Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
Nelson
Harry had the file on my desk in fourteen minutes.
I knew because I'd been watching the clock on my dressing-room wall since I walked in, counting the seconds in the same part of my brain that counted beats between camera cues, and when he knocked twice and let himself in — Harry always knocked twice; once was the janitor, three was Bruce — he was carrying a manila folder thicker than I'd expected.
He set it on my desk and stepped back, arms folded, leaning against the door frame. He was watching me the way you watch someone approach a door they might not want to open.
"You already read it," I said.
"I skimmed."
"And?"
"And I think you should read it yourself."
I opened the folder.
The first page was a printout of the Beacon HR onboarding file.
Name: James A. Goodman.
Title: Executive Producer, Beacon News Tonight.
Hired by: Bruce Coleman, VP Programming.
The photo was a standard corporate headshot — auburn hair, green eyes, the ghost of freckles across the nose, an expression trying to be professional and not quite succeeding, because Jimmy's face had never been good at hiding what he was thinking.
I stared at the photo longer than I should have.
The second page was a résumé. It was extensive.
Undergraduate degree in journalism from Columbia University.
Thirteen years of international documentary work, published under the byline J.
Goodman. Assignments in Syria, Yemen, South Sudan, Mexico, the Philippines.
A Peabody at thirty-one for a documentary on civilian casualties that had triggered congressional hearings.
Head of an independent documentary unit for three years, until its recent dissolution.
The third page was a collection of press clippings Harry had printed from various journalism outlets.
Reviews of his work. Profiles. An interview in the Columbia Journalism Review where he was asked about the state of American media, and his answer — which I read twice — was a precise, articulate dismantling of everything cable news represented.
He called networks like ours "entertainment machines masquerading as journalism.
" He said the twenty-four-hour news cycle had "replaced depth with volume and courage with calculation. "
Jimmy might as well have been talking directly about me.
I closed the folder.
Harry was still watching me. "Nelson."
"Bruce hired a man who has spent his entire career publicly attacking cable news.
" My voice was level. Controlled. The voice I used when I was at my most dangerous, which Harry knew, which was why he hadn't moved from the door frame.
"A man with no producing experience in live broadcast television.
A documentary journalist." I shut my eyes a moment. "To run my show."
"He's a Peabody winner," Harry said carefully.
"Jimmy Goodman is a Peabody-winning documentary journalist who thinks this network is an entertainment machine. He said that. In the Columbia Journalism Review."
"I saw that."
"And Bruce hired him to produce the flagship primetime broadcast."
"It appears so."
I stood, picking up the folder.
"What else?" I asked, because he was still in the door frame, and Harry only lingered when there was something he hadn't said yet.
He hesitated. Harry never hesitated. It was like watching a clock skip a second.
"Columbia," he said. "Same school, same years as you. Journalism program."
The room went very still.
"You knew him," Harry breathed. It wasn't a question.
I held his gaze for three full seconds. I didn't confirm or deny, because confirming meant opening a door I wasn't ready to open, and denying meant lying to the only person in this building I didn't usually lie to.
"Thank you, Harry. That will be all."
He left. Harry always knew when to leave. It was one of his finest qualities.
I sat back down and opened the folder again. The headshot stared up at me. Auburn hair. Green eyes. Freckles.
Jimmy.
Thirteen years of silence. Thirteen years since he left that note on our coffee table.
I'd spent those years building myself into something uncrackable, untouchable, unreachable — and Bruce Coleman, in his infinite talent for avoiding consequences, had hired the one man on earth who had already proven he could rattle me.
I closed the folder, set both palms on the desk, and took a deep breath. Held it. Released it through my nose.
Then I picked up the folder and walked out of my dressing room.
* * *
The control room was still lit when I reached it.
Through the glass I could see the overnight monitors cycling through feeds, the skeleton crew at their stations, and in the center — in the EP chair, in jeans and a blazer and a headset, reviewing something on a screen with the focused intensity of a man who had no intention of leaving — Jimmy Goodman.
The control room lights caught his hair — auburn, smoother than I remembered, deliberately styled in a way the Jimmy I'd known at twenty-two would have found absurd.
He was leaning forward slightly, chin propped on one hand, studying the screen with the same expression he'd worn in the editing bay at Columbia when he was cutting a story he cared about.
I hadn't seen that expression in years, and it nearly stopped me in the doorway.
I did not let it stop me.
I opened the door. The sound was small — a click, a shift of air — but every head in the room turned.
Two overnight producers and the technical assistant monitoring the feeds.
All of them registered who I was and went very, very still, because Nelson Mackenzie never came to the control room.
The control room came to Nelson Mackenzie, or it didn't come at all.
Jimmy turned slowly, the way you turn when you've been expecting something and want to meet it on your own terms.
Our eyes met.
Thirteen years of memories compressed into a single second.
Every fight, every kiss, every whispered plan about the famous journalists we'd become.
The note. The empty apartment, and the silence that followed, vast and terrible, stretching across years like a wound that never closed.
