Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
Nelson
The lineup was a mess. Not actively terrible, but shapeless — the product of a newsroom that had been running without a permanent EP for weeks and was starting to fray at the edges.
The A-block was fine; the Senate confirmation hearings would carry themselves.
The B-block had a pharmaceutical-pricing package that needed stronger sourcing.
And the C-block was a human-interest segment about a rescue dog that had, frankly, no business on a primetime news broadcast. This meant someone in the editorial meeting had clearly panicked and needed to fill time.
I made three notes on my phone. I'd raise them in the pre-show meeting, because if I didn't, no one would.
Harry was waiting outside my dressing room with a garment bag and a look that suggested he had opinions about my evening.
"The charcoal or the navy?" he asked, holding up the bag.
"Charcoal. The navy was last night."
"Charcoal it is. Coffee's on your desk. Brad wants you at five for hair and makeup." He paused. "And Bruce has been walking the halls like a man about to be audited."
"Bruce always looks like that."
"More than usual. I'd swear he's about to strangle himself with his tie."
I set my bag down and turned to look at him. "Is there something I should know?"
Harry shrugged with the carefully calibrated innocence of someone who was not entirely innocent. "Just an observation. You pay me to observe."
"I pay you to assist."
"Assisting includes observing." He hung the garment bag on the rack. "Five o'clock. Hair and makeup with Brad."
He left. I sat at my desk and read the lineup one more time, made two further notes on the pharmaceutical package, then changed into the charcoal jacket — structured, sharp, a faintly lighter thread in the weave that caught the studio lights as depth rather than pattern.
After hair and makeup I did my own final check in the mirror.
Everything in place, everything where it should be.
At 6:40, I walked to the studio.
The set was the same as every night — the anchor desk gleaming under a cathedral of lights, the cameras locked on their exact marks, the floor crew moving through their pre-show choreography with the practiced ease of people who'd done it a thousand times.
Marla was already in her chair, adjusting her earpiece with one hand and scrolling her phone with the other. She looked up as I approached.
"Nelson," she said. "You look like you're about to run a country."
"Small one, maybe." I sat, positioned my water glass exactly seven inches from the edge of the desk, and reached for my earpiece.
I glanced at the glass wall of the control room.
Not something I usually did — the control room was background, machinery, not my concern until something went wrong.
But Harry's comment about Bruce had snagged somewhere at the back of my mind, and I found my eyes drifting toward the blue-lit glow behind the glass.
Someone was sitting in the EP chair.
It had been empty since Greg Fletcher's departure.
Various producers had rotated through on a temporary basis, none lasting more than a night or two before retreating to their regular posts.
But this person wasn't one of the rotation.
I could tell from the posture alone — whoever it was sat in that chair like they intended to stay.
And there was something about the shape of them: lean, straight-backed, auburn hair catching the control room light—
I looked away. The floor director was coming over for the final check, and I had a broadcast to run.
"Mic check, Nelson," the audio tech said, and I leaned forward and spoke my test line — "Good evening, I'm Nelson Mackenzie" — flat and colorless, saving the real voice for when the cameras went live.
The earpiece crackled. I adjusted it.
"Two minutes," the floor director called.
I straightened my jacket and fixed on Camera Two.
One breath, held, released slowly through the nose.
The ritual. The same ritual before every broadcast for years — the thing that took Nelson the person and put him away somewhere safe, and brought Nelson the anchor to the surface: steady, unbreakable, cold.
The countdown began. Ten. Nine. Eight.
The theme music rolled. The graphic spun. The red light on Camera Two ignited.
"Good evening. I'm Nelson Mackenzie with Marla St. John, and this is Beacon News Tonight."
I delivered the opening flawlessly, because I always delivered the opening flawlessly. The Senate confirmation hearings. The committee chairman's opening statement. The key moments from today's testimony. Copy, pivot, toss to package. Seamless.
The package ran and I took a sip of water. Normal. Everything perfectly normal.
The package ended. I turned back to Camera Two.
And then a voice came through my earpiece.
"Nelson, we're going to skip the planned toss and go straight to the analyst. Camera One for the two-shot."
The voice was cool. Professional. Measured. The voice of someone who knew exactly what they were doing in a control room, who'd made a fast editorial call and communicated it with clean precision.
It was also a voice I would have recognized in a crowded stadium, in a thunderstorm, in my sleep — hell, in my grave.
My hand tightened on the desk.
The movement was small — imperceptible, probably, to anyone watching. My fingers curled around the edge and pressed down, hard, the way you press on something when the floor has dropped out from under you and you need to confirm that at least one solid surface still exists.
Jimmy.
The name hit me like a freight train wearing silk gloves. One word, detonating silently in the center of my chest.
Camera Two's red light was on. Fourteen million people were watching.
