Back After This

Chapter One The Pitch

Chapter One

The Pitch

In Studio D, I was trying to record a short intro that should have taken less than fifteen minutes. The board in front of me was lit up, the mic lights were green, my headphones were on, and the host was in the chair on the other side of the glass. I pressed my talk button. “Tell me what you had for breakfast.”

“Well,” Miles began, leaning intimately toward the microphone, as if I were really asking. “I had an omelet. Four eggs, goat cheese, and arugula. Oh—and a diced tomato.” He knew that one purpose of this exercise was to make sure his P’s didn’t pop unpleasantly at the poor public, but he managed never to eat anything for breakfast with P’s in it. No potatoes, no pepper, no prosciutto or pancakes.

“I’ve never known anybody who eats as many eggs as he does,” Julie muttered from the chair next to me in the booth, firing up her laptop. “I’m never sure whether he actually smells like eggs, or whether I just think he smells like eggs because I look at him and I can’t stop thinking about eggs.”

I pressed my button again. “I need to hear some P’s, Miles.”

“Oh!” he said, always freshly surprised, months into production. “Peter Piper.” I heard Julie moan in the corner.

“A few more than that, please,” I told him, “and back off the mic about an inch, you don’t need to swallow it. As we’ve talked about before.” I looked over at Julie. “Too much?” I asked.

She nudged her glasses up on her nose. She must have gotten a late start with her daughter and not had time for her contacts. “Nah. I think it’s charming how every day is like the first day. He’s like a newborn baby.”

“Pizza!” he said. “Pickles, popcorn. Sergeant Pepper. Yellow Submarine.”

How had he gotten lost over the course of seven words? “Right,” I muttered. I fiddled with the sliders and talked to him again. “Okay. Go ahead on the intro, please.”

Miles had come to audio from one of the biggest newspapers in the country, where he’d won the biggest awards in journalism for reporting on the biggest corruption scandal in the history of his state. My boss, Toby, had been perched atop a mountain of investor money, jonesing for respect after getting Palmetto on the map with a pulpy true-crime podcast and an addictive series of marital-infidelity confessionals. He was trying to keep the place on track after Rob, his co-founder, who had recruited me, cashed out. Toby had snapped Miles up like a blue-ribbon hog at the state fair, bidding and bidding until the competition threw up its hands. The paper could, after all, hire three young reporters (or twelve interns) for what it would cost them to keep Miles, which was easy math for people who now worked for venture capitalists. So Miles Banfield became a podcast host, interviewing newsmakers, presenting some of his own reporting, and delivering commentaries that Julie and I would cut down from seven or eight minutes to a tight two and a half.

He was very bad at it. He made mouth noises—tsks and gulps and smacks of all kinds—while other people were talking. He would overlap the first few words of the next question with the final few words of the last answer, which signaled his impatience and rattled guests. He asked the same question in different ways four times in a row. He refused to read any of the research Julie stayed up late creating for him and then told Toby we hadn’t prepared him. He would spend most of a half-hour interview asking a prolific author about the dedication in a single mid-career book, ignoring our efforts to interrupt, sometimes pointedly taking off his headphones. He clattered his watch on the table every time I didn’t remind him to take it off. He hummed tunelessly while I was trying to solve technical problems. I couldn’t get him to improve his active listening past an obnoxious “oh-oh-oh-OHHH,” which he occasionally unleashed ten times in the same interview. A former senator emailed me once and complimented me for editing his interview with her to the point where you couldn’t hear him making “that car alarm noise.” I told no one.

And now, as he spoke, I heard his mouth clacking and sucking, like an octopus playing with a wheel of cheese. He was three sentences in when I hit the talk button again to interrupt him. “Hey, did you by any chance drink Mountain Dew before you came into the studio again?”

He paused. Looked at us through the glass. Shrugged. “So what?”

I silently turned to Julie, who chuckled and looked determinedly at her notes. “Oh, boy,” she said. “Just remember, it could be worse. It could be the true-crime guy with the big glass of milk.”

I leaned on the desk, flattening my palms against it on either side of my script so I wouldn’t raise my voice. He had already told the boss—his and mine—that he did not like it when I raised my voice. So I inhaled deeply, puffed out air several times until my lungs emptied of what Toby called my tone, and spoke again. “Do you remember when I told you drinking Mountain Dew makes you sound like your mouth is sticking to itself?”

“No.”

“Well, I did. A couple of times. There’s a bottle of water right there. Take a few sips. And please don’t drink Mountain Dew when you know we’re tracking. It doesn’t help you sound your best.”

