Chapter 2 Brynn
The obnoxiously large grandfather clock in the corner of Colton’s office seemed to be losing time. It wasn’t, the reasonable
side of me knew, but it sure seemed to be. The seconds were ticking on, slower and slower. I’d taken as long as I could getting
unmic’d, changing my clothes, and cleaning my face, and still I’d been sitting, waiting, dreading, and absolutely losing my
mind for thirty-five minutes.
You’d have thought my phone call with my agent would have killed more time, but it had basically consisted of Robyn saying,
“Fix it!” over and over again in a voice vaguely reminiscent of a coyote yipping at a freight train, until she finally hung
up with an emphatic “It’ll be fine.”
I still didn’t understand what had happened. Oh, I understood that I’d stepped into a pile of poo bigger than the one Mark
had been teasing me about just over an hour earlier, but I was having a difficult time understanding how it had happened.
One moment I’d been having a shallow-but-promising bonding moment with my cohost and had been at the top of my game.
So near the pinnacle of my industry. And the next, the security guard outside the studio was avoiding my eyes as he held the
door for me.
“Hey, Brynn.” Colton greeted me wearily as he walked through the door of his office. “Sorry that took so long.” Before closing
the door, he called out to his assistant, “Please hold my calls, Claudia.”
I’d startled when he entered, and my cell phone fell out of my shaky hands. I’d been holding it loosely, trying to muster
up the courage to google myself and ultimately being too much of a coward.
“That’s fine.” Fine. Robyn probably hadn’t believed in the word when she used it any more than I did now. I reached down and grabbed my phone
from the floor and stuffed it into my jeans pocket as I stood from the leather couch.
He sat on the other end and left plenty of room for me to sit back down and join him if I so chose. I did. I wasn’t sure how
long my knees would last standing.
“Colton, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know we were live.” I rolled my eyes at myself. Yeah, I think that much was obvious. “I mean, I really thought you told us to stick with camera four... Not that I’m blaming you. I’m not. I just hope you
know I never would have said what I said...” Again, obvious.
What wasn’t obvious, at least to me, was how much of what I said had made it to air. The only thing more frightening than what people
were saying about me was what I had actually said. For about half a second I had comforted myself with the possibility that only the tail end had been broadcast
before Colton cut the feed, but then I remembered that the tail end was the part where I essentially called our viewers gullible
dimwits for believing I was a good person. There was no bright side here.
I cleared my throat. “Colton . . . how much of what I said—”
“From Elena and Hayley’s thirty-second cue on.”
I was pretty sure I was already sitting down, so why did it feel like I was falling?
“So when I said that stuff about twelve brain cells and forty bucks...”
“It was forty- two bucks, but yeah. Clear as a bell.”
In an instant, my legs catapulted me up from the couch just as my throat seized and the air I was attempting to breathe got
caught somewhere between my throat and my lungs. I released a very undignified honking sound from my mouth—maybe from my nose...
who could say?—and my eyes flew open in terror and panic. Maybe because I couldn’t breathe. Maybe because I’d just perfected
the mating call of the Canada goose. Or maybe, just maybe, because I’d known it was bad. Now I knew how nice just “bad” would
have been.
“Hey, hey, hey.” Colton jumped up and flew over to me. He wrapped one arm around my shoulders and squeezed my arm. “Breathe.
Come on. Nice and slow. In and out.” He began demonstrating, and I was grateful. Turns out I’d forgotten how that was supposed
to work. “In and out. That’s good. Keep going. In...” Deep breath in. “And out...” Deep breath out.
He repeated the process several more times for me, and I tried to focus on a framed photo of his family on the table in front
of us as he patted my back gently. They were at Disney World. Colton’s wife and their three daughters, who looked to be preteens
at the time, laughing at Colton, who was wearing one of those Goofy hats with the ears hanging low and two buckteeth protruding
from the cap. The Epcot ball glistened behind them, but nothing else was happening in the picture.
Those laughs. That ridiculous smile on my boss’s face. It was all fueled by the five of them being together.
“I bet you’re a really good dad.” My voice was raspy and my breath ragged, but I felt like I was in control once again. Of breathing, anyway.
He followed my eyes and then smiled as he patted me on the back one final time and pulled away. He guided me back to my spot
on the couch and said, “I hope so.”
“How old are your daughters now?”
