Silently, she stares at him across their table. How nice he looks – clean, shaven, slick, well dressed in some designer he doesn’t even know.  By contrast, she knows she hardly looks as well. Her hair and face have both grown thin. Her knuckles and wrists protrude past the point where people ask what she’s done to look so good. Everything is afflicted anemic pallor.

Photographs on the mantle reflect the way things used to be, with her pink-cheeked and grinning, and him in his mismatched socks. Nowadays, it’s suits that his secretary matched for him.

She chides herself for that. “Administrative assistant,” she remembers, is the correct term anymore. After all, “secretary” is just so outdated, and it hardly works when one’s assistant is a disgruntled, twenty-five-year-old, male Communications major who went to community college instead of anywhere “respectable.” He’s one to talk.

For ten years now, he’s not made mention of how his first degree was from a community college, followed up by six years at the local, low-rung commuter school. He says nothing about how his grades weren’t good enough for Stanford, nor about the hundreds of classes that he skipped – and, in keeping with his sense of self, she’s forbidden to say anything.

Never mind that it’s only through her hard work that he’s come this far by now, when he clearly deserves so much less.

They met in high school, senior year, when first impressions said that he was sweet. When she got harassed for the crime of being new, he stood behind her for strength, and then before her to take the bullets. He had a goofy smile and he couldn’t do anything without checking himself ten times. Had he remembered everything? Was everything where it needed to be? Did his socks match?

She repaid him in college. She only got her Bachelor’s, and spent all four years working to better him and maintain their tiny home. Even a job like waiting tables was better than the alternative, and he did, eventually, get a decent degree. They were married shortly thereafter, and after two more years of servitude, he finally contributed.

He worked steadily, but still not well. He was no prodigy, no wunderkind of finance. Numbers made sense only in a context and nothing could make sense while he dealt with them. But hard work went rewarded when the promotion debate came up: just as he’d worked hard, so did she work to make his boss hard.

By the time he found out, he’d had two more promotions. He never came home before ten and he didn’t care enough to change that. He didn’t care enough to act out in unfelt anger, but it was still her fault for being imperfect. By being human, she let him down. And now all they have in common is the morning coffee, which she knows has sat too long today. Their penthouse is too large, too white, and he’s too pressed for time.

“You burned the coffee, Emily,” he manages to toss in on his way out.

Emily was his last secretary. He doesn’t even correct himself before the door slams. Of course, he looks good with his Gucci suit and Prada shoes, but he’d look better with a knife in his back.

Perhaps she should make steak tonight.