Chapter 10
Chapter Ten
Jimmy
I delivered it early, because if Nelson Mackenzie wanted to set a test, I intended to pass it with a margin wide enough to be insulting.
I'd been in the building all morning, working through the overnight feeds and a carafe of coffee Ray set on the EP desk without being asked.
The lineup was clean. Three blocks, no filler, no dead weight — his words from last night, thrown back at him in the language of a show tighter than anything my predecessor Greg Fletcher had produced during his ill-fated tenure.
The A-block led with the Supreme Court's upcoming ruling on executive authority — strong, timely, the kind of story that rewarded preparation.
The B-block had an investigative package on defense-contractor lobbying that I'd pulled from the network's research desk and rebuilt with two additional sources.
The C-block was a live interview with a whistleblower from the pharmaceutical-pricing story Nelson's previous EP had run as a limp package two weeks ago.
No rescue dogs. No filler. Nothing Nelson Mackenzie could remotely call adequate.
I left the printed lineup on his desk with a sticky note that read, in my neatest handwriting:
Lineup for tonight. Three blocks. No dead weight. —J. Goodman
The sticky note was petty. I was aware it was petty, and I didn't give a damn.
* * *
The editorial meeting was held in a glass-walled conference room on the fourth floor that the staff called the Fishbowl, because anyone walking past could see exactly who was getting eaten alive by the sharks inside.
I arrived at 3:55. The room was already half full — writers, producers, the graphics lead, a couple of PAs hovering near the back wall with tablets and anxious expressions.
Ray was in the corner, arms folded, radiating the patient stoicism of a man who'd survived hundreds of these meetings and expected nothing from any of them.
Nelson walked in at exactly four o'clock.
He was in a black suit with a red tie. It was the wardrobe equivalent of a declaration of war, and every person in the room felt it.
He carried a single sheet of paper — my lineup, I realized — a coffee cup, and nothing else.
No laptop, no tablet, no phone. Just the paper and the absolute certainty that he was the most important person in any room he entered.
He sat at the head of the table without greeting anyone, placed the lineup flat in front of him, and smoothed it once with his palm — the way you smooth a tablecloth before setting it on fire.
"Mr. Goodman," he said, without looking up. "Walk us through it."
Every eye in the room swiveled to me. I was standing at the far end of the table — a deliberate choice, because I wasn't going to sit at his end. But I also wasn't going to sit in the middle of the pack like a staffer. I was the EP. I'd earned the real estate.
"A-block: Supreme Court ruling on executive authority.
We've got the oral arguments from this morning, two legal analysts booked — one conservative, one progressive — and a correspondent at the courthouse for the live standup.
I want to open with audio from the chief justice's questioning, which was sharp enough to carry the top. "
Nelson's eyes moved across the page. He said nothing.
"B-block: investigative package on defense-contractor lobbying. I rebuilt it from the research desk's original draft with two additional sources, including a former Pentagon procurement officer who's on the record. Four minutes, forty seconds."
"Four-forty is long for a B-block package," Nelson said. His voice was neutral. Clinical. A surgeon examining an X-ray.
"The sourcing justifies the length. Cut it to three minutes and we lose the procurement officer, and without him the package is just allegation and inference. With him, it's journalism."
A beat of silence. The writers were watching Nelson. The PAs were watching me. Ray was watching both of us with the quiet fascination of a man at a tennis match