Looking away from me, down at his phone, he said, “It’s journalism, Cecily. The audience is smart. I don’t think they care what I drank with lunch. Let’s not get distracted by the small stuff.”

“Well,” I said. “Your smart audience has things to listen to that don’t sound like they were recorded inside a Saint Bernard’s mouth.” I heard Julie snort. “The microphone you are talking into cost as much as my first car. You’re in a room designed to make sure that the sounds that come out of your face are the one thing that everyone is one hundred percent guaranteed to hear. Right now, that means it’s picking up every time your lips pry themselves off your gums. So again, please stop drinking Mountain Dew before we track.”

I could hear Julie take a breath. “Oh shit,” she whispered.

Miles turned and looked at me, hard. I raised my eyebrows at him. Tilted my head. He rolled his eyes, then held up one hand in my direction. He put down his phone. “Let’s take it again,” he said. “You wrote ‘debut’ in here, and ‘introduction’ will sound better.”

I had written “introduction” originally. Over email, he had changed it to “debut.”

—

It took Miles thirty-two tries to get through the seventy-two-second intro, interrupted by multiple water-swishing breaks. Halfway through, I had a Slack from Toby: “Can you come by when you’re done? Have great news to share.” I promised I’d be there soon, and after I saved the tracks and shut down the board, I turned to Julie and said, “I have to go see Toby.”

She scowled. “What’s he want?”

“No idea. He says it’s good news.”

“Oh no,” she said.

“I bet he wants to tell me something about promos.” Toby had Slacked me throughout the previous day about fifteen-second promos versus twenty, because he said he couldn’t decide. He’d added a GIF of a cat following a tennis match with its eyes.

“Better than talking about his divorce,” Julie said. “I’ll do a first pass on this and you should have it by the end of the day.”

“Oh, blergh, what if it is about his divorce?” I asked.

“Well, then at least memorize everything. I’m morbidly curious.” Toby was a middle-aged skinny-pants-wearing, hip-haircut-sporting, nerd-glasses-affecting overachiever who loved to talk about investing and eating paleo. He’d recently split from a funky ceramicist who, just before they met, had spent two years following a jam band around the country. Their union had made no sense to me. If he’d followed anybody around for two years, it would have been a productivity guru who sold unregulated protein powder out of the trunk of his car.

“Pray for me,” I said, and I threw my body against the heavy studio door.

—

Palmetto was open-office (a wild idea for audio, I thought, but nobody asked me). Everybody wore headphones at their desks, whether they were listening to anything or not, and only the sounds of phone calls and hushed bitch sessions created a low murmur. The décor had been described as “industrial” in a couple of magazine articles about our early successes. This mostly meant you could look up and see pipes and ducts zigzagging across the ceiling, and some of the walls had wide expanses of reclaimed wood. The floors were a light gray laminate, and bright pops of yellow showed up in chairs and sofas in our break rooms. Potted palms rested in corners like the afterthoughts they were, and modest succulents were grouped on conference tables.

The wall outside Toby’s office was host to an enormous black-and-white photo, probably five feet by three feet, of Toby and Rob laughing in their chairs while speaking on a panel at a tech conference. It was from five years ago, when business had been better.

Toby’s door was open, and he was at his standing desk with his back to me, looking at what seemed to be a selection of coats on sale. “Hey hey,” I said.

“Oh. Get in here,” he said with a grin. He persistently thought it was endearing to talk to me like I was a voice-commanded robot vacuum or a border collie, and to save time, I ignored it. His office had inspirational art on the walls—no actual slogans or quotes, just a photo of a guy scaling a cliff without ropes and another one of Muhammad Ali. All the awards that Palmetto had won in the last ten years, none of which had Toby’s name on them and several of which had mine, were lined up on two floating shelves, and the overflow extended to the top of a cabinet I knew held smoothie ingredients in its drawers instead of files.

He sat down, rolled over to his other desk, and gestured toward a low lime-green chair. Of the many things I dreaded about my trips to his office, the chair was in the top five. It was not a good chair. It was a cool chair, a modern chair, and sitting in it made me feel like my ass had a manufacturing defect. I dropped into it anyway, and before I could even ask what was up, he was upon me. “So you know how valuable you are to me.”

I hesitated. He had a townhouse in Georgetown. Once, after he invited a bunch of us over for cocktails, Julie and I looked it up on HouseStalker and found it valued at $2.3 million. I lived in a one-bedroom apartment with a leaky kitchen faucet. “For the purposes of this conversation,” I said, “I’m going to say yes.”

