April rushed into May and with it came a call from my brother, a voice I hadn't heard in close to two months. He'd been brief in the exchange, but I hadn't missed the threads of stress in his tone when he'd asked for me to squeeze him in for a morning coffee chat the following day. 

Finishing up at the gym, I walked down the busy Manhattan streets, a crisp, balmy day with the promise of encroaching summer on the breeze. The sort of morning that was deceptive with a brilliant sun and clear, clear skies overhead, but still demanded the layer of my jacket and jeans.

Collin sat in the nook by the Starbucks window, his back to me, and laptop open. Pushing into the coffee infused chaos, I joined him at the table.

"Hey," I said and his face lifted from the screen. Although he was my slightly older brother, by two years, age wasn't as kind to him as it was to me. Wisps of white lined above his ear and wings of crows feet crinkled at the corners of his eyes.

Rising, Collin gathered me in for a fierce hug. The kind that wrenched the breath out of your lungs and cracked a rib or two. He'd always been an aggressively affectionate hugger; ten years in a hellish marriage hadn't changed that.

"Good, you made it," he said as I sat down. "Can I get you something?"

"I'll grab a green tea in a minute. What's going on with you?" I asked, tucking my knees under the table. "You sounded pretty stressed out."

Collin shut his laptop, large hands folding overtop. His left ring finger, I noticed, was absent its platinum wedding band.

"Oh, shit," I breathed, reaching for him. "When?"

"Couple weeks ago." Our fingers twined and his lips thinned, a whisper of sadness deepening the lines in his otherwise handsome face. "Hell, longer if I am honest. We hadn't been 'working' for a long time, but papers were exchanged at the end of April."

I knew this was coming. A few years ago, the tension between him and his wife Helen had been brutal to behold. A toxic cloud of animosity, from her, and a thick, unyielding fog of depression, from him. "Why didn't you call me?"

His shoulders moved the barest fraction, as if too heavy with the burden of his failing marriage to find the strength to budge.

"I came out by your place, last week," he said, "but you weren't home. Stuck around till the wee hours, hoping to catch you."

"Oh," I said, "I was,"—with Tristan—"out of town. Business."

"Figured that might've been the case. How's the merger treating you?"

 "It's been—good. An adjustment, but good."

"Good." Collin nodded, fingers tracing the edges of his computer. "Well, look the reason I called you out is, well its Nathanial."

"Nate?"

 "I don't know what to do with him. He's getting into all sorts of trouble. Expelled. Again. Twice in one year. I don't think there's a private school in the city that will touch him, now."

"Expelled?" I couldn't believe my ears. My darling little Nate? Memories of a beautiful, tow-headed little toddler danced in my thoughts. That some toddler shifting and growing, transforming into a bright and dazzling young man. Smiling. Always smiling. Always happy. Expelled? Couldn't be. Not Nate. "On what grounds."

"Drugs. Heroin. Cocaine. Jesus." Collin lifted hands to his face, pressed them there. "He could be facing charges. Helen's lawyers are working tirelessly to see if we can reduce them to a misdemeanour with probation." Those hands swiped down over the length of his face, fell to his lap. "They found it in his locker, sis. And he won't give anyone answers. Helen thinks we should send him abroad for a while. To some reform institution for troubled youth."

"Bullshit." I gripped Collin's arm, kept my voice hushed. "He's never been away from home. That would kill him."  

"I've talked her out of it for now, but she's got primary custody of him, and Nathanial is a minor until his 16th birthday next year. So, technically she'd be within her rights to send him off, whether he wanted to go or not."

I closed my eyes, my heart kicking in my chest, my hands clammy with panic and disbelief. How could things be such a mess? How could I not know?

"I wanted to ask if you were coming down for Dad's sixty-fifth this year?"

"I was thinking about it—until the merger. And now, I've got a couple major developments on my plate. It's complicated timing right now."

"Look, I wouldn't ask if it wasn't important. You know that, but Helen's going to be there and she's always listened to you. I think you could help sway her from shipping Nathanial off. Please consider it? Please?"

"Alright." Here I was, stepping in once again to save my big brother. To help clean up the mess and chaos of his life. I smiled at him, even while my stomach lurched at the idea. "I'll take care of it."

Relief rushed into his skin, warming the apples of his cheeks visible through the haze of red beard.

