There is a baby by the new secretary's desk.

Chou Tzuyu cannot remember the last time she saw a baby in person. Her boss keeps showing her pictures of her ever-growing brood — an unruly-looking mob of  children with wild bespectacled eyes — but she has thankfully managed to avoid having to encounter the brats in real life. The same cannot be said for the occupant of the playpen five feet in front of her, who is currently her thumb and sleeping peacefully.

For now, Tzuyu thinks. Soon she'll be screaming and ting and doing whatever else it is that babies do.

"I'm so sorry," her secretary says as she steps into the waiting room from her office, her eyes wide as she sees her boss standing there, glaring at her child. "Chaeyoung has a fever but I can't find anyone to watch her."

"Is that yours, Mina?" She asks, annoyance and mild disgust creeping into her tone.

A frown darkens Mina's features for a second before disappearing into the placid non-expression she usually wears. "She's my daughter, yes."

Tzuyu snorts. "I wasn't aware you had one. A kid, that is." She watches the muscles in her secretary's jaw tighten, release, tighten, release.

"I showed you a picture of her last week," Mina finally says. If tzuyu acknowledges her words, she cannot tell.

"Is she contagious?" She asks, wrinkling her nose.

"No, but—"

She ends the conversation the way she has ended every conversation they have had since she started working there: by walking away when there is so much more left to be said.

Making tea is not one of Mina's duties but, like clockwork, she brings Tzuyu a steaming cup of Earl Grey with the tiniest splash of almond milk and one Splenda at ten-thirty and two-thirty, then one more at five if she is working late. She prefers when she brings her, her tea in the evening; she gets ready to go home while the tea steeps and brings it to her with her coat on, a crimson scarf nestled between the collar of her pea coat and the pale curve of her jawline. It is comforting, somehow, to be reminded of the fact that Mina has a life outside of this office when it feels like she lives here. (She hopes she has not seen the pillow and blanket she has stashed in her desk. She has already seen her toiletries case, but hopefully has come to the correct though erroneous conclusion that she keeps it in her top right drawer because she is fastidious about her personal hygiene.)

One day two months after Mina starts working for hee, she brings her ,her five o'clock tea wearing her usual coat and scarf with the addition of a red and black plaid hunting cap, her dark hair covered by the thick earflaps. The sight is so ridiculous that she smiles at her for a moment instead of giving her her usual curt nod and grunt.

After she leaves, she puts her head down, hitting her forehead against the desk. She may as well have just exposed her belly and told her to go in for the kill. Her previous secretaries have never seen her smile.

"You can't bring her back here," the daycare owner tells her. "She screams and cries all day for you." She glares at Mina, her narrowed gaze saying everything her lips do not: You must have done this to her.

"I thought she was getting better," Mina replies, pursing with worry. Chaeyoung whimpers in her arms, her green beautiful eyes red-rimmed and teary.

"It comes and goes, but lately it's been worse than ever. It's disturbing the other children. I'm sorry, but I can't keep her around when she's this disruptive."

Mina cannot think of anything else to say, so she bids the woman goodbye and walks to her car, her breath coming out in short huffs of vapor as she walks. Chaeyoung chatters happily to herself as she rests her head against her mother's shoulder, poking at the earflap of her hat with one mittened hand. It has been like this since Mina started working for Tzuyu: Chaeyoung is her usual bubbly self in the morning, then quiet on the car ride to daycare, then a shrieking banshee until her mother comes to retrieve her again at five-thirty.

Chaeyoung has never screamed like that for Mina. Not once.

That night, after Mina finishes wiping spaghetti sauce from Chaeyoung''s chubby cheeks, the baby says her first real word after months of babbling gibberish: "Dada."

Mina inhales sharply, her eyes watering at the sound of the two syllables. "Good girl!" she chirps. She hopes that Chaeyoung is too young to detect the quaver in her voice. "Can you say Mama? Maaa-maaa?"

"Dada!" Chaeyoung yells, stretched into a smile. "Dada! Dada!"

"Yes, Chaengie," Mina replies, picking up her child and holding her close. "Dada's coming home soon."

She sits tautly, spine ramrod-straight in her chair as she waits for Tzuyu to arrive at work the next day. Chaeyoung sits on the floor next to her desk, stacking blocks and then knocking them over, alerting her mother to what she has done by squealing and babbling delightedly. Mina sighs and hopes that she will still have a job by five o'clock.