He laughed and nodded. “Right, right. You get me.” I didn’t. “What I want to talk to you about is that I think we have a show that you would be perfect to host. In fact, it’s a show I think you’re the only right person to host. And to help build from the ground up, if you’re willing.”

After working for Toby for six years, I didn’t think he could surprise me. He’d never let me create a show myself. I had pitched idea after idea, and he had rejected them all.

Well, all but one. All but Clothing Line, a series on fashion history that was my personal hobbyhorse for about a year, and that I wanted to host. He loved the idea. He praised me for it, he thanked me for it, and then he took it. He set it up with Daphne Flood, a former food blogger he’d hired at a high price. Two projects he’d planned for her had already collapsed, and she was threatening not to renew her contract, meaning they’d get nothing for their investment at all. So I didn’t host it. I didn’t produce it, either, because at the time he needed me to throw myself at a deeply dysfunctional two-man chat show where one host was dating the other’s ex. I helped them hit deadlines and not strangle each other. Clothing Line had won one or two of those awards on his shelf, and it had kick-started what was now a successful audio career for Daphne. I got a “special thanks” credit for my trouble.

I stared, caught off-guard by him as I rarely was. “Really?”

He nodded more. “Really. It’s going to be our first-quarter tentpole next year. And it’s very secure, because we already have advertisers interested. Just so you know, we have more interest for this than we had at the same point when we were developing Cheats. ” Cheats was the show where people talked about the affairs they’d had. It had been the second hit Toby and Rob had made after Otter Tail, the true-crime sensation with the deceptively zoological name. It involved dead people and camping and the mishandling of DNA evidence, but no otters. “You want to hear about it?”

“Of course.” I started to think before he started to talk. This was a way out of Miles’s lip-smacking and ranting and watch-clacking. Miles wouldn’t like it, but he’d go along with it, because he’d never want to admit he needed me for anything.

“Well,” Toby said, “it’s about women …and how they make the big change. ” He emphasized each word by slicing the air with both hands, like he was making a stump speech.

“Like…menopause?”

“No.”

“Because ‘the change’ usually means menopause.”

He shook his head impatiently. “The idea is women making big changes to their own lives. We want to really get intimate about what it’s like out there. On your own, trying to better yourself.” He took a dramatic pause. “Aided by a whole industry that might—or might not—be trying to help.”

Toby had been making scattered noises for half a year about wanting to make more shows for women. I had been ignoring a gut feeling that it would wind up being something exactly like this, a goofy product in a pink box. “So it’s self-help?”

Toby smiled. “And self- care. And not for just anybody. The thing is, we want it to be about you. Your own path. Single woman gets it together.”

I felt like my whole forehead pressed itself into a tiny dot between my eyebrows. “Gets what together?”

“You know, life. Big dreams. Relationships.”

Now a wave of deep concern, blended with a dash of panic, washed over me. “Relationships? You want me to talk about dating?”

Toby looked wounded, but strategically so, like he had a plan for this conversation and it was on track so far. “Can I just pitch you before you say no? We want it to be about this collision between business and personal. The industry of happiness. In this case, we want to talk about life coaches. People who get hired to give women advice about how to fall in love and get it together, all that.”

“Please stop saying ‘get it together.’?”

He held up his hands in a reflexive non-apology. “Don’t take it the wrong way. You’re the most together person I know in a million different ways, you know that. We think you’re in a unique position to open up this door in a way that anybody could relate to and understand. You’re single, you had a breakup—”

“Not recently.” In the four years since Justin dumped me, I hadn’t been on more than four dates with anybody, which I didn’t bring up with Toby, since I didn’t think it would exactly help my cause.

“Sure. But you’re still looking, right?”

Truthfully, I was still looking for a person to be with in the same way I was looking for a bigger apartment: longingly, daily, and around the edges of all the other things I had to do. I would look at dating apps and townhouse listings, become utterly defeated, and forget about it for another day. “I am, but…Toby, no.”

“Cecily, yes.”

“Why would anybody listen to a show about me trying to get a date?”

“For the adventure. For the journey. Think of it like this: The audience is the tour group, and you’re the guide.”

“Really? Because it sounds more like I’m the attraction. It sounds like I’m sharing an exit off Route 66 with the Blue Whale of Catoosa, and you’re going to put up a billboard of me frowning in a bathrobe with a pint of ice cream under the words ‘Five Miles to the Old Maid,’?” I said.

