CHAPTER 6
Sam Chisolm stood at the window of his office, watching the evening traffic inch forward like cattle in a jammed chute.
The folder Grace had prepared for Brenna Rease lay open on his desk, with the summary sheet of expenses atop a formidable pile of legal documents.
Sam had whistled at the total and ignored the rest.
It would be like Grace.
Proper. Well-considered. Beyond reproach.
He liked Grace—always had. From the day he interviewed her for the job, fresh out of Columbia graduate school. Even young, she’d had an air of success about her. Sam knew immediately that he wouldn’t regret hiring her. And time had proven him right.
Hard-working, intelligent, and personable, Grace advanced steadily through the ranks at EBS, learning her profession and enlisting the loyalty of a talented production team.
She led by example, and the employees liked her for it.
She had a quiet way of eliciting the best from people.
Soon, she’d attained the highest possible post, short of a vice-presidency.
Unlike so many executives at her level, Grace didn’t succeed by being a hard-ass.
She made it because she was principled. She never signed a contract she didn’t believe was fair.
Consequently she never balked at enforcing one.
Like anyone, she had needed room to learn, and made her share of mistakes.
But her errors had come from inexperience or incomplete information—never from lack of intelligence or an unwillingness to complete a difficult task.
Until recently, everyone assumed Grace would be promoted when Sam retired. Now that wasn’t so certain.
When her partner Aya and their unborn baby died, Grace came undone. She stumbled through Aya’s funeral, insisted on returning to work right away, then crashed and burned emotionally.
Sam, concerned when Grace didn’t call or show up for work one Monday, called her house repeatedly.
By evening, with still no answer, Sam drove over and found her sitting despondently in the dark, surrounded by the boxes she had packed of Aya’s things, wearing the same clothes she had worn the prior Friday.
Sam picked up the phone and booked Grace a one-way plane ticket to Maine.
Then he called Margaret and Alden Alcott and told them the time of their daughter’s arrival.
Sending Grace home to the grief counseling provided by her mother, a nationally-respected clinical psychologist, saved her life.
But getting Grace back on her feet had not restored her spark.
Grace put in her hours and delivered her work.
Her productions came in on time and within budget, as always.
At her worst, Grace could still beat many of the best in the field.
That made her a valuable asset. It did not, however, make her the unequivocal choice for the next Senior Vice-President of Documentary Programming.
And that’s what Sam wanted her to be—his successor.
However, the job demanded a dynamic leader capable of inspiring sponsors and shaping the corporate course, and Grace had lost her gloss.
The change in her hadn’t gone unnoticed.
Though it wasn’t yet common knowledge, Sam had recently given the Board of Directors notification of his retirement.
Despite Sam’s still championing Grace, some members of the Board—thinking Grace wasn’t up to the task—were discreetly wining and dining prospective candidates from outside the network.
Mercifully, Grace remained unaware of the development.
The Board, in its infinite idiocy, was leaning in favor of Hugh Driscoll.
Aya’s old boss.
Grace’s long-time adversary.
Sam snorted. Driscoll thought the sun came up just to hear him crow.
Grace and Hugh Driscoll’s productions competed directly against each other at awards time, but Sam didn’t believe professional competition was the root of the antagonism between them—Grace easily stayed on good terms with other competitors in her category.
More likely, it was connected to Aya, to how her career had never progressed as it should have, to how her face fell at the mention of Driscoll’s name, or to the near-fiasco at the National Capital Broadcasters Association a few years back when Driscoll had pitted them against each other.
Whatever the origins of the conflict—and Grace and Aya were both close-mouthed about it—one thing was clear: If Driscoll got the job, Grace would not only be humiliated, she’d soon be squeezed out.
“Sorry to keep you waiting, Sam.”
Grace stood in the open doorway, the sleeves of her silk blouse rolled up at her wrists. Sixteen hours in the edit suite had etched her face with fatigue.
