Rosalina was up at five thirty on Monday.
She told herself it was because she wanted extra time to get ready. The truth was she had barely slept.
She lay in the dark staring at the ceiling for a full ten minutes before admitting that sleep was finished with her and getting up.
The apartment was quiet. Betty had wished her luck the night before with the kind of enthusiasm that had involved jumping on the bed and a somewhat dramatic speech about destiny and opportunity that had made Brian laugh so hard he'd had a coughing fit. Rosalina had pretended to be annoyed. She hadn't been annoyed.
She dressed carefully. Black trousers this time, a cream blouse, her good heels — the ones she saved for occasions that required her to feel taller than she actually was. Hair down today, falling in its natural blonde waves past her shoulders because she had spent twenty minutes on it and it had cooperated for once and she wasn't going to waste that.
She checked her reflection.
Professional. Composed. Absolutely not terrified.
Two out of three would have to be enough.
She left a note for Brian — good luck at school, eat actual breakfast not just crackers, I mean it — kissed his forehead while he slept, and stepped out into the Milan morning.
She arrived at Salvatore Group headquarters at six forty-five.
Fifteen minutes early.
Enzo Salvatore had said seven. She had heard seven and arrived at six forty-five because arriving exactly on time felt in that building like arriving late.
The same receptionist from Friday was already at her desk. She looked at Rosalina with mild surprise — whether at the early arrival or the blonde hair down Rosalina couldn't tell — and directed her to the elevator.
The sixtieth floor was already alive.
That was the first surprise. She had expected to arrive before him. To have a few quiet minutes to settle herself, find her desk, understand the geography of the space before the man himself appeared.
Instead when the elevator doors opened she walked into controlled organised motion. Two staff members were already moving through the corridor with tablets and documents. Someone was on the phone speaking rapid Italian. The young man from Friday — whose name she had learned from Clara was Giorgio, Enzo's personal secretary — was already at his desk looking like he had been there for hours.
He looked up when she appeared.
"Miss Evans." He stood. "Welcome. I'll show you to your office."
Her office.
She had an office.
It was beside Giorgio's desk — a glass walled room with a direct sightline to the double doors of Enzo's office. Compact but well equipped. A desk, a computer, a phone system that looked complicated enough to require its own instruction manual. A window with a view of Milan that on any other day would have made her stop and stare.
"Mr. Salvatore's schedule for today is on the system," Giorgio said, showing her the screen with efficient calm. "He has a board meeting at nine, a conference call with New York at eleven, lunch with the COO at one, and three internal meetings in the afternoon. Your job is to manage all communications, prepare briefing documents before each meeting, coordinate with department heads, and anticipate whatever he needs before he needs it."
Rosalina looked at the screen. Then at Giorgio.
"Before he needs it," she repeated.
"Yes." Giorgio said this as though it were a completely reasonable expectation.
"How do I know what he needs before he needs it?"
Giorgio looked at her with the expression of someone who had been asked a question they had asked themselves many times. "You learn," he said simply. "Clara left notes. They're in the system folder marked orientation. I'd read them quickly."
He returned to his desk.
Rosalina sat down, pulled up the folder, and started reading.
Clara's notes were thorough, warm, and occasionally alarming.
He takes his coffee black. No sugar. Ever. If someone brings him coffee with sugar he will not say anything but the coffee will remain untouched and that person will not be asked to bring coffee again.
He reads every document before a meeting. Do not summarise unless he asks you to summarise. He has already read it.
He does not like to be interrupted mid-thought. You will learn to recognise mid-thought. It looks like silence but it is a specific kind of silence.
If he says fine he does not mean fine. Fine means he has noted the problem and will deal with it himself and is done discussing it.
He is not unkind. He is simply precise. There is a difference.
Rosalina read this last line twice.
He is not unkind. He is simply precise.
She thought about green eyes that had looked at her like a variable. About see that you don't delivered without inflection. About seven a.m., I don't repeat myself on punctuality said to her retreating back.
Precise. Right.
She was still reading when the private elevator at the end of the corridor opened.
He walked in like the building had been waiting for him.
Which, she supposed, it had been.
Enzo Salvatore at seven a.m. on a Monday was exactly what she might have predicted and somehow still more than she was prepared for. Dark suit. Dark hair. That particular quality of stillness that large rooms seemed to arrange themselves around. He was on his phone again — a low conversation in Italian that he finished before he reached Giorgio's desk.
He said something to Giorgio without breaking stride.
