Chapter 10
Newsbreak
ZOE
I’m in my Jeep at eight forty-five in the morning, heading toward a house I officially lived in for four days before staying with my sister, which is wild. My toothbrush is sitting on a marble vanity in a guest bathroom that’s bigger than my old kitchen.
The sky is doing that pale, scrubbed-clean thing it does in winter even though it’s spring. I rehearse my mantras out loud, because that’s who I am now, apparently.
“This is professional. This is a business arrangement. Jonah Holt is a client.” A client who happens to be devastatingly attractive but is also off-limits and not my type. Who’s also not into me, as he indicated by laughing in my face. “I’m here for Eli and only Eli.”
I’m rounding the curve onto Pinecrest when my phone explodes through the car speakers, and the name Mel Cho lights up the dashboard.
Mel and I worked together at W2Beaver, back when she was a producer and already destined for bigger things.
She left for Seattle two years ago, and the last time we talked was a Christmas card with a photo of her in front of the Space Needle.
In other words, Mel doesn’t call to chitchat. Mel calls because Mel wants something.
I tap accept.
“Lane.” Her voice fills the car, all confidence. “Tell me you haven’t already taken another job.”
“Good morning to you too, Cho.”
“Yes, fine, hi, how are you, you look great, I’m sure. Now answer the question.”
I laugh. “I haven’t taken another job. Technically.”
“Technically?”
“Define job.”
“Zoe.”
I drum my fingers on the steering wheel. The road blurs past—pine trees, mailboxes, that one weird mid-century house with the giant ceramic frog out front is coming up, just around the corner. “I’m nannying while I build out my podcast.”
“Mm-hmm.” Mel tsk-tsks. “Listen. KISL just lost Brennan to maternity leave, and she’s not coming back.
They want someone in the EP chair on the morning block by mid-April.
I told my GM about how you pulled together that volunteer firefighter piece in a single afternoon when the actual reporter no-showed. He wants to talk to you.”
I don’t say anything. I can’t. My foot is still on the gas, my hands are still on the wheel, but my brain has lifted out of my body and is hovering somewhere over Seattle, looking down at a corner office I’ve wanted since I was twenty-two years old.
“Zoe? Did you die? Tell me you didn’t die. I didn’t have time to find another candidate.”
“I’m here.” I croak. “Mel, that’s the morning block.”
“Yep.”
“That’s a real budget.”
“Yep.”
“That’s national affiliate—”
“Three million viewers a quarter, Lane, I know, I work here. Do you want it or do you want to pack sack lunches?”
I pass the frog house.
“I need to think about it,” I hear myself say. “This is a sensitive situation. Kid and dad just reunited.”
“I know the story, Zoe. All of Earth knows the story. It’s sad, but there are loads of amazing nannies.”
I don’t answer, and Mel sighs the sigh of a woman who’s heard every excuse in the book. “Seventy-two hours, until Saturday. That’s what I can give you. After that, I have to move to candidate two, and candidate two is Jenna Park, who is a hack but a very fast hack.”
“Seventy-two hours.”
“Don’t make me regret this, Lane. I’m sticking my neck out.”
“I know. Thank you. Really.”
“Yeah, yeah. Call me back ASAP.”
She hangs up with the abruptness of a person whose time is worth more than mine. The car goes quiet, and the quiet is enormous.
Seattle.
The morning block.
National reach. Real news. The kind of work that wins things. The kind of work that matters.
I should be euphoric. Instead, I feel like someone has parked a small piano on my chest.
I think about The Zoe Show, which currently has eleven episodes, one of which is me reviewing diner pancakes around Dickens, and the math doesn’t math. Seattle is a sure thing. Zoe Knows is a gamble.
And then there’s Jonah and Eli.
I take the last two turns on autopilot. By the time I pull into Jonah’s driveway, the sun has cleared the ridge and is doing that gold-on-the-pavement thing that real estate photographers fake with filters.
The kitchen light is on. Through the big front window, I can see a tall shape moving around, hair sticking up in directions.
My chest tightens, and it has nothing to do with morning blocks or three million viewers.
I will examine that exactly never. Moving on.
I let myself in by entering a punch code, which still feels so fancy, and I’m met by the smell of rich coffee.
“Morning.” I drop my bag by the door.
Jonah’s at his new espresso machine, holding the milk frother. In sweats and a long-sleeved Trout shirt, he looks like a man who’s been hit by several trucks. “This thing hates me.”
“That’s because you’re holding it wrong. Move.”
He obliges, and I take the wand, drop it into the pitcher, and steam the milk while he watches me with the bleary expression of a man who’s not slept in one hundred years.
