Chapter 25
WORTH IT
Summer Knoll
The press conference is Ezra's idea, which means it's also Diana's idea, executed with Diana's precision and announced to me exactly forty-eight hours in advance with a formal written notification that includes my name in the list of confirmed attendees.
Not a surprise. Not a fait accompli. An invitation, with enough time to decline.
I don't decline.
The Kittredge Foundation conference room has been transformed.
Longer table, more chairs, a podium that wasn't there last week. A bank of cameras that has no business making a room look as serious as it does. Reporters I recognize fill half the seats.
Several I don't fill the rest. National correspondents who picked up the Baythorne story and have been following the SDNY proceedings, the specific category of journalist who arrives when a story has become large enough to require coverage rather than just interest.
I take a seat in the third row. Not the front, I'm not the story today, but close enough to hear clearly and far enough to be a journalist rather than a participant.
Diana finds me before Ezra takes the podium.
She crosses to my row with the efficiency of someone who has something specific to deliver and has allocated exactly enough time to deliver it. She sits in the empty seat beside me, which is not something Diana usually does.
She's a woman of standing positions, of doorways and corridors, not chairs at other people's tables. The sitting-down is its own communication.
"He asked me to tell you," she says, with the neutrality she applies to everything personal, "that item four is operative."
I look at her. "He asked."
"He asked whether you wanted to know he was planning to mention you today. I told him I would convey the question." A pause. "You've just received it."
"And if I said no?"
"Then he wouldn't mention you." She holds my gaze with the directness she reserves for things she considers important. "He also asked me to tell you that your answer to that question would not change whether he's glad you're here."
I look at the podium. Empty still, the bank of cameras pointed at it, the charged quality of a room waiting for something to begin.
"Tell him item four acknowledged," I say. "And yes."
Diana nods once. Stands. Starts to go.
"Diana."
She turns.
I've been thinking about how to say this since I walked into the building. I've been thinking about it, in some form, since a board meeting where she said nothing and looked at me and left. Since the lobby where she handed him coffee and said good and walked out before he could respond.
"Thank you," I say. "For the past several months. For being a fair witness to all of it."
She looks at me for a long moment. Something in her expression does the thing it does very rarely. The warmth that exists underneath the professional efficiency, surfacing briefly and without performance.
"He's better," she says simply. "You should know that. The man who walked into a gala at the Plaza and handed a journalist his card is not the same man who is about to walk to that podium." A beat. "You had something to do with that."
She leaves before I can respond.
I sit with that for a moment. Then Ezra walks to the podium, and I take out my notebook and I do my job.
He's wearing the charcoal Brioni. The suit that makes him look like he was assembled with the specific brief of being taken seriously.
He looks at the room with the steadiness of someone who has stood in rooms like this before and has decided, this time, that what he says will be the thing he actually means rather than the thing he has prepared.
His gaze finds me in the third row. It holds for exactly one second. Not the managed acknowledgment of a man noting the presence of a reporter. Something passes between us in one second that would take considerably longer to say in words.
Then he looks back at the room.
"Thank you for coming," he says. "I'll make a brief statement and then take questions."
What follows is twenty minutes of precisely crafted corporate communication.
The Baythorne situation addressed. The SDNY inquiry, the manufactured evidence, the cooperation of Robert Westbrook, the role of independent journalism in establishing the full record. Vale named without editorializing. The Foundation's plans going forward.
All of it accurate and complete and delivered with the economy of a man who has learned to say exactly what he means and nothing more.
I take notes. I record. I do what I do.
Then he sets down his prepared remarks.
The room shifts. When a person at a podium sets down prepared remarks, the air in the room changes. The specific change of people recalibrating from managed to real.
Cameras lean forward. Metaphorically, but the room does.
"I want to address something directly," he says. "Something that isn't in the brief."
He looks at the room with the steadiness of someone who has made a decision and is enacting it, not performing the making of it.