Tzuyu is a difficult boss, utterly exacting to the point where she is cruel more often than not, prizing the quality of her work over anything as inconsequential as manners or tact. She has gone through three secretaries in two years. But she recognizes her when she does well and coaches her — if barking at her counts as coaching, but her words are helpful even when they are flung at her with utter contempt — and her paychecks seem much higher than the salary she initially quoted for her, so she stays. In a few months she will be able to move herself and Chaeyoung to a nicer apartment in a better neighborhood. If she stays for a year, she will be able to buy a new car, one that doesn't rattle ominously when she drives it faster than fifty miles per hour.

The money and the prestige are worth the hassle of spending eight hours a day with this petty tyrant, this Napoleon. She can be so unpleasant it is easy to forget that her standards, punishing though they are, are the reason she's the best. Chou tzuyu can negotiate contracts with suppliers and subsidiaries, can persuade even the most intractable clients to do multimillion-dollar business with Park and Company. In the boardroom her taller figure comes off as cool confidence, her crudeness as straight-shooting directness. She berates investors with facts and figures until they cannot help but acquiesce to whatever plan he proposes, and then they thank her for the privilege.

Mina got to see her in action once. She left the boardroom ready to follow Tzuyu to the ends of the earth, even as she was disgusted at how she treated a room full of CEOs like they were idiots.

She is so lost in her thoughts that she does not notice Tzuyu emerging from the door of her private office; she has been in there since before she arrived, apparently. "What is that?" She asks, pointing at the scattered blocks on the floor. Chaeyoung looks up at her and smiles, then offers her a block in one small outstretched hand. Tzuyu narrows her eyes at her.

"Chaeyoung was having separation anxiety at daycare. Yesterday she was asked not to come back. I'll get her in a new place soon, but until then I need to bring her here. I'm sorry." Her words come out rushed even as her gaze is steady, unwavering, directed at the cold steel of her eyes.

Her response is terse, as usual: "Find someone to watch her until you find a new daycare."

At that Mina's resolve breaks and her eyes flicker down to her hands, which rest against the top of her desk. "I don't have anyone to watch her," she mumbles.

"Dad not in the picture?"

"Pardon me?"

"Why doesn't her dad step in?" Tzuyu asks slowly, as though she cannot comprehend her words.

She hesitates, then trots out the line she has rehearsed so many times in the bathroom mirror: "Chaeyoung's Dad is out of the country."

"Military?"

Another pause, shorter this time. "Personal reasons."

"While you're working and taking care of the kid on your own? Sounds like a real ," she scoffs.

Tzuyu walks away from her then, back into her office. She doesn't hear her say, "I know she is, but I still love her."

As Tzuyu is preparing to leave the office one night, two hours after she initially intended, something catches her eye as she walks by Mina's empty desk. It is a photograph encased in plastic, a grinning Mina (a novel sight — at best she will curve her lips at her, reserving the show of her teeth for the baby) cradling Chaeyoung in her arms. Sitting next to them, with one arm draped lightly over her shoulders, is the Dad. She's a young looking woman, younger-seeming than Mina even, with a green eyes that sparkle with mischief, even captured on celluloid and trapped in lucite. The girl is smiling, but Tzuyu can detect a slight strain around the corners of .

Or maybe not. Maybe she is projecting. She already hates the girl for not doing right by her girlfriend (she assumes; she has not seen a ring on the secretary's finger) and her child. Mina had said the girl was abroad due to "personal reasons," but she tries to think of something that would necessitate such a long absence — family issues, for sure, but why would she not say that? — and comes up empty. Maybe a drug problem, but she's not sure why someone would skip the country to go to rehab when she's got a baby to take care of.

No, she decides. She definitely hates this girl.

Tzuyu picks up the picture to get a better look. It is heavier than it looks and clinks as she lifts it: the picture is a keychain, attached to a heavy ring of keys. She inspects them, silver and brass topped with color-coded rings of plastic. Her lips purse into a small smile; of course Mina organizes her keys.

But these look like house keys, and it has been a frigid winter. The thought of the secretary and the baby, pale and shivering from the cold, makes her guts twist in a curiously unfamiliar way. After she slips the keys into the right front pocket of her trousers, scowling a bit when she notices how they deform her slim silhouette with their bulk, Tzuyu goes back into her office and pulls up the company's intranet so she can search for Mina's contact information.

