s Head of Marketing."
His hand lifts toward the small of my back—a gesture of introduction that stops just short of contact, hovering in the charged inch between his palm and the fabric of my shirt .
"Aubrey Palmer, my new assistant."
"The Aubrey, I suppose." Timothee's grin arrives warm and wide and entirely unguarded. "I've heard a lot about you, actually."
The question assembles itself instantly, precise and unwelcome.
What, exactly, could he have heard? And from whom?
What had Finn told him — the library version of her, the two-in-the-morning version, the one who talked too fast?
Or the version that borrowed his notes and laughed at things that weren't funny to anyone else in the room?
"Tim." Finn's voice carries a warning so controlled it's nearly indistinguishable from conversational.
But Timothee's grin sharpens into pure delight at the sound of it.
"What?" He spreads his hands in the universal gesture of a man who is being entirely intentional and wants you to know it. "I'm being friendly."
His eyes find mine again, bright as if he has located exactly which button to press and is enjoying the proximity to it.
"Finn talked about you constantly in college, you know. 'Aubrey said this, Aubrey thinks that.' I told him he was obviously—"
"That's. Enough." Finn's tone doesn't rise, but the edge in it lands much louderю
Timothee closes his mouth even though he looks like he has already said exactly what he needed to say. But then I catch… the flush. A slow, unmistakable tide moving up the back of Finn's neck, visible just above his collar.
I file it alongside everything else I'm not supposed to notice.
Sarah steps in like she has spent years smoothing the roughness her husband leaves in his wake.
"What Tim means," she says, and her smile is real like it doesn't require an audience to sustain itself, "is that it's genuinely wonderful to finally put a face to the name."
She reaches out and squeezes my arm. The gentleness of it arrives in my chest like a word in a language I used to speak fluently and have since lost.
"How are you finding the role? Settling in all right?"
"Getting there," I say, and Sarah's expression is open and makes honesty marginally less dangerous. "The learning curve is steeper than I anticipated, but the work itself is interesting. I'm grateful for it."
"Finn runs a tight ship," she agrees, casting him a glance that is both fond and entirely without deference. "But he's fair. And Tim is… well, Tim is Tim. Which is a category entirely unto itself, believe me."
"I prefer 'irreplaceable,'" Timothee offers.
"You prefer many things that aren't accurate," Finn tells him.
"And yet here I am. COO." He raises one eyebrow with theatrical precision. "Clearly you find me useful for something, buddy."
The ease of it moves through me before I can redirect it. The rhythm of people who have built a shorthand over years, who can be awful to each other with complete affection.
Who exist in a shared frequency I am receiving but was never designed to transmit.
My shoulders have dropped a half-inch without my permission, and I can feel my jaw has unclenched from its customary vigilance.
This is what normal feels like. I had forgotten it had a specific texture.
Then Sarah asks questions about my background. Timothee derails into a story about his own first week here that makes Finn close his eyes briefly like he is revisiting a particular wound.
I laugh—an actual one, unmanaged and unplanned—and feel briefly, disastrously human. But underneath all of it, words looping with the persistence of a phrase you can't unhear once it's in the room.
‘I told him he was obviously…’
Finn was obviously… what exactly?