“How was last night?” I don’t look at him because if I do, I’ll lose my nerve about Seattle.
“Quiet.” He scrubs a hand down his face. “Too quiet, then weird, then bad, then okay, then weird again.”
“That tracks.”
“We ate pizza and didn’t talk. I put on the first Avengers and that helped for a while. Then he asked me about God, what happens when you die, and whether his mom can find him in this house, and I bombed all three of those.”
I tap off the steam. “Sounds right on par.”
He stops, and his jaw works. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“Of course you don’t.” I pour his milk into the espresso, then slide the cup across the counter to him. “Nobody knows what they’re doing on day one.”
He eyes me over the rim of the mug, and the grumpy hockey player’s been replaced by a tired man with a kid. “Thanks for coming.”
“Don’t get sappy, Holt, I’ve been here twelve seconds.”
He almost smiles before he drinks his coffee. “Game is at eight, but I don’t know how late I’ll be getting home afterward. The new defenseman stuff is—” He waves a hand. “Whatever. I’ll be back.”
“We’ll be fine. Go.”
He nods, then pauses, then turns and goes upstairs without another word, and I hear his feet on the hardwood. A minute later he comes back down holding a Lego box approximately the size of a seventy-two-inch TV.
The Death Star. The actual Death Star. The kind of Lego set that has its own zip code.
“Is that—”
“I ordered it.” He shifts the box from one arm to the other. “It’s something Eli and I can do together. Eventually. When he wants to.”
“Yeah,” I say softly. “It is.”
Eli appears at the top of the stairs in pajamas that are too big for him, hair flat on one side, Flash action figure in hand. He looks at his father. He looks at the box. He creeps down the stairs like a scared squirrel.
“I know you love Star Wars.” Jonah holds out the box. “And I thought… you know. If you wanted.”
Eli takes it. He’s careful with it, both hands, the way you’d hold something breakable. He stares at the picture on the front. “Thank you.” His voice is quiet. “I’ll put it in my room.”
He doesn’t open it. He doesn’t ask if they can build it. He carries it to his room and doesn’t come back down.
After Jonah heads upstairs and tells Eli goodbye, he’s out the door. His SUV hums to life, then fades, and the house gets quiet in the way it does after someone leaves and a child is still in it.
I climb the stairs and knock on Eli’s open door. He’s sitting on the floor next to the Lego box, not touching it, just looking at it.
“Hey, Eli.”
“Hi.”
“You want breakfast, or do you want to skip straight to lunch prep?”
He gazes up at me, and for the first time this morning, his face flickers with interest. “What kind of lunch?”
“Cook’s choice. You’re the cook. I’m support staff.”
He stands. “Mac and cheese.”
“From a box?”
The look he gives me is so withering I almost apologize. “From scratch. You need a roux.”
“Oh my God, I’m being out-cheffed by a fourth-grader. Lead the way.”
In the kitchen he pulls a stool over to the stove without asking, like he’s done it in a hundred kitchens, which I guess he has. He opens cabinets and finds the saucepan he wants. He measures milk into a Pyrex.
“Sharp cheddar.” He holds out a hand like a surgeon waiting for a scalpel. “And do you have parm?”
I check the fridge. “Yup. Jonah has good cheese.”
“Good. You need parm. Otherwise it tastes flat.”
“Noted.”
He works the roux like a pro. Butter. Flour.
Whisk, whisk, whisk. He warms the milk separately—“cold milk seizes,” he tells me, very serious—and pours it in while I hold the pan.
He grates the cheese in three stages, adds the parmesan without a prompt, a tiny pinch of nutmeg, then black pepper, then salt, tasting after each one.
I don’t say anything. Not, Did you learn to cook this from your mom? Did you learn this because you had to, or was this special time you shared together? I just hand him spoons and bowls and watch a nine-year-old move through a kitchen like he owns it.
We eat at the island. It’s the best mac and cheese I’ve ever had, and I tell him so, and he ducks his head over his bowl and almost smiles.
“You said you played chess,” he says after.
“I did. In high school. I was a champion.”
“Of what?”
“Of my high school?”
He puts down his spoon. “I’ll do the dishes if you set up the board.”
I don’t want to do dishes. “You’ve got a deal.”
“Can I be black?”
I shrug. “You’re nine, you can be whatever color you want.”
“I’m black.”
I’m beaten in eighteen minutes.
Not “almost beaten.” Beaten. Checkmated.
He pins my queen on move twelve, and I never recover.
He plays without hesitation, his small finger on the top of each piece like he’s just nudging it into the place it was always going to go.
When he says “checkmate” he doesn’t even look smug.
He looks disappointed, like he was hoping it’d be more interesting.