He sighed. “Skye is twenty-four, Roma is twenty-two, and Lizzie’s nineteen. She’s finishing up her first year at University
of Southern California.”
I looked at him in surprise. Maybe because I hadn’t known—I’d certainly never bothered to ask—where his daughter was going
to school. Maybe because I never would have suspected that a simple thing like the name of my alma mater would stabilize me
and give me something to grab on to. “I went to USC.” My voice sounded deceptively normal once again.
“I know.” He chuckled. “And believe me, Lizzie certainly knows.”
My eyebrow quirked. “Why’s that?”
“She wants to be you. The only thing that has made me cool to her over the course of the past couple years is the fact that I work with you.”
“Are you saying she’s going to USC because I went there?”
He shrugged. “Let’s just say it gave her one more in a compelling list of reasons to move to the complete other side of the
country rather than go to NYU or Columbia, as her mother and I would have preferred.” He grinned, and I was surprised to discover
I didn’t detect any sadness in it. “She wants to be in television news, God help her. Paige and I couldn’t argue with the
quality of the broadcast journalism program there, even if we wanted to.”
He crossed to the small refrigerator behind his desk and walked back with two bottles of water.
He leaned forward and pushed one toward me on the table as he sat back down.
I grabbed the bottle and began greedily gulping as I stared at the photo of Colton’s family.
Lizzie Passik, whom I’d never met in my life, wanted to emulate my career path.
Or at least she had , as of when her dad left for work that morning.
Hoda Kotb had gone to Virginia Tech. Maybe they were still accepting enrollments
there.
“What do I do now, Colton?”
He sighed and leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “I’m not exactly sure. I think I’ve got Bob convinced, at least
for now, that we can’t fire you.”
My eyes widened. “Bob wanted to fire me?”
He tilted his head and released a humorless chuckle. “Did you seriously not realize that would have to be an option on the
table?”
Droplets clung to my lashes as I lowered my gaze and focused my eyes on my clenched hands, squeezing my knees. “I guess I
hadn’t gotten that far yet.”
Fired. I’d never been fired in my life. In fact, I’d never left a single job I’d ever had for any reason other than to move onward
and upward to a better opportunity. But there wasn’t a better opportunity in the entire industry for someone who got fired
for cause from Sunup .
I sniffed. “Thanks for talking him out of it.”
“Trust me, it would be easier if we did fire you.” He released a heavy sigh. “But we’ve got too much invested.”
He didn’t have to explain what he meant by that. The last two months had been an endless barrage of photo shoots, interviews,
appearances, and hype. Hype, hype, hype. The stars of every show on the network had recorded promos welcoming me to Sunup . Fashion designers from all over the world sent original creations in my size, vying to get me to wear their clothes on-air.
And Ben & Jerry’s had launched Sunup Sundae just the day before. My face was on a gazillion pints of ice cream. Yeah...
a lot had been invested.
I implored him again. “Tell me what to do.”
“Bob recommended I get Hayley to fill in for you for a while. Until we sort it all out.”
I liked Hayley Oswell. She had certainly always been nicer to me than Elena had been. Hayley was smart and personable and
terrifically charismatic on-screen, and from what I had seen, she’d never used the fact that her daddy was the network president
to get her out of the hard work. I had no doubt her day on the main couch would come. I’d imagined she’d sit there with me
someday, once I replaced Mark in the top seat, and she and I would make up the first all-female seven o’clock couch in Sunup history. But it wasn’t her turn yet. And I couldn’t take a chance of getting lost in the fray during a particularly intense
game of morning television leapfrog.
I cleared my throat and sat up straight. I didn’t even take time to wipe away any stray tears on my face. There was no more
time to be wasted on any of that stuff.
“I’ll make it right, Colton. I’ll apologize. We’ll explain that the prompter was malfunctioning. That we were short-staffed
and the wrong cue got piped into 2-A.” I nodded and took a final swig of my water before setting it on the table and standing
up. Energy was suddenly coursing through my veins. Hope-fueled energy. “I mean, I know it was bad, but that was a lot to go
wrong all at once. People will understand. Don’t you think?”
I nodded again, answering my own question as I lifted my thumb to my mouth and began chewing on my fingernail for the first
time in twenty years or so. “Yeah. They’ll understand. I’m only human, after all. Who hasn’t said something they shouldn’t?
Sure, I did it on a much grander scale, but—”