Life was too short to worry about whether people liked her or not. 

Dr. Elizabeth Wright is proud of her effective administration of the Grants Office at the small university where she has worked for the past 20 years. Single and 50, she finds her quiet, reclusive life satisfying enough. When she hires young Elizabeth MacKenzie, she gains not only a trustworthy and capable assistant, but an unlikely friend. If only other people hadn’t interfered…

Excerpt from Prologue

The Time Log

If Liz did not improve her work performance, and soon, Elizabeth would have to let her go. It would be difficult—in general, a mess—and certainly Elizabeth didn’t want to let her go, but the record she had been keeping for the past two weeks did not lie. It was a log of Liz’s time—blocks of four lines with a fifth crossing over them, like a sketch of a little picket fence across the white page. Each time Liz got up and left from her desk, Elizabeth made a mark. At first she had kept the log locked in her top side drawer, but then through the side door to the reception area she would see Liz leave again, and she’d have to unlock the drawer to make a mark, so she now kept it in a folder on her desk, taking care to lock it if she went to the Ladies Room  or to lunch.

There was plenty of work to be done. They had been notified of several new applications from the National Science Foundation, but Liz had not yet investigated any of them. She hadn’t seen the grants calendar Liz had told her would be done last week, either. Liz would be at her desk, then away, then back for a moment or two, then away. Elizabeth knew there was very little that Liz did in the context of her job that would require such constant up-and-down. Occasional copying, and scanning, and that was it.

Elizabeth didn’t like keeping the Log. It made her uncomfortable. And keeping track of Liz’s movements was actually taking up a good part of her own day. It would be a lot easier if Liz’s performance assessment were coming up; she could integrate the current difficulties into the evaluation and if it came to letting her go, she’d have a well documented back-up. As it was, her evaluation four months previous had been generally outstanding. Elizabeth now regretted some of her more enthusiastic comments about Liz’s work: “Ms. MacKenzie is able to prioritize amongst competing office needs and uses time efficiently to produce highly professional work in a timely manner… Ms. MacKenzie’s excellent computer skills have made her a valuable resource in designing various tracking systems to manage office information and grant reporting requirements… Ms. MacKenzie would be difficult to replace…”

How could someone change so quickly?

---