She dropped into a wing chair and kneaded her neck. “We had trouble locking up the track.”
Sam walked over to the conversation area and sat in the center of the sofa, cowboy boots on the rug, arms stretched out along the back. “I just wanted to tell you that I’m putting myself out to pasture,” he said. “Retiring, in the Fall.”
Grace looked like the cheese fell off her cracker.
“I want to leave while I still have time left to ride the trails with Mae,” Sam explained.
Grace mustered a smile. “Congratulations, Sam. It’s well-deserved. Tell your wife I’m happy for her.”
At this point, Sam thought, most execs would be wondering if they were about to be promoted. Apparently, it didn’t even occur to Grace.
All the more reason to shake her the hell up. Maybe what Sam was about to do was a mistake. Maybe Grace had become a dog that wouldn’t hunt. Maybe Sam would get her killed. “There’s something I want us to do before I leave,” Sam said.
Grace gave him a tired smile. “How can I help?”
“I want to go out with flying colors. At the top of the heap, with you at the helm,” he said. “This series of yours can soar. I want you to make the pilot a knockout and get us an Emmy.”
“I don’t see how that differs from what I usually do,” she replied cautiously. “The hallway’s full of Emmys.”
Right. But none since Aya died. Grace was turning out excellent—but not extraordinary—programming.
Sam studied his boots. Grace needed a kick in the butt. Driscoll was going to walk away with her job. But Sam wasn’t going to tell her that yet. “I want you to go to Kav?ak with Brenna Rease and write the piece yourself.”
Grace jerked her head up, thunderstruck. Where the hell did that come from? she wondered. Was Sam nuts? She hadn’t written copy in years, and now all of a sudden Sam was proposing a refresher course? In a war zone? With Brenna Rease?
“You need to get back to basics. Find the fire in the story. Build it like you used to, from the ground up.”
“Geoff Garrett’s writing it.”
“I saw what he sent you today. Cow-patties, and you know it. Leaving him on this is a mistake. Your name’s on this. Mine. Brenna Rease’s, too. You’re squandering your first line with a bench-warmer.”
“I hate parachute journalism. I know nothing about Kav?ak. It would be presumptuous to write as if I did.”
“This is a story about the human heart, not politics. You have a heart. You’re qualified,” Sam retorted. “Besides, what you don’t know Brenna Rease can fill you in on.”
“She going to fill me in on getting killed, too?”
Sam lowered his voice. “I’m not ordering you to go. I’m… strongly recommending.”
“Why?”
“Because when you sold me on this segment, you said it was for Aya. Seems to me that makes it personal, not something to hand off.”
Grace twined her fingers and stared at them while Sam’s words evaporated into a long silence.
Aya had been a top producer in her own right—smart, hard-working, intuitive.
Where Grace’s work shone, Aya’s was brilliant.
But at Aya’s network, Hugh Driscoll had thwarted her for years, always promising to finance a solo project that he never let her have.
Why would he, while he could keep taking credit for her work?
How many times had Aya come home crying and headed directly to the shower to wash off the day with that wretched man?
It took years for Grace to convince her to go freelance.
The grand-daughter of interned Japanese-Americans, her family’s values had been shaped by history, and she had vowed never to be found wanting beyond the shape of her eyes.
For so long, she had believed that leaving the job at her network would be a form of failure, an inability to overcome workplace challenges.
What workplace was perfect, she’d kept saying.
It was only after years of being blocked that she’d finally accepted Grace’s offer to pay the bills while Aya set herself up as a freelancer.
The documentary on Kav?ak was to have been her first project.
“What do you say?” Sam interrupted her thoughts. “Will you go?”
Grace blinked, refocusing on Sam’s question. Yes, she finally nodded. For Aya, she would go. Grace would complete the project that would have set her free at last from Hugh Driscoll. The last woman standing on Team Tanaka-Alcott would cross the finish line for them both.