Oliver arrives on a Friday, carried on the hip of a woman who looks like she's been assembled by a committee of Vogue editors and Anglican bishops.
Margaret Hale wears cream cashmere and a pearl necklace that probably has its own insurance policy. She sets Oliver down in Edmund's doorway and the man behind the desk disappears—replaced by someone I haven't met yet.
He drops to his knees, arms open, voice pitched to something soft. "There's my boy. Come here."
Oliver launches into him like a small missile with curls. Edmund catches him and lifts, pressing his nose into the boy's hair, and every sharp angle I've learned over the past week dissolve into something I have to look away from.
"And you must be the new assistant." Margaret's voice arrives before she does—measured, pleasant, probably secretly opinionated. "Cora, isn't it?"
"That's right, lovely to meet you, Mrs Hale." I stand and extend my hand, which she takes with a grip that is warm and appraising in equal measure.
"Margaret, please." Her eyes move over me the way a jeweller examines a stone—not hostile, just thorough. "How are you finding the role so far?"
"Steep learning curve, but I'm enjoying it." I keep my smile professional and my hands visible, because something about this woman suggests she could read a lie through body language at forty paces.
"Edmund mentioned you came from a rather different background." She adjustes her handbag strap with two fingers. "Hospitality, was it?"
"Five years in restaurants. Turns out managing a dining room and managing a CEO's calendar require the same core skill—keeping everyone fed and happy while nothing catches fire."
The corner of her mouth moves a fraction—not warmth, exactly, more like a notation in a mental ledger. She turns toward Edmund's office, where Oliver is showing his father a red toy car with the breathless urgency of a keynote speaker.
"Mum, I need five minutes in the Ashford meeting." Edmund appears in the doorway with Oliver on his forearm. I can’t not marvel at the way this man reduces to someone’s son and someone’s father in the presence of his family. Not Margaret, not even mother, mum. "James pulled the timeline forward."
"Of course." Margaret is already reaching for her buzzing phone. "Give me one moment—it's Dr. Finch about Oliver's appointment."
Edmund looks at me, and the request is forming before he speaks. "Cora, would you mind watching him? Five minutes, tops."
"Of course." The words leave my mouth on autopilot while every nerve ending in my body stages a coordinated revolt.
He sets Oliver down beside my desk, squeezes his shoulder, and disappeares down the corridor. Margaret steps toward the lifts with her phone at her ear, and I am alone with him.
He stands at knee height, clutching the red car in both fists, and looks up at me with green eyes that have memorised the exact route from the delivery room to Kettleworth.
"What's your name?" He asks it the way children ask everything—like the answer is the most important thing in human history.
"Cora." My voice holds, which qualifies as a minor medical event given what is happening behind my ribs. "What's yours?"
"Oliver James Hale. I'm free years old." He says the full thing with the gravity of a barrister entering a plea.
"Three," I correct automatically, the way I used to with Blythe at that age. "Three years old."
"That's what I said." He holds up the car. "This is Lightning, he's the fastest car in the whole world—do you have a car?"
"I take the bus." I crouch to his level because my knees are going to buckle anyway and at least this way it looks intentional.
"Buses are slow." He spins the wheels with one finger, brow furrowed in mechanical assessment. "Lightning could beat a bus, and a train, and a—" he pauses, "—a cheetah."
"That's very fast." My thumbnail presses into the pad of my index finger hard enough to leave a crescent of its own. "Does Lightning live at your house?"
"Lightning lives in my pocket and in my bed." He pats his coat to demonstrate. "And sometimes in the bath but Grandma says no because of rust."
He looks at me with sudden and devastating focus, his chin tilted up, the question already loaded. "Do you have a grandma?"
"Not anymore." I swallow around something that had no business being in my throat at ten on a Friday. "But I have a sister."
"What's her name?" He crashes Lightning into my stapler with sound effects suggesting total vehicular annihilation.
"Blythe." I watch the car bounce off the stapler and skid across the desk toward the keyboard.
"That's a funny name. I don't have a sister." He retrieves Lightning and examines him for damage. "I don't have a mummy either—Daddy says she's in the stars."
He says it the same way he's said buses are slow—factual, a statement about the nature of his world. My thumbnail breaks skin.
"The stars are a good place to be." The sentence come from outside my body—some automated system producing words while the person operating the machinery has left.
"Do you like drawing? I can draw a dinosaur." He is already on the next continent, no connecting flights. "Daddy says it looks like a potato but it's not a potato."
"My sister draws too—she's very good." I watch his fingers grip the car, small and certain and impossibly real.
"I'm good too." He nods with the confidence of a child who'd never once been told otherwise, and the crescent birthmark below his ear catches the overhead light.
Edmund's voice carries from the corridor—meeting over, footsteps approaching. Oliver grabs Lightning and runs toward the sound with the aerodynamic grace of a shopping trolley.
Margaret collects him, thanks me with a nod still making assessments, and walks them to the lift. I watch through the glass until the doors close on a red toy car and green eyes that will cost me sleep for the rest of my natural life.
The restroom is empty. I lock the stall, press my back against the door, and hold my hand over my mouth until the sound trying to escape retreat into my chest where I keep everything that isn’t allowed to exist during business hours.
Ninety seconds—I give myself that, then flush for sound cover, wash my hands, check my face in the mirror. Functional and employed.
Back at my desk, I open the shared drive to pull up the client brief I've formatted yesterday—headers, margins, the tedious work Edmund needed before Monday. The folder is empty and the file is gone.
I check the trash, the backup, my local saves—nothing. I open a blank document and start again from scratch, because the alternative is screaming into the server room.
My own mistake—has to be, I am new, still learning the system, probably saved to the wrong location. I finish the redo in forty minutes and pin it to the correct folder twice, because once clearly isn’t sufficient for someone operating at my current level of competence.
The bus home takes thirty-eight minutes and I spend every one not thinking about a red toy car and a boy who draws potato-dinosaurs and doesn’t have a mummy.
I see the paper from the end of the hallway—white rectangle taped to our door, fluttering under the draught from the stairwell. Official letterhead, red font, the word NOTICE large enough to read from ten feet away.
Three months' unpaid rent, thirty days to vacate—Dennis's name on every line, my entire future pinned underneath it.