"Over the past several months, a journalist named Summer Knoll has been working on a profile of this foundation and its work.
During that process, she uncovered evidence of a coordinated fraud against this company.
She reported it accurately, completely, and at significant personal cost." He pauses.
"The significance of that cost is something I want to be specific about. "
I keep my pen moving. I keep my face neutral. I keep doing what I do, which is pay attention.
"There were people who tried to use Miss Knoll's relationship with me to discredit her work.
They leaked photographs. They manufactured a narrative.
They published a document designed to make her journalism look like something other than what it was.
" Another pause. "What it was, is the best investigative work I've encountered in fifteen years of being the subject of investigative work. "
I look down at my notebook. The page is blurring slightly. I blink once, twice, and it resolves.
"There has been speculation about whether our relationship compromised her journalism or my conduct," Ezra continues.
"I want to address that directly. Miss Knoll's journalism was not compromised.
Her reporting was independently verified, editorially reviewed, and held to every professional standard her publication applies.
The suggestion that it wasn't is false, and it was made by people whose interest in making it required that her credibility be destroyed. "
He looks at the room. Here. This is the part.
"As for the personal dimension?—"
"Miss Knoll and I are in a relationship. That relationship developed during the period of her reporting and was known to her editor throughout. It complicated both our lives considerably." The corner of his mouth moves. Just barely. Just enough. "It was also, in my assessment, worth it."
The room erupts.
I sit in the third row with my recorder running and my notebook open and my pen moving, and I write down what he said in my precise professional shorthand, which requires looking at the page, which is why I'm looking at the page, which is why nobody in this room can see my expression.
The words are in my notebook now. On the record. Part of the permanent version of events.
Worth it.
I think about the photographs of me leaving his building, and the headlines about bed-warmers, and the forty-five minutes I sat at my kitchen counter with my hands flat on the tile, grounding myself in something solid.
I think about the board meeting where Vale said one wonders whether her judgment can be trusted, and I kept my pen moving and my face neutral and held my fury with both hands.
I think about every room I've walked into in the past several months where someone looked at me and saw the billionaire's journalist and not the journalist.
And I think about this room. These cameras. This record.
He just used the machinery that was used to harm me — the cameras, the public statement, the official record — to say the true thing instead of the managed thing. In front of everyone. On record.
Worth it.
I keep my pen moving. I do not stop doing my job.
But something in my chest settles into a place it hasn't been in a long time.
The specific quality of a professional reputation restored, not by defense or denial, but by the plain public statement of someone who was there and knows what the work was.
The questions run for another forty minutes. Ezra handles them with the precision of twenty years in difficult rooms. He doesn't flinch from the relationship questions. He doesn't deflect.
He answers them the way he's learned to answer things that cost him. Directly. Without decoration.
Afterward, the room empties in the slow way of rooms that have contained something significant.
Reporters filing out with the focused energy of people who have a story to write. Diana managing the last of the stragglers with her usual efficiency.
I stay in my seat. I'm writing up my notes while the room empties. The professional reflex of capturing while it's fresh, before interpretation starts to layer over observation.
Ezra finds me when the room is nearly empty.
He sits in the chair beside me. Not across from me but beside me. Adjacent, the way he's been since a town car forty-seven floors below his office and a deck in the Hamptons and every hallway and corridor we've stood in together. The default that is no longer a decision.
"Item four," I say.
"Operative."
"You asked before you did it."
"I asked Diana to ask you." He looks at the empty podium. "I should have asked you directly."
"You're a work in progress."
"As are you."
I look at him. "You told a room full of cameras it was worth it."
"It was a factual statement."
"You told a room full of cameras."
"Also factual."
"Ezra."
"Summer." He meets my eyes with the steadiness he brings to things he's decided. "I've spent fifteen years managing what I say in rooms with cameras. Today I said the true thing instead." He pauses. "I'll probably say it again."