Zanne adjusted the lumbar support and lowered the seat on Dawn’s Aeron chair. She’d been reluctant to adjust the settings the first few times she covered for Dawn, afraid to seem like she was gunning for her job. Half the time, Zanne wasn’t even sure she wanted it. She had enough exposure to Ted as it was.

She’d started out as a swing, doing the tasks that anyone could do, raising and lowering the blinds in Ted’s office, restocking the drink coolers in the guest cottage, lowering the temperature in the gym before Ted’s workout and cranking it up in time for Holly’s hot yoga. After a few months, she was trained as a backup to the executive assistants. She answered phones, scheduled meetings, confirmed the accuracy of the information in Ted’s calendar. She helped him move through his day, a column of professional and personal blocks of time stacked on top of each other like a game of Jenga. She learned to think and communicate in the ways he did. It didn’t matter if the directions you provided for Zoe’s ballet recital were technically correct if Ted didn’t understand them and got lost, showing up late and missing her solo. He preferred having information presented to him in a specific and consistent way. He tended to have the same follow-up questions, whether you were handing him foreign distributors’ projections or vacation options for winter break, and it saved everyone time and heartache if you had the answers ready or, better yet, incorporated them into your work from the outset.

It soon became apparent that Zanne had a knack for predicting Ted’s moves and staying in step with him. There was something oddly thrilling about it. She’d always thought of herself as a nonconformist. None of her heroes—Jean Genet, Lynda Barry, Julia Kristeva, Cindy Sherman—would have been caught dead working in a place like this, where they made nothing of their own, not even a movie. And yet here she was, reading one man’s mind for a living. The rest of the executive assistants began to depend on Zanne, bringing her their professional disasters for translation into Tedese.

But she wasn’t useful to Dawn tied to the phones, so a new role was created for Zanne: special projects. For the most part her work was advisory, floating across the departments, tasked with foreseeing shitshows and preventing them. But anything that was too important or complex to be trusted to someone more junior, or too time-consuming for Dawn to handle directly, went to Zanne. Emergency protocols, awkward phone calls booting once-important people into new spheres of Stabler irrelevance—these were Zanne’s bread and butter.