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“Did you hear Rachel died on the private jet?” John asked one of the other Dyad security guards.
“Shh,” Andrew hissed. “We’re not supposed to talk about it. Plus, that blonde doctor is taking her place.”
The two resumed their positions against the wall as some important-looking people passed by them. They didn’t know their names.
Once they passed, they turned to each other again.
“Do you think this one’ll be as bitchy as Rachel?” Andrew asked in a whisper.
John shrugged. It was almost midnight and he wanted to go home, but for some reason Dr. Cormier needed to move into her office in the middle of the night.
The elevator dinged, signaling an entourage of powerful people, a tall, blonde, curly-haired woman in ballet flats at their center.
John and Andrew sighed, resuming their posts at each side of the glass windows leading to the office. They were shocked when the woman made eye contact with each of them, grinning slightly. The two guards exchanged slightly nervous glances as the five people entered the office.
“Please get settled in, Dr. Cormier,” a man whom John didn’t recognize said after a moment. “We’d like it if you could be ready for the plane by five.”
“Thank you, Dr. Jameson,” she responded. She sounded…tentative. Un-used to power or authority.
“Will you need help?” Another man asked her.
“I don’t think so,” she said. “Thank you, Arthur. I will see you all in the morning.”
The four men left the office without looking at the guards and rode the elevator down.
“What are your names?”
Andrew and John started, turning quickly to find Dr. Cormier standing behind them holding a crate.
“Uh-I’m Andrew.”
“John.”
Dr. Cormier smiled. “Delphine. I guess we’ll be seeing a lot of each other.”
For the rest of the night, John and Andrew took turns glancing back inside the office, watching Dr. Cormier unpacking her few boxes, occasionally picking up her phone and grinning at a text or something.
Around 1:30, she laughed out loud, and the guards turned their heads in. When she saw, they quickly resumed their posts.
“Sorry,” she said, still laughing. “Something my girlfriend texted me. What did the antibody go to the Halloween party dressed up as?”
The guards stared at her, completely at a loss. Why was she even talking to them? She was the director of Dyad.
“What?” Andrew stuttered eventually. The two then exchanged a meaningful glance. Girlfriend?
“An immuno-goblin!”
Neither of them had any idea what she was talking about, but they chuckled and she seemed satisfied. They all went back to work.
Dr. Cormier’s office was empty for three weeks. Andrew heard in the cafeteria one day that she’d gone to Germany.
The woman who marched into the office after three weeks was not the same one who giggled uncontrollably about biology jokes. She wore a long gray coat and black stilettos, and her hair was pin-straight.
She had also been crying.
Pretending not to notice, Andrew and John stood at their posts outside the glass doors.
“Hi Andrew. John.” She stopped before walking through the door to greet them with a watery smile.
“Good evening, Dr. Cormier,” they responded almost simultaneously.
“Please, call me Delphine,” she said as she entered the office.
The guards pretended they didn’t see her wipe her nose on her new gray coat.
Dr. Cormier stayed in the office until 10:30 that night, doing paperwork or going through files on her computer. She didn’t receive any cute texts from her girlfriend that night.
Occasionally she would sniffle, and whisper something in whatever language her accent was before hastily returning to work.
All evening, they pretended not to see.
She left at 10:30. “Goodnight, guys,” she said as she left, smiling at them both.
“You guys are here every day.”
It was 9:30 at night, and two important-looking people from the third floor had just left Dr. Cormier’s office after an important-sounding meeting about things Andrew and John didn’t care about. They did notice however, that her authority had increased since the first night. She spoke with power and elegance. No longer the tentative woman with the wild hair.
They turned around to see Dr. Cormier standing behind them with her hands on her hips. “Don’t you take vacation time?”
Andrew and John turned to each other.
“We have weekends sometimes, Ma’am,” John responded tentatively.
“You should go for the night. Do something fun.”
“We can’t do that, Ma’am. It’s kind of our job.”
“Right,” Dr. Cormier said, squinting vaguely. “Call me Delphine, please.”
The guards didn’t reply.
Soon, it was 11:00.
A voice spoke from inside the office. “Do either of you speak Russian?”
Neither responded for a moment. “Us?” John asked. Dr. Cormier nodded.
“I do, mostly,” Andrew said cautiously. “Uh, some southern dialect but I can get the gist. You know.”
“Can you come tell me if this email makes sense?”
Andrew didn’t move.
“It’s nothing that’s going to change the fate of nations, I just need to set up a meeting,” Dr. Cormier grinned.
Andrew walked over to her desk and bent over, reading the email quickly. “Yeah, it seems perfectly fine, Ma’am.”
