The Assistants(65)

I scanned the beautifully sunlit space, noticing how cushiony the matted floor was beneath my rubber-soled Converse One Stars. The gym was mostly empty—only a handful of people in the whole city could afford a membership there—so I had no problem locating Robert. He was climbing in place on an elliptical machine like it was Machu Picchu, wearing gray sweats, a black T-shirt, and pristine white sneakers.

It sort of melted my heart to see him this way. Sweatpants could deteriorate a man’s dignity like that. It was like seeing someone with their fly open or a fleck of spinach in their teeth—it somehow raised your affection for them alongside your pity.

I held Margie’s envelope close to my hip, concealed securely in my messenger bag, but seeing Robert in the flesh only confirmed what I already knew: I couldn’t use the documents against him. I wouldn’t expect anyone to understand this. Unless you’ve been the assistant to a great man—or even a man who’s not so great, but was great to you—it’s difficult to comprehend the sacred relationship between bosses and assistants.

Robert had only fired me, while Emily ended up behind bars—this was the sacredness of our relationship at work. So I couldn’t turn up now and blackmail him. There was etiquette to be observed, and Robert was big on etiquette.

If he would just hear me out, allow me to explain, I knew we could work out a compromise. Robert was a pragmatist above all else. He didn’t want to deal with the messy public fallout of a rogue Titan employee. The negative PR alone made it worth his while to end this briskly and quietly. And he never even needed to know the documents in my bag existed.

I padded across the cushiony matted floor toward him, but he was so focused on the window, on a distant point on the horizon, that he didn’t notice me.

Rather than startle him, I mounted the unused elliptical beside his and started climbing.

I waited a few seconds and then said, “Hi, Robert.”

He turned to me with a neutral expression at first, and then he looked aghast. “How did you get in here?”

He stopped climbing, looked left, then right.

“I wanted to say thank you,” I said, knowing that would calm him and keep him from calling out for security. “In person. For sparing me.”

Robert turned his head forward, pretending I was no longer there, and resumed climbing.

“And I wanted to explain a few things,” I said.

This was the hardest thing I’d ever had to do. I stood still on my climber to conserve my energy.

“Emily doesn’t deserve to be in jail,” I said. “She really doesn’t. I take full responsibility for what happened, even though I swear to you it was all sort of an accident.”

Robert refused to acknowledge me. I watched a sweat tear run down from his dark and sopping sideburn.

“What happened wasn’t Emily’s fault,” I continued. “She shouldn’t be the one who gets punished.”

“You want me to send you to prison instead of her?” He still wouldn’t look at me, but at least I’d gotten him talking.

“Well, no, not particularly,” I said. “Not if we can avoid that as a resolution.”

Robert’s silhouette smirked.

“Tina.” There. He finally turned to face me. He paused his climbing and gripped the elliptical’s handlebars tight. “You couldn’t have been responsible for that scheme. I know that. She’s the one who signed every one of those false expense reports. I don’t know why you’re trying to cover for her. Maybe you like her a little too much? If that’s it, I don’t want to hear about it.”

He reached for the towel draped over the machine’s frame and dried off his face. “I know you well enough to know you don’t have it in you to be the mastermind behind anything. I can only imagine how she bullied you.”

This surprised me.

“So wait,” I said. “You went after Emily and not me because you think she’s smarter than I am?”

Robert squinted his eyes to avoid responding right away.

I could see that’s what he meant but he didn’t want to be insulting.

“I’ve seen her,” he said. “I’m aware of who she is. She went to Harvard, you know.”

Sweet Jesus.

“She can be very persuasive,” he went on. “You’re not the only one she’s managed to trick.”

Robert was explaining what an excellent con artist Emily was, but more than that, he was explaining how ineffectual I was, how incapable. How lost and aimless.

He hadn’t seen me in action these past months, being the boss and, when necessary, being the bitch. He didn’t know that I used to be Tina Fontana, a thirty-year-old assistant making forty thousand dollars a year with zero options of upward mobility—but that I wasn’t anymore.

I dismounted my elliptical. “So you think I’m just some gullible girl who got exploited by the sneaky Harvard grad?”

I could feel the girth of Margie’s fat envelope in my messenger bag.

Robert laughed. He laughed. The bastard.

And then the words just came out. “How do you know I didn’t come here to threaten you?” I said. “To blackmail you?”

“Tina, I recognize you’ve been through a lot, so I’m going to excuse you your tone, but I’m beginning to lose my patience, so I suggest you move along now.”