Giorgio responded immediately.
Then those green eyes moved — briefly, efficiently — to the glass walled office where Rosalina was sitting.
She looked back.
He looked away first but only because he had already moved on and not because he had lost anything.
He went through the double doors.
They closed.
Rosalina released a breath she hadn't entirely been aware of holding.
"Does he always walk like that?" she asked Giorgio quietly.
Giorgio looked up. "Like what?"
"Like—" she gestured vaguely. "Like that."
Giorgio considered this with complete seriousness. "Yes," he said. "Always."
She had exactly forty minutes before the building truly came alive around her.
She used them well. Clara's notes. The schedule. The briefing document for the nine o'clock board meeting that she found half prepared in the system and finished herself, cross referencing three department reports and formatting everything exactly as Clara's templates showed.
At seven fifty-eight she printed it, walked to the double doors, knocked once, and waited.
"Come in."
She pushed the door open.
He was behind his desk. Jacket off, sleeves rolled to the elbow — she noticed the tattoos properly for the first time, dark ink tracing up both forearms, precise and deliberate like everything else about him. He was reading something and did not look up immediately.
She crossed to the desk and placed the briefing document in front of him.
"Board meeting briefing for nine o'clock," she said. "I cross referenced the Q3 reports from finance and operations and updated the projections section. Clara's version had February numbers. The March figures came in Friday."
Now he looked up.
Those green eyes moved from the document to her face with an attention that felt uncomfortably thorough.
"You updated the projections."
"The February numbers were outdated. It seemed important to have the correct ones before a board meeting."
A silence.
The specific kind, she was already learning. Not empty. Occupied.
He looked back down at the document and turned the first page.
She waited.
"Is there anything else?" he said without looking up.
"Your coffee," she said. "Black, no sugar. It'll be on your desk in three minutes."
She turned and walked out before he could respond.
In the small kitchen along the corridor she stood at the coffee machine and allowed herself one private moment of something that felt dangerously close to satisfaction.
Clara's notes. Read them. Use them.
She was good at this. Organisation, anticipation, reading a room — these were things she had learned not in any office but in years of managing everything alone. A sick brother. A stack of bills. A life that required her to be three steps ahead at all times just to stay in place.
Enzo Salvatore thought he was demanding.
He had never met Rosalina Evans before.
She poured the coffee — black, no sugar — put it on a small tray, and carried it back to the office.
She knocked once.
"Come in."
She placed the coffee on his desk without a word and turned to leave.
"Miss Evans."
She stopped.
He still hadn't looked up from the briefing document.
"The March projections are correct." A pause. "Good work."
It was four words delivered to the top of a page without eye contact.
It was also — she understood instinctively — as close to enthusiastic praise as Enzo Salvatore was likely to get.
She kept her face neutral.
"Thank you Mr. Salvatore."
She walked out.
And in the glass walled office, safely out of his sightline, she allowed herself the smallest private smile in the history of smiles.
She was going to be just fine.
She met Luca Anderson at five past nine.
He arrived on the sixtieth floor with the energy of someone who owned whatever room he walked into — which, as COO of Salvatore Group, he effectively did. Tall, broad, dark haired with warm brown eyes and tattoos that matched the general Salvatore circle aesthetic. Handsome in a way that was approachable rather than intimidating which made him, Rosalina thought, immediately distinct from his best friend.
He stopped when he saw her at her desk.
"You must be the new PA." His Italian accent was warm and his smile was genuine and easy. "I'm Luca Anderson."
"Rosalina Evans." She stood and shook his hand. "Nice to meet you."
He looked at her for a moment with the assessing eyes of someone who read people well. Then his smile widened slightly.
"Clara said you'd be interesting," he said.
Rosalina blinked. "Clara said that?"
"Clara said — and I'm quoting directly — this one is different, Luca. She looked at him like he was a normal person." He tilted his head. "Apparently that's rare."
Rosalina thought about green eyes that had looked at her like a variable. About four words of praise delivered to the top of a page.
"He is a normal person," she said. "Isn't he?"
Luca Anderson looked at her for one long moment.
Then he laughed — a real, full laugh that bounced off the precise walls of the sixtieth floor corridor.
"Oh," he said, almost to himself. "This is going to be very entertaining."
He walked through the double doors still smiling.
Rosalina sat back down at her desk.
Through the glass wall she could see Giorgio watching her with an expression that suggested he agreed with Luca entirely.
She turned back to her screen.
Normal person, she thought. Probably.
*******