Dr. Cormier smiled. “Great, thank you, Andrew. I’ve got English and French down, and I’m alright at German, but Russian’s taking some…getting used to.”
“It’s the cases that’ll get you,” Andrew said, walking back to the door.
“I know!” Dr. Cormier exclaimed, resting her elbows on the desk. “I never know if it’s nominative or, or instrumental…” She looked so…human just then. Just…a person behind the power suits and four-inch heels and pin-straight hair.
At 1:15, John turned around to find that blonde head resting on her arm on the desk.
“Should we do something?” he whispered.
Andrew shrugged.
John entered the office and tiptoed over to the adjacent wall with Dr. Cormier’s desk. He tapped her lightly on the shoulder.
“Ouais?” Her head snapped up and she laughed, obviously startled. “Sorry, John. I just…fell asleep, I guess.”
“Not a problem, Ma’am. Would you like someone to pull the car around to take you home?”
Dr. Cormier squinted at him. She seemed uncomfortable with having someone take her home. “Thank you, John. And please, just Delphine…”
She yawned, packed up her things, and slipped her heels back on before exiting the office with a sleepy wave.
Nobody ever came by for Delphine who wasn’t business-related. She had meetings all day, sometimes flights in the middle of the night. Andrew and John watched her become tired and stressed, but whenever a business suit walked through the glass doors, her angular face became professional and serious. She would laugh mechanically at her clients’ bad attempts at humor in a dreadfully grim situation. She would pour them wine from a shelf on the wall, but would never really drink any herself. Once they left, she would sigh and check her phone. No messages would come in, and she’d run a hand through her hair and continue working.
Some nights like tonight, she would get bored or restless, and she’d start chatting with Andrew and John.
“Are you married?” she asked, looking interestedly from one to the other.
“Andrew is,” John responded. “Right, bud?”
Andrew grinned, looking at his feet. “Her name’s Kate. We got married last September.”
“Show her that picture, Drew.” John nudged the other guard in the ribs.
“I want to see.” Dr. Cormier hopped over in her bare feet and looked over Andrew’s shoulder at a picture on his phone. “She’s beautiful. Your wedding looks lovely.”
“Thanks, Dr. Cormier.” Andrew grimaced at a look from the doctor. “D-Delphine.”
“There you go,” she said, elbowing him and walking over to lean on her desk.
“How’s your girl, Dr. Cormier?” John asked, grinning.
Delphine shook her head, running both her hands through her hair. “She isn’t my girl anymore.”
“Sorry,” John said, shuffling his feet nervously.
“Don’t be. I, um, I ended it. So I could help protect her better. And so she could be happier because, you know, I’m out of town or here all the time...”
The guards watched as the director of the Dyad Institute swung her feet against the desk and sighed. “She—she doesn’t really see that. And now she has a new girlfriend.”
They were silent for a moment. “She’s the one from downstairs, with the dreads,” Delphine continued.
“I like her dreads,” Andrew said after a second.
Delphine laughed. “I do too.”
A few days later, a dreadlocked woman walked through the glass doors while Delphine wasn’t there.
“Excuse me,” Andrew said to her. “Do you have an appointment?”
John tried to catch his eye. With weird facial expressions, he managed to indicate that this is the ex-girlfriend!
“Oh,” he said finally. “Uh, go in. She’ll be up soon.”
“I—I already texted her.”
The woman shuffled around with a paper in her hands, waiting for Delphine. After a few minutes, the taller woman stalked into the office, flicking an eyebrow at the guards on her way in.
Andrew and John tried not to listen to their brief conversation, exchanging glances every few seconds. Then, they couldn’t help but tune in:
“The day you left for Frankfurt, I almost died,” the dreadlocked woman said. “Some kind of near-death experience. And it was so easy, I could have just…slipped away. Then I had a vision of you. I came back for you.”
Shit. John and Andrew looked at each other, trying their hardest not to turn and look into the office.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” The careful façade had been broken, and the guards heard the Delphine they knew from the late hours of the night, after all the clients had gone.
“Cause you don’t believe in stuff like that. And cause…we had to move on…”
They heard Delphine whisper something, then an unmistakable sound.
Then, Delphine: “I’m sorry. You should’ve trusted me.”
A second later, the two women were called out of the office by Dr. Nealon. They heard Delphine sigh, and her heels clicked their way out.
Delphine didn’t go home that night—none of them did. Something big had happened, something with Rachel. It was almost light out when she returned to the office. She threw herself into the chair and put her face into her hands.
By morning, the curtain had again been pulled shut. Delphine was replaced by Dr. Cormier, director of the Dyad Institute, and business ran as usual.