As the cursor of her mouse hovers over a box in which she is supposed to input her last name, she realizes she doesn't actually know it. So she just types "Minari" in the box where her first name goes (first misspelling it as Menari for some reason, then Minarri) and prays that Jihyo has paid the IT guys enough to make the damn thing actually work. After a few interminable seconds, a pop-up window appears.

One result found:  MYOUI, MINARI

Tzuyu snorts. "Go ing figure." 

She reads through the file, which has her personnel photo (again, a smile with teeth; perhaps she only reserves them for people who are not her), her cell phone number, and her address.

Sighing deeply, she picks up the phone that sits on her desk and punches in her number.

"Tzuyu?" she asks before she can say hello. She sounds confused, perhaps a little perturbed. She barely speaks to her unless it is absolutely necessary; a phone call after hours is unheard of.

"Yeah, it's me. I think you left your keys here."

"Oh thank god," she sighs. "I thought I dropped them. I'll run right back to the office and grab them."

"No, don't trouble yourself," she says gruffly, shaking her head. "I'll drop them off for you."

"You sure? I don't live in, uh, such a great neighborhood. A girl dressed like you is going to get mugged." Through the phone, Tzuyu can hear the faint tinny whine of an ambulance siren.

"Don't worry about me. I can handle myself," she tells her, then hangs up without saying goodbye.

Fifteen minutes later, Tzuyu realizes Mina was being diplomatic when she said she didn't live in such a great neighborhood. The streetlights that aren't broken are either dim or flickering. Ghosts of abandoned brick-front factories line the streets before the landscape shifts to squat clapboard houses, rusted siding, shattered windows, broken concrete. Each corner, it seems, is marked by at least one figure in black: men snugly bundled into hoodies, women shivering in short dresses and thin stockings. Tzuyu can imagine the overlapping low patter of their pitches: Want weed? Want coke? Want Percs? Benzos? Oxies? Want a date? Wanna have some fun? I got what you want. I got what you need.

Her GPS soon announces that she has arrived at her destination: a crumbling tan brick building with a faded sign. Judging from the intercom and the rows upon rows of buzzers next to the door, Mina has to buzz her in. Tzuyu stands there for a moment, her finger hovering over the buzzer labeled "M. Myoui, 324 when she realizes the front door has been propped open with a cinderblock. Before she goes in the building, she fumbles around in her coat pocket for her key fob, then arms her car alarm for the fifth time.

The combination of smells in the building — mildew, heavily spiced food, the piercing smell of bleach, the muzzy sweetness of faded stale cigarette smoke, and, beneath it all, the smell of dozens of living bodies crammed on top of one another — takes her back for a moment to every ty apartment she's ever lived in, every dimly lit hall he ran down because it was too unsafe to go outside. Tzuyu's breath stops dead in her lungs and she involuntarily hunches over, bracing herself as the memories overwhelm her: being yelled at by Mrs. Choi for playing basketball in the lobby, the fights and ing she could hear through the thin walls, the girl in 6A who let her kiss her once, the sad skinny frill of tinsel around the apartment door each Christmas. (Of course, her mom's interchangeable boyfriend of the moment always had enough money for a couple of cases of piss beer and, when she was seven, a mistletoe belt buckle which she could tell was terribly distasteful even then, but they would never allow her the extravagance of a single strand of icicle lights.)

She stands up straight, tries to swallow away the lump that has formed in . That Tzuyu is dead. That Tzuyu is dead for a very good reason, She tells herself.

Mina's door is at the end of the hall on the first floor. It is easy to spot: she is crouched outside of it, trying to pick the lock with what looks to be a small screwdriver. Chaeyoung crawls around on the floor, occasionally lifting one pudgy hand to tug at her mother's clothing. She lets out a whine, unused to being ignored by her mother for so long.

"Baby, stop," Mina scolds her, eliciting a louder cry from the baby.

"You know you don't need to do that," Tzuyu says as she walks up to them.

Mina jumps at the sound of her voice, then puts the screwdriver in her purse before she looks up and acknowledges her presence. "I got a little impatient," she admits with a shrug.

Tzuyu lifts one corner of at her. She is tenacious; she will give her that. She reaches into her pocket and produces her keys, then hands them to her. Mina gathers her things and gets up, then picks up Chaeyoung, who looks to be on the verge of tears.

"What's