The toss to the analyst was three seconds away, and the man in my earpiece — the man who had left me with a half-empty apartment and a note that said he didn't recognize me anymore — had just handed me a direction, and I had to take it.
I couldn't answer. I couldn't even turn toward the glass.
Whatever was happening in my chest, it had to stay there, because the only thing I was permitted to do on live television was obey the voice in my ear.
I turned to Camera One and delivered the toss with the seamless authority of a man whose world had not just cracked down the middle. "Joining us now is Dr. Alan Whitfield of the Brookings Institution. Dr. Whitfield, what should we make of today's testimony?"
My voice didn't shake. My expression didn't change.
The audience saw nothing, because I'd spent years building a version of myself that could take a bullet on live television and deliver the next line of copy without flinching.
But behind my ribs, something was happening that I had no name for and no defense against.
The analyst talked. I nodded at the appropriate intervals and asked a follow-up I generated from pure muscle memory, because my brain was no longer in the studio.
My brain was in a fourth-floor walk-up off Morningside, unlocking a door and finding the apartment half-empty and a silence so loud it had echoed for years.
"Nelson, ten seconds on the analyst, then toss to Marla for the weather segment."
There it was again. That voice. Inside my head.
Calm, professional, and absolutely devastating — because the last time that voice had been inside my head it had been saying I don't recognize you anymore, and now it was saying toss to Marla for the weather segment, and my body didn't know the difference.
My body heard Jimmy and responded the way it had always responded to Jimmy — with everything, all at once, every nerve ending firing in a way I'd spent years learning to suppress.
I wrapped the analyst and tossed to Marla.
To her credit, Marla didn't miss a beat, though I caught her glancing at me sideways during her lead-in, which meant something in my face had shifted.
Marla, who'd been on television long enough to read a co-anchor the way a sailor reads the stars, had noticed.
The broadcast went on. Jimmy's voice went on.
Every direction precise, every call sharp, and I hated that I noticed, because it meant I was listening to him with the wrong part of my brain — not the professional part that evaluated editorial competence, but the part that catalogued the texture of his voice the way you catalogue a song you used to love and can't stop hearing.
Jimmy was good. Infuriatingly, undeniably good.
The C-block rescue-dog segment I'd written off as filler?
He restructured it on the fly — cut twenty seconds, added a toss to a live reporter at the shelter, turned a fluff piece into something that almost resembled journalism.
I felt the improvement in real time, the way you feel a car shift into a higher gear, and I wanted to throw something.
I resisted the urge and delivered the copy and hit every mark.
I was Nelson Mackenzie, and millions of people were watching.
Not one of them knew, or cared, that the voice in my ear belonged to the man who had broken my heart so thoroughly at twenty-two that I had rebuilt my entire personality around the wreckage.
"Nelson, thirty seconds to close. You've got the outro, then hold for three on the graphic."
I delivered the final line, looked into Camera Two, and held for three seconds while the graphic played and the theme music swelled.
I did not blink. I did not breathe. And I did not look at the glass wall of the control room, where my ex was sitting in the EP chair like he had every right to be there.
The red light died.
"Clear!"
I unclipped my mic and stood. My hands were steady. My face was neutral. Everything about me, from the outside, looked exactly the way it was supposed to look.
Marla was watching me. I could feel it.
"Good show," she said carefully. "New EP seems sharp."
I picked up my water glass, took a sip I didn't taste, set it back exactly seven inches from the edge, and walked off the set.
Harry appeared at my elbow within four steps, matching my pace, saying nothing for exactly as long as it took to clear the studio floor and reach the hallway.
Then, quietly, without looking at me:
"So. New EP."
My jaw was tight. Every muscle in my face struggled to stay neutral, and Harry could see it too, because Harry saw everything. Right now he was watching the most controlled man in cable news hold himself together through what appeared to be sheer force of will.
"Harry."
"Yes?"
"Find out who he is. Everything. Résumé, byline, how Bruce found him, when he was hired. I want it on my desk in twenty minutes."
"Nelson—"
"Twenty minutes."
He left without another word. I walked the rest of the hallway alone, my footsteps clicking against the floor in a rhythm that sounded like a countdown.
I reached my dressing room, closed the door, and locked it.
Then I stood in front of the mirror and looked at the man staring back — black hair, blue eyes, charcoal suit, flawless under the lights — and forced the mask to hold.
I watched it hold, the way it had held through every broadcast and every crisis and every empty night in an apartment that looked like nobody lived there. The mask held. It always did.
But underneath it, in the place I never let anyone see, something was shaking.
Jimmy's fucking voice in my head. Jimmy Goodman was in my control room, in my building, in my broadcast, and the walls between us had just become the thinnest barrier in the world.
I pressed both palms flat against the vanity and leaned forward until my forehead nearly touched the mirror.
I did not cry. Nelson Mackenzie never cries.