"Collin," I said, shouldering my purse. "Would you say I was a jealous person?" He leaned back, assessing me with interest and concern.

"Jealous, you say?"

I nodded and he scraped a hand across his jaw.

"Do you remember when we were little? When dad brought home that little yellow lab puppy?"

I smiled at the memory. The two of us, he was eight and I was six years old and dressed for bed. Dad had come home, the weekend after winning the election campaign. Dripping wet—it had been raining all day. Tucked into the crook of his arm was a wiggling little mass of adoring licks and affectionate cuddles.

"Daisy," I said, warmed from that brief glimpse into my childhood.

"You hated the fact that she came to me, instead of you, do you remember? Every time there was choice, she'd bound my way. She'd loved you, too, don't get me wrong," Collin added when I opened my mouth to contradict him. "But she was very much my dog. I was the one who played with her in the yard, I was the one who wanted to take her for walks, poured out her food, and even combed her coat. Our bond was strong. And you hated that."

"Hate's a strong word." 

His blue eyes flattened. "You poured paint in my bed. And when you got in trouble, sulked about it for weeks."  

I squirmed a bit in my seat, thrust up my chin. "Yes, well...I was just a little girl. Kids get snippy."

"Laura," Collin smoothed a hand over my arm, squeezed. "I'm not saying you're a bad person for having feelings. Only that when those feelings are hurt you often do hold a grudge."

 *** 

I arrived to my office an hour later then I would have liked, with my mind a muddled mess from my conversation with Collin. And because I couldn't shake the maelstrom of concern, disbelief, shock and guilt, I devoted the rest of my morning to researching into Nathanial's arrest and drug situation. Jacqueline, thankfully, had a friend in the Private School network that was able to shed a light into how bad his circumstances actually were. I read through the condemning article blasting the situation, and since he was a minor of course his name was withheld, but there was enough present for her to glean some pretty alarming details.

Collin had been kind and understating in his summation of events. And I could only hope that Helen's lawyers were close friends with people in powerful judicial places. Or had a set of Guardian Angels in their back pockets.

"Shit," I muttered, switching from the news article over to Facebook, and stared at the strange, unrecognizable face of my nephew. Gone was the smiling, adorable precious little boy and in his place was a sullen, hallowed cheeked, blue-haired youth.

"Ms. Pierce?" A knock at the door reminded me I'd pushed my morning of Nancy Drew investigation longer then I could afford, and Paul sailed in, notebook in one hand, coffee in the other. "I'm sorry to interrupt, be we really need to sort out the mess of your schedule." He plopped down delicately, crossed a leg.

"Right. Yes, I know you said I'd double booked myself in a couple places."

Paul flipped that wing of hair out of his eyes. "Try triple, and in more than a couple, otherwise I could have cleaned up the mess on my own." He paused to sip and gave a dramatic shudder like a jolt of electricity snapped through his body.

"Ah, there. I'm alive. Okay. Monday."

He was right. Mess didn't even begin to cover absolute disarray, but after one hour, two emails and three quick phone calls we'd managed to set the bulk of it to rights.

"While we're looking at my schedule," I leaned back in my chair, propping my black Christian Louboutain pumps on the end of my desk. There was something sexy, I thought, about the red-soled bottoms. Like lipstick for shoes. "I want you to block out the last week in June."

"Okay, the Monday to Friday?"

"No, the whole week."

Paul lifted startled brown eyes. "Seriously? Are you going on vacation?"

I smoothed a hand over the pressed crease in my navy capri slacks. "Does family count as a time off?"

"Depends." Paul shrugged. "Do you like your family?"

I smirked. "Yes."

"Then it counts. Alright. Last week in June. Done. So, all we need to worry about now is whether or not you want me to proceed with booking flights to Japan next week?"

Ah, Japan. "Nishizawa hasn't pinned down dates," I said, taking one last look through my emails for our most recent correspondence. I'd been making strides towards working the account my way, but still needed to clinch the deal. And for all of his interest, Nishizawa was stalling and that made me anxious. The longer it took to get him to sign our contact, the more likely Diverse could still wiggle in there and steal him. Losing was not something I ever did with grace or dignity.

"Why don't you go ahead and connect with the travel agency? Pull some options and put a reservation on hold?"