I hadn't closed it. Closing it would mean it had healed, and it hadn't healed.
I was standing in a doorway looking at the man who had wounded me — auburn hair, green eyes, freckles — and he looked—
He looked like Jimmy.
Not the version I'd built in my head over the years — the villain, the coward, the man who'd run away from us.
This was just Jimmy. Older. Tired around the eyes.
Handsome in the way he'd always been handsome, the kind that crept up on you and then wouldn't leave.
Sitting in a chair in my building, wearing a headset, looking at me with those green eyes that had never once in their entire existence managed to hide a single thing he was feeling.
Right now they were feeling a lot. I could see it all — the fear, the defiance, the guilt, something underneath all of it that I refused to identify, because identifying it would be dangerous.
The room was silent.
I walked forward and stopped at the edge of the EP desk — close enough that Jimmy had to tilt his chin up slightly to hold my gaze.
He was seated. I stayed standing. I let the room arrange itself around the fact of me the way it always did, and I did not offer him the courtesy of sitting down to meet him at eye level. The geometry was deliberate.
I set the manila folder on the desk between us. The sound was very small and very final.
"Mr. Goodman," I said. My voice was cool, professional, and absolutely steady. "I'm Nelson Mackenzie. I anchor this broadcast."
Jimmy held my gaze without flinching. I'll give him that — he did not flinch.
"I know who you are," he said. His voice was even. Almost calm. But I could hear it — the faintest tremor underneath, the seismic activity below the surface — and I knew he could hear it too.
"I'm sure you do." I let the words sit a beat. The overnight producers were staring at their screens with the desperate concentration of people trying to be invisible. "I understand you've been hired as executive producer of my show."
"Your show."
"My show. Is that going to be a problem?"
Something flashed in his eyes. There it was — the Jimmy I remembered. The one who never backed down, who argued about everything. The man who'd once told me with a straight face that PBS was where real journalists worked.
"No," he said. "It's not going to be a problem."
"Good." I tapped the folder once. "Because I've read your file. Impressive résumé. Extraordinary field work. No live broadcast producing experience of any kind."
"I ran a documentary unit for three years."
"Documentary is not live television, Mr. Goodman.
Documentary is controlled. Edited. You shoot, you cut, you polish.
Live television is uncontrolled. It breaks, and often it surprises you.
Unlike documentaries, it doesn't wait for you to find the perfect frame.
" I paused. "Tonight's broadcast was competent. The C-block restructure was—"
I stopped. I wasn't going to say good, because there was no way in hell I was giving him that. Not here, with witnesses.
"—adequate," I finished. "Adequate is not the standard of this broadcast. This show has won eleven Emmys and holds the highest primetime ratings in cable news.
I will not see it diminished because Bruce Coleman decided to hire someone without consulting the person who sits behind that desk every night. "
Jimmy's jaw set, and he sat straighter in the chair — which I recognized as Jimmy's combat posture, the physical equivalent of planting a flag.
"The C-block was more than adequate," he said.
His voice was steady now. The tremor was gone, replaced by something harder.
"The rescue-dog segment was filler, and you know it.
I turned it into something watchable in under a minute.
Your audience noticed. Your crew noticed.
" He glanced at Ray's empty chair, then back at me. "I think you noticed too."
The room held its breath.
I stared at him. He looked at me. And for one terrible, suspended moment the thirteen years between us collapsed entirely, and we were twenty-two again — standing in our tiny kitchen, arguing about what mattered and what didn't, neither of us willing to give an inch.
I blinked first. I hated that I blinked first.
"Tomorrow's editorial meeting is at four p.m.," I said. "I expect a complete lineup by three. No filler. No dead weight. If you're going to produce this show, you're going to produce it at the level this show demands."
"Understood."
"Goodnight, Mr. Goodman."
"Goodnight, Mr. Mackenzie."
I turned and walked out of the control room. Across the newsroom, down the hallway, past the darkened studio where the anchor desk sat empty under switched-off lights. My footsteps were the only sound.
I didn't stop until I was in my dressing room with the door locked and my back against it.
My hands were shaking.
Not visibly. But I felt it — a fine, deep tremor running from my wrists through my fingers, the kind of shaking that happens when the adrenaline has nowhere left to go.
Jimmy pushed back. Of course he pushed back. It was the thing I'd loved most about him and the thing that had destroyed us. He was still doing it, thirteen years later, sitting in a chair in my control room with his new hair and his old eyes.
I think he noticed it too.
When he restructured the C-block, I'd noticed the precision of his editorial calls, the sharpness of his instincts. I'd noticed, and I'd said adequate, because the truth — which was brilliant — was not something I was capable of giving Jimmy Goodman. Not tonight. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
I pressed my palms against the door and leaned my head back until it touched the wood.
Tomorrow Jimmy would be here again. His sharp voice would be in my earpiece, and his face would be behind the glass wall, and we'd do this again — the professionalism, the subtext, the careful dance of two men who knew each other's bodies and voices and weaknesses and were pretending they didn't.
What happens when he speaks in my ear tomorrow?