Chapter Text
Before the divorce, Calliope hadn’t known much about Mr. Kaspbrak.
None of them had, she thinks — he wasn’t the kind of guy who shared a whole lot about his home life, y’know? But Calliope is his assistant, and even she’d barely known anything about him. She’d known he had a wife (Maya? Mara? Moira?) and that he lived in Long Island, sure, but even that was mostly just because he’d had DINNER — DON’T WORK LATE scheduled for Fridays at 7 PM, and he left every Friday at five on the dot.
(Fill in the blanks, people — Midtown to the Hamptons during Friday rush hour is a solid two-hour commute. This man wears Gucci loafers! He’s loaded.)
Their relationship — Mr. and Mrs. Kaspbrak’s, she means, not his and Calliope’s — had always struck her as… at least a little weird. Not, like, abusive, or anything —
Mr. Kaspbrak definitely never had bruises, and he seemed like the kind of guy who wouldn’t take a punch lying down — but there was just something about him, y’know? Like — he had the ring, and he had the one wedding picture that all the married people put on their desks just to remind everyone, but even in the photo he hadn’t looked happy, more… resigned. And even when Calliope would ask about his wife — not often, because she’d only really asked to be polite — Mr. Kaspbrak would just say something like, “Oh, she’s fine, thank you,” and it’s not like he knew about her partner, so there was no real reason for him to ask after them, so the conversation always just kind of trailed off there.
Uh. Anyways.
Calliope figures out the divorce first, though, so maybe she does know him a little better than the rest of them.
Well —alright, so maybe she had a bit of an advantage as his assistant and thus the only one who had his schedule at hand, but she would take any gain she could get, okay?
Here’s the thing. Three weeks ago, Mr. Kaspbrak suddenly calls in a week and a half of PTO. That wouldn’t be strange for anybody else, but… let’s be real here, Mr. Kaspbrak isn’t like everybody else. He’s a workaholic in the strangest ways — he leaves on time every day except Fridays (when he leaves even earlier), but he works from home all the time and never takes a day off. The man has been working here for ten years — ten years! — and in all that time, nobody ever noticed him missing from the office. He’s hard to forget, too — Mr. Kaspbrak looks pretty average, sure, but he’s got forearms sculpted by Michelangelo (he rolls his sleeves up, sometimes — Geo, Mr. Burkin’s assistant, always stares at him when he notices) and a voice that gets as loud as a police siren.
Anyways, that’s beside the point. The point is: she notices that he’s taken some time off, and she also realizes after a click glance through his Outlook email (that she looks at every day, so no that is not a creepy thing) that he had totaled his fucking car. So… whatever’s happening there is obviously a whole thing. Add in the plane tickets to Bangor, Maine (which, Bangor? Really? Not even, like, Portland?), the four-day rental car, and the reservations at a place called “The Derry Town House”?? Out of the norm, for sure.
At first, he doesn’t even take days off — just sends an email letting HR (and her, by extension) know that he won’t be open for calls on the weekend like he normally is. Come Monday, though, he emails in the week and a half for a “family/medical emergency”. At first, Calliope figures it means he and his wife are coming down with something and want to wait out the worst of it, which makes sense.
He’s a pretty clean person, Mr. Kaspbrak. In the beginning, he’d walked to the bathroom every hour or so and come back with hands scrubbed red, and he would douse himself in hand sanitizer after coming back from a meeting. He’s definitely better now (bathroom breaks are twice a day), but Calliope has always thought he seemed like the kind of guy who took illnesses seriously.
So yeah, Calliope figures it’s a medical thing. But then Mr. Kaspbrak decides to work remotely for another week or so (and nobody’s going to argue in the face of one of his I-Will-Take-This-To-Corporate-If-Necessary emails), and things change a little.
Not to say that Mr. Kaspbrak has never called in from home before — he did, just once, when the flu spread through the office like wildfire two years ago and Corporate decided to close for a week. Back then, though, Calliope remembered that Mr. Kaspbrak had seemed just as untouchable through the screen as he was in person. He’d still dressed in a suit every day, and his background had looked almost offensively professional — it had been something bland, she thinks. A white wall… some plants, maybe? A painting? Something horrifyingly normal.
This time, things are. Markedly different.
First of all, he’s got a fucking scar. It’s healed well, almost strangely well considering Mr. Kaspbrak didn’t have the scar two weeks ago, but still. It’s a giant, jagged line running through his cheek and cutting into his dimple. Calliope doesn’t react — what is she, an amateur? — but she definitely notices it.
The second (and almost more important) part is that Mr. Kaspbrak is dressed down. All she can see is a t-shirt that seems too big on him (usually all of his shirts look tailored), with a faded logo that looks like it might have been from New Kids on the Block. The room he’s in is different too; if she has to guess, she’d say a hotel room, what with the pristine bed and the mini-fridge in the background.
(No, it is not weird that she notices all of this! Ollie likes to tease her for it, but Calliope has always been an observant person, she swears.)
To be fair, it’s not a big meeting — just him and her, debriefing on the week and prepping for next month — so she doesn’t question it at first (even though she really wants to).
Then, though: someone’s voice — someone’s deep, definitely not Mrs. Kaspbrak’s voice — echoes from off-camera. Mr. Kaspbrak stops speaking, mutes himself, and turns toward whoever’s speaking.
That’s new, too. Calliope still has Mrs. Kaspbrak’s number written down as DO NOT PUT THROUGH WHILE IN OFFICE.
Whatever the guy’s saying — the person’s saying, her mini-Ollie corrects — makes Mr. Kaspbrak smile and nod.
Smile and nod! Jesus Christ, who the hell knows how to make Mr. Kaspbrak smile?
(Listen. Calliope doesn’t like watching soap operas, okay? The plot holes make her angry. She needs to get her drama from somewhere!)
After a second, the mystery person passes Mr. Kaspbrak a plate of something — breakfast, probably — and then brushes a lock of hair behind his ear. Mr. Kaspbrak smiles (again!) up at the person and says something that Calliope can’t make out (she’s not very good at lip reading), reaching up to brush his hand against their arm.
The person’s arm moves away after a second, and Mr. Kaspbrak is still smiling faintly when he looks back at the camera. He’s got the faintest blush (??????) on his cheeks when he unmutes. “Sorry about that, Calliope,” he says, one hand just visible on the keyboard. “My, um. My partner? Brought me breakfast.”
Calliope smiles brightly, showing absolutely none of the desperate curiosity lurking beneath the surface. “That’s so nice of them!” She pauses, shrugs mentally, says fuck it. May as well. “My partner, Ollie — they do the same thing when I’m working from home, I always appreciate it.”
Mr. Kaspbrak’s face freezes for a second, and Calliope has a moment of OH FUCK OH SHIT OH FUCK before realizing that the internet cut out. She sucks in a quick breath (since when was she holding it?) and his face unfreezes into a small smile.
“That’s great,” he says, his lips moving just before the words come through. “It’s really something to have a supportive partner, huh.”
Calliope smiles back, wider than she means to. “Yeah. Yeah, it is.”