“Oh, come on,” Toby protested. “You know I’d never make you look bad. The woman we have who’s going to take you through the whole process, I guarantee you’re going to love her. Positivity is her whole thing. You might learn something.”

I watched his eager little eyes behind his bright green frames. He was counting downloads in his head. He had probably been doodling promo art while he was on the phone. “Go ahead,” I said in my most level of voices.

“She’s a dating coach, life coach, influencer, whatever. Her name is Eliza Cassidy.”

I had heard of her, vaguely, in the same way I’d heard of a lot of companies that sold stylish luggage and stretchy bras on Instagram. “What kind of influencing does she do?”

“She started out in beauty, she expanded into lifestyle, she’s done some health and wellness, and now she’s starting a consulting thing in relationship coaching.”

“A consulting thing,” I repeated.

“Right. She wants to change everything about how relationship advice is given. She wants to make it less sexist, less nasty, less judgmental, more upbeat. Never settle, you’re enough, girl power, that kind of thing.” I didn’t realize how not eager I was to hear Toby say “girl power” until right then.

“But she isn’t trained to do this,” I said. “She’s pivoting from how to find your perfect foundation match.”

“Now, don’t be a snob,” he said. “She has a lot of experience connecting with audiences. The people who follow her absolutely love her, and they trust her. She has millions of followers on YouTube. Millions on Instagram. Millions on TikTok. She’s probably got millions of followers on something you and I have never even heard of. How’s that for a built-in audience?”

“But why are they going to care about me?”

He shrugged. “They’re going to care about her taking you through this approach she has.”

“Toby, I’m not a good candidate for this. I am a dork who spends most of my time in headphones. Nobody is going to believe I’m going to meet a prince because I live the truth of some kind of listicle about dating. It’s not going to convince anybody.”

“You don’t even know what she’s going to say.”

I did know what she was going to say, because I knew what these people always said. People paid the women who wrote The Rules an ungodly amount of money to tell them to make men pay for dinner and not to return phone calls. And, of course, not to talk too much, and people had been telling me that for free since I was in first grade. “I hate dating advice,” I said.

“Perfect, so does she. That’s why she wants to shake things up. Wisdom with…with reinvention.”

“How old is this wise person?”

“She’s thirty-three, I think.”

“That’s a year younger than I am.”

“Well, my doctor is younger than I am, but I still take his advice about my cholesterol. Besides, she’s very happily married, so maybe she knows something.”

“A lot of people are married, Toby. Serial killers are married. To people who marry them because they’re serial killers.”

He forged ahead. “Well, she’s not a serial killer. She does video, she wrote a book, she speaks at events.”

“Oh, I see. Events.”

“What’s wrong with events?”

“An event could be anything. A raging fire is an event.”

“She doesn’t speak at raging fires.”

I shifted in that terrible chair and tried to get my spine to line up with itself. “What would she do to me, anyway?”

“For crying out loud, she’s not going to do anything to you,” he said. “She’s going to work with you for a few months. She wants to set you up on twenty dates.”

“Twenty?” The idea of going on twenty first dates in front of an audience with the ability to provide feedback sounded like a level of humiliation that would outstrip any underpants-up-the-flagpole nightmare middle-schoolers could conjure.

“Twenty. You do everything she says, you see what happens, we get tape. Tape of these dates, tape of your coaching sessions, lots of storytelling directly from you. No-holds-barred, totally honest portrayal of the experience. I won’t interfere, you can tell the absolute truth. It’s going to be a killer show.”

“Who would produce it?” I said.

“Well, we’re working on that, but one possibility is that Julie would.”

Julie Nazari had come to Palmetto after I met her at a conference and we became texting friends. I’d recommended her to Toby, and she’d been the assistant producer on a bunch of projects I’d headed up since then, including Miles’s show. “It could be an opportunity for her to move up to the next level. Abby and Charlie will help.” Toby leaned toward me. “It’s going to kill. Come on, I’ll get you a dream team.”

I’d heard this before, the way he’d hedge about letting Julie be in charge of something if only I would do him this one favor. I did love Abby and Charlie, who were best friends and had come to us from the same local station in Minneapolis. It was hard for me to believe they would be interested in this, but maybe they would? “Toby, this is self-help. I’m terrible at self-help. I am allergic to journaling. I don’t have a love language. And I’m only highly effective when you don’t bother me.”

