Soo-Lin's unrequited love for Elgin Branch

Soo-Lin Lee-Segal’s unrequited love for Elgin Branch develops through a widening gap between professional closeness and romantic reciprocity. In her WYP account, she traces how admiration, private confidences, and one night together become the basis for a future she imagines with him, even as her own reality checks expose how little of that future Elgin has promised. The account ends with Soo-Lin pregnant, attached to Elgin, and trying to reconcile his limited commitments with the life she hoped they would share.

Identity and the account

Soo-Lin records this relationship in a WYP, or Write Your Part inventory, after being told at VAV that she must write and read her part before returning. The exercise asks her to acknowledge her participation in an abusive or damaging dynamic rather than remain solely in the position of a victim. Its form matters: the account alternates between the story Soo-Lin once told herself and explicit reality checks that revise it. She is not simply recounting a romance that failed; she is documenting the process by which she mistook her own growing attachment for mutual love, and naming choices she now recognizes as her responsibility.

Professional closeness becomes romantic hope

Soo-Lin describes an initially rocky start as Elgin’s administrative assistant, followed by a working relationship in which he asked for difficult things and she found ways to accomplish them. She felt that he admired her ability, and the work became a source of pride and emotional connection. In retrospect, she locates the beginning of her love in that successful exchange: professional appreciation seemed to her to be the start of a shared intimacy. Her first reality check draws a firm distinction between them. She had fallen in love; the evidence does not establish that Elgin had.

The boundary blurred further when Elgin invited Soo-Lin to lunch and spoke to her about his wife, Bernadette Fox. Soo-Lin understood that a coworker should not become the confidant to whom someone complains about a spouse, particularly when personal and professional lives are already intertwined. Their children attended the same school, which made it harder to keep the relationship within the limits of work. Yet her account acknowledges that she could have politely ended the conversation. That admission shifts the emphasis from circumstances alone to her own decision to remain emotionally available.

When Bernadette became entangled with an internet-hacker ring, Elgin’s anger at her brought further confidences from him. Soo-Lin treated these disclosures as evidence of love, though they demonstrated his willingness to confide rather than a declaration of romantic attachment. The difference between what happened and what she inferred becomes especially clear in the account of the Bellevue hotel. When Elgin planned to sleep at the office, Soo-Lin booked him a room at the Hyatt and drove him there herself. She interpreted his question about her coming in as recognition that they would act on their sexual tension. Her later assessment rejects that interpretation: she had mistaken the situation and recognized that Elgin was emotionally vulnerable.

Misread signals and the disclosure about Bernadette

At the hotel, Soo-Lin continued to imagine that Elgin was waiting for her to make a romantic move. The narrative registers the intensity of that belief, then punctures it with a brief reality check. Later, when Elgin offered to tell her about the FBI file, Soo-Lin welcomed the opening as though it might bring them closer. Instead, he told her that the most painful part was Bernadette’s letter to Paul Jellinek. He wished he could go back and tell Bernadette that he wanted to know her, and wondered whether doing so might have changed the situation in which he found himself. His attention was directed toward his wife and the lost possibility of understanding her, not toward a future with Soo-Lin.

Soo-Lin left and drove home. The following day, Elgin was scheduled to rehearse Bernadette’s intervention with a psychiatrist away from the Microsoft campus, and his brother was expected to arrive from Hawaii. While she worked, Soo-Lin fixated on an imagined reconciliation: flowers would appear at her doorway, followed by Elgin admitting his love. The specificity of this fantasy contrasts with the actual events she reports. It supplies the romantic gesture that Elgin has not made, while her own account makes clear that the expectation came from her hope rather than from any promise he had given.

A single encounter and its consequences

Later, at the Four Seasons, Elgin and Soo-Lin were both drunk. When he said that he would not cry, she gave him permission to do so; they smiled and laughed together. Soo-Lin read the exchange as the opening of a glorious future. Her reality check identifies the condition she had left out of that interpretation: they were drunk. Snow began falling, feathers escaped from a tear in Elgin’s parka, and Morrissey fans nearby sang. The scene’s charged, theatrical surroundings accompanied a change in their relationship, but did not guarantee the lasting commitment Soo-Lin imagined.

Elgin took Soo-Lin’s hand as they went upstairs, and they kissed in the elevator. She said she had wondered what kissing him would be like. The sex that followed was awkward; Elgin seemed to want it over, then fell asleep. In the morning they dressed hurriedly and avoided looking at the floor. Because Elgin had given his car to Van, Soo-Lin drove him home. Bernadette then walked in on her intervention. The account identifies this as the first and last time Soo-Lin and Elgin had sex, a decisive limit on what she had been imagining as the beginning of a shared life.

Pregnancy, attachment, and recognition

By the time of the WYP, Bernadette was still out of the picture and Soo-Lin was pregnant. Elgin had promised to take care of Soo-Lin and the baby, but refused to live with her. Soo-Lin continued to tell herself that he might need time. She also tried to build compatibility from details that could not establish mutual love: because Elgin liked presidential biographies, she named her son Lincoln after a president; because he loved Microsoft, she said that she loved Microsoft too. These efforts reveal how her hope persisted by turning his interests into possible points of connection.

Her final reality check is more severe than her earlier corrections. Soo-Lin concludes that Elgin will not love her because, in her view, she lacks his intelligence and sophistication, and that he will always love Bee Branch more than their unborn child. She also interprets his offer of a new house as an attempt to buy her off, while acknowledging that she should accept it. These are Soo-Lin’s judgments, not independently confirmed explanations of Elgin’s motives. Their force lies in the contrast between what she knows concretely—his promise to support her and the baby, his refusal to live with her, and his offer of a house—and what she continues to hope or fear those actions mean. The WYP therefore leaves her love unresolved but no longer wholly unexamined: its central movement is from romantic projection toward recognition of the unequal relationship and her own part in sustaining it.