Page 10

NINE

Alex carefully sits down at the desk. The springs of the wooden office chair squeak loudly and she cringes, feeling like an intruder. This is where she sat, Alex thinks, imagining Francis Keen in one of her trademark men’s shirts, the sleeves pulled up to the elbows, typing her answers to all of life’s important questions. Maybe when she gets paid, she’ll look for an oversized white shirt of her own from one of the tiny boutiques she’s always admiring along Madison Avenue.

She opens the top desk drawer. It has been emptied out of everything but a letter opener, brass with a handle inlaid with shell. She holds it in her hand like a priceless artifact, placing it carefully to one side. The bottom of the drawer still bears a constellation of old pencil marks on one side and a splotch of blue ink from a leaky pen soaked into the wood at the bottom. She runs her hand across the grooves where Francis’s pens and pencils once lay, feeling herself well up. She’s about to close the drawer when she notices something trapped on the edge, a piece of folded paper tucked into the seam of the wood. As she pries it loose, she finds that it’s a matchbook. She holds it in her palm, marveling at the little relic left over from Francis’s life. The Nest , it says in art deco–inspired font. The phone number is listed below in delicate gold embossing. Alex opens it and runs her fingers over the tight rows of matches, all unused. She places the matchbook back in the drawer. She’ll keep it there as a little good-luck charm, a memento to remember her by.

She turns her focus to the computer monitor, which is brand-new. A thin film of plastic still clings to the front of it. Alex peels it back, feeling weirdly ashamed. Why couldn’t they have left the old one? She rests her fingers lightly on the keyboard. Deep breath in. She takes the instructions that Jonathan has printed for her and logs into the Herald ’s mail system.

Up until now this entire experience has all felt out of body, like she is watching it happen to someone else. But as she types in her temporary password, it all seems suddenly quite real and completely terrifying. She watches a solid wall of unread emails fill the screen. Messages about orientation and HR forms lost between rows and rows of subject lines begging her for help— Desperately need you… Help me… Can you save my marriage? The enormity of what she is supposed to do hits her all at once. She will have to show up for people the way Francis did. Alex scrolls down through what must be a thousand unread submissions. What if she has no idea how? What if the letters she wrote in the application were just a fluke? The feeling is both exhilarating and terrifying, like being at the top of a roller coaster. She exhales and clicks the first message open.

It’s an incredibly strange feeling being able to peer into someone’s most private life, to read about their shame and worries, to be told their deepest secrets. There is one message from a man who lost his daughter in a swimming accident and can’t stop going out in the water looking for her even though he knows she isn’t there; another from a woman whose husband is having an affair with her sister and thinks she doesn’t know; there’s a college-age girl who is lost and miserable at her Ivy League school; and on and on…. Alex’s eyes burn from staring at them. She has been reading the letters for hours, but she has barely scraped the surface. And every time she returns to the inbox the list of unread messages has grown even longer, an unending stream of highlighted subject lines stacking on top of one another, all begging Dear Constance for help.

A ding. A new email appears at the top of the screen with the subject line Please .

Dear Constance,

Ha! Dear Constance, my ass. Whoever you are, you don’t deserve to even have the same email address as Francis Keen. It’s disgusting that Francis has been replaced so quickly and with someone so inexperienced. The Herald has got to be absolutely joking if they think I’m going to trust you with my problems. You’re a little twit, a hack, and you won’t last. I give it a year before you lose your job. No one can compare with Francis. They shouldn’t even have tried.

Alex closes the email without finishing it. She wasn’t expecting anger directed at her, though she realizes now that she probably should have. She’d been outraged herself when she found out about a possible replacement. She might not be the kind of person to write a nasty email, but she understands. Deep breath. Still, as she settles back in to read, a terrible feeling grips her. What if the person is right and she has no business reading these letters? What if she has no business being here at all?