“Learning new things is what you’re good at,” he countered. He folded his hands on his desk. “Listen, I can’t make you do it. I mean, I can, but I won’t. But I’m telling you, this is an opportunity to break into being on mic. I think you’d be great.”

“And what do I get if I do it?”

“What do you mean? You get to do it. You get to be a host, which I thought you wanted.”

“But I’d be a host of this, ” I said. “Which is not what I wanted. As you know.” For the last year, I had been pitching, hard, a series about the mothers of famous men. I’d sketched out six episodes. I’d done preliminary research for two of them on my own time. I wanted to build it. I wanted to host it. He kept saying maybe, he kept having meetings with me, he kept asking for more, and then he kept doing absolutely nothing. He was sitting on pages of proposals he probably hadn’t read, prep work that I’d polished and perfected and then hurled into the void of his office. “If I do this one for you, can we go back to my thing?”

“I can’t say for certain,” he said. “But if you do this and it’s successful, you become a personality. And I can’t sell a history show unless it’s built around a personality. So if you want to go forward, then yes, this is a way that we could do it.”

Dating. A dating show. Everyone would learn about Justin dumping me. Strangers. People listening at the gym while they climbed thousands of steps to stay in the same place. People who just wanted something to keep them company while they fell asleep. People Justin and I had worked with. People who knew us both, who might think he was too good for me or I was too good for him, either of which they might say in public, and either of which would be mortifying. And oh my God, Justin would hear it. He would hear me trying to learn how to find a boyfriend and trying to learn how to be a host, and what if I failed at both, and he got to listen to me do it?

Toby could see me continuing to squirm, and it wasn’t only because of the chair. “I don’t know,” I said.

Just then, there were two quick knocks, the office door opened, and Brick DeWitt poked his head in. “Oh hey,” he said. “Is this a good time?” Brick was one of the ad guys. Brick, Duncan, Tucker, and Joe. It was like they wrote the gospels, if the gospels were about dynamic ad insertion.

“Perfect, actually,” Toby said, pointing to his other chair. “Cecily, I asked Brick to come by. He’s just been feeling out advertisers. Obviously, everything is still tentative, but since this idea came from somebody on his team, I wanted him to explain how strong the enthusiasm has been about the version of this pitch that we’ve shared with them.”

“The idea came from the ad guys?”

Brick put up both hands defensively. “From partnerships. Eliza’s team reached out. All we do is mention opportunities.”

I nodded. “Okay. So, tell me all about the enthusiasm.”

Brick didn’t so much sit down as lean his ass on a low cabinet, twirling a pen in his hand. “Fitness West,” he said.

“The gym ?” I said.

“It’s not a gym,” he said. “It’s very innovative. They partner with a lot of wellness start-ups to provide services on-site. They’re looking for growth with single professional women between thirty and forty, and they’re really excited about doing something in relationships. We’re still trying to lock it down, but we’re close. We think they’re going to wind up making a major investment.”

I looked at Toby. “So it has to be me because of their demographic? Why can’t it be, I don’t know, Abby?”

“She’s too young.”

“Kyla.”

“She’s a contractor. I’d have to write a new contract.”

“Marissa.”

“They’re looking for somebody who wants to date men.”

“How about the new one, Alessandra?”

“Somebody who wants to date men, not somebody who’s already engaged to one. Cecily, you are it. So let him explain.”

“Fine,” I said. “It’s going to be sponsored by going to the gym. And?”

“We have interest from a bunch of places,” Brick said. “We’ve had a lot of meetings.”

I believed it. In fact, I wasn’t always sure what the ad guys did other than meetings. “Specifically what interest?”

“Well, beverage companies are big business right now, particularly specialty drinks and mail order. I’m talking to a place called Wine 4 One.” He held up four fingers and then one, and I nodded. “You tell them how many glasses of wine you drink and how often, and you take a quiz about what you like. And they send you what you need for the month in individual, vacuum-sealed servings. Recyclable packaging. It’s green because there’s no waste.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “What else?”

“Well, of course, you know how big meal-prep boxes are, but they’re moving to more niche stuff, more specific populations. We’re talking to a company that does meals especially for single people.”

“Isn’t that just Lean Cuisine?”

Brick ignored me. “It doesn’t require you to scale up or down, and it doesn’t leave a lot of leftovers. They call it Just Me.”

I narrowed my eyes. “Like in a restaurant. When they ask you how many are in your party. And you say, ‘just me.’?” I had eaten in enough restaurants when I traveled for work that I was very familiar with the look they give you, like you’re the gnarliest, ugliest rescue dog at the shelter.