"Okay." Paul ticked something off his list with a scratch of his pen. "That's done and we've covered those...oh, one more thing," he added, bouncing his pen at the center of his page, "this weekend you have a meeting request from Mr. Shade? I wanted to check with you, see what that was about?"

"I do?" Re-opening my calendar, I pulled up my weekend, frowned. "I don't see anything."

"That's because you haven't replied to it yet." Paul said in his 'I'm rolling-my-eyes-without-rolling-my-eyes' tone. "Request should still be sitting in your inbox."  

And it was. I opened the meeting request, set for tonight, Friday evening, and running straight through to Monday morning and with only one word listed in the subject. Busy. "How do you know what's in my inbox?"

"First, all meeting requests are automatically cc'd to me," he said enumerating on his long, skinny finger. "And second, I do have administrative access to view your inbox. Standard assistant protocol, of course. How else do you think I manage to keep on top of your schedule so efficiently? Half your meetings you forget to flip to me."

"I see," I said, not entirely sure how I felt about knowing that Paul had access to my internal work correspondence. "Anything else?"

"Well," Paul scooted to the edge of his seat, set down his notebook on his lap. "I do have a personal request. I need to take Monday off."

"This coming Monday?"

"I know its last minute—"

"Paul, you know you're supposed to provide all vacation requests to HR, and they want at least three weeks heads up before—"

"I know, I know," he scooted even closer until I was sure he had only an inch of butt actually left on the seat. "But Michael," his eyes glimmered, full of devious glee, "that is Magic Mike, wants to take me back to London for...sightseeing," he finished tactfully.

I traced a finger along my bottom lip, nodding slowly. "Sightseeing."

"Lots of sightseeing."

"Alright. Alright, fine. Take it to HR and tell them I signed off. Monday, and only Monday. We've got a lot of projects on the go and I can't afford having no support."

"Well, Janice said she'd be happy to—"

"Absolutely not," I interjected. "Go, go," I waved a hand, dismissing him, but Paul stayed where he was, bobbing like a buoy in the water.

I rolled my eyes back to him, arched a brow. "Yes?"

His thin little lips wriggled and danced in a smirk across his long face. "It's well...next week Wednesday is my birthday. My twenty-fifth. And I was having a dinner at my place with some friends, Mike of course, and thought, well. If you're not doing anything, maybe you'd like to come?"

I held the groan in my throat and tried to politely smile. "Don't think so, sorry."

"Oh come on!" he bounced again, pushing the swing of hair out of his face with flick of his hand. "You can bring your guy! And now that I know Mike isn't your Magic Mike," he wiggled proud shoulders, "I have a new theory about who Mr. Wonderful could be."

Shit, I thought. Paul wasn't the first assistant to play the 'I want to get to know you game', but unlike the rest I had allowed a degree of unprofessionalism to go unchecked, and apparently from the way this conversation was headed, for far too long. Time to rectify that.

"Paul," I said, folding my hands atop my desk, putting on my all business CEO voice. "I appreciate that you're good at your job and dedicated to the position, and from time to time I may have entertained your...unique personality, but I want to make some things abundantly clear: who I date and who I sleep with are not subjects up for discussion between us, got it? Anything beyond those boundaries is off limits."

"Oh," his shoulders curved. "I didn't mean to...I mean I was only being friendly. Sometimes I can get a little overboard but,"

 "I'm your boss." I ploughed on. "You're my assistant. We're not colleagues. We're not friends."

He sat slack-jawed for a second before his chest puffed and his spine snapped straight. "Are you freaking kidding?"      

"If you have a problem with respecting that, Paul, we can see you relocated to a different department, effective immediately."

"Ms. Pierce." He snapped to his feet, the ball in his throat leaping up and down.

"Paul—"

"No, no I need to say this." He sliced a 'not taking no for an answer' hand through the air. "Do you know that the entire administrative team all said you are a cold bitch to work for? That you look down your nose at anyone who isn't on level with you? And I," he bounced a finger against his chest, "I was the only one who wanted to work with you? I may be just an assistant, but I'm a person. A kind, decent, friendly person. There's nothing wrong about getting to know me, and no reason why I'm not good enough to be your friend and your assistant." His voice hitched with a threat of tears, but his chin stuck out—stubborn and firm.

"You'll have my resignation next week."