Brick ignored me again. “They’ve got great ingredients, good sourcing, really starting to pick up speed, and they’re looking to connect, you know, deeply, with exactly the kind of intelligent, high-end audience we know this project is going to attract.” He grinned.

I didn’t smile. “Is that it?”

He pointed at me. “Oh—pets are huge with direct response, right? People spend all kinds of money if you tell them it’s going to make their dog like them. Subscription boxes and specialty foods are the traditional angles. But a lot of the action has been happening in those food and treat spaces, and the one we’re talking to is evolving more in amusement, in the amusement arena. And rather than focusing on dogs, where the market is so saturated, they’re more pertaining to cats, which they think is a neglected market.”

I nodded. “So they’re in the cat amusement space.”

“Exactly.”

“Anything else?” Brick looked at Toby, so I did too.

Then I turned back to Brick. He appeared to be thinking,which seemed like trouble. “I mean, nothing firm,” he said. “Nothing definite.”

I didn’t take my eyes off him. “Understood. But how about what’s not definite?”

Brick twirled the pen faster in his hand. “Oh. Well. There’s a company, really new, does a lot of exciting things in the financial planning world, but it’s, you know, they specialize in independent professional people? Affluent clients who are just, you know, making sure all the loose ends are tied up?”

I remembered the first time I met Brick a year and a half ago. He’d come in with his fancy new phone and his Bluetooth earpiece, and he’d put a green Tupperware container full of quinoa and vegetables in the fridge, which he ate in the break room that was mostly used for lunchtime gossip. After eighteen months of trying to sell ad space to every conceivable weird-ass start-up and creating promo codes for everything from wearable bug zappers to erotic-themed bedding—not to mention surviving several new show launches both successful and not—he now regularly ate Chipotle at his desk.

“Loose ends?” I asked. “What kind of loose ends?”

“Just general…generally loose ends. Any ends that…that are loose.”

“So,” I said to him, “it’s estate planning. Bequests. Burial plots.”

Brick glanced at Toby again, then back at me. “I mean, sure, yeah, I guess, but not exclusively.”

“What’s the company called?” I asked.

People going into gum surgery look more excited than Brick looked at this moment. I once saw a radio host have to run to the bathroom immediately-as-in-immediately during a live broadcast, and he seemed happier about that than Brick was about this.Brick finally scratched his head and said, “They call it Finally. Youknow, ‘Finally: the last item on your to-do list.’ But there’s no A. And they’re both capital L’s. FinLLy.”

The room was still. Brick looked tentatively at me, tentatively at Toby, then hungrily at the door. He wanted quinoa, Chipotle, hemlock, a stab in the throat, anything.

“Can I have a second with Toby?” I said, and Brick practically left a Brick-shaped puff of smoke behind as he beelined out the door, pulling it shut behind him. “So,” I summed up. “You want me to host a show where somebody teaches me how to get a boyfriend. And it’s going to be sponsored by eating alone, drinking alone, dying alone, and cat toys.”

“That’s very glass-half-empty.”

“Toby.”

He laughed. “Don’t forget the gym!” he said. “Look, I get it. Just think about it, would you?”

I could imagine the promo art, which would be something like a woman reaching for an engagement ring that was just beyond the tips of her fingers. I could imagine myself trying to explain this show to my sister, who saved pets’ lives for a living. I could imagine Justin laughing as he fired up the first episode. “Oh, Toby, why are you doing this to me?”

“Listen,” he said, “you know things are tight. You know what’s happening with ads. This is a critical piece of our strategy, and there aren’t a lot of people I would trust with it. We don’t have a lot of chances to bring in anything as big as what these discussions with Fitness West could mean.” He took a breath. “I’m not going to lie to you, Cecily. I need a hit.” He looked past me through the glass wall of his office. “Everybody who works here needs a hit.” His eyes came back to me. “Take a day and think about it. You don’t have to answer me right now. Sleep on it, and we’ll talk tomorrow.”

“Toby, I—”

“Tomorrow. I’m not hearing ‘no’ until tomorrow.” I got up, freeing my ass from his uncomfortable chair, and as I got to the door I turned back to him. But he was already at the standing desk with his back to me. “Tomorrow,” he repeated, and he reached his hand into the air and waved goodbye without turning around.

I closed the door behind me. “Cat toys,” I muttered as I headed back to my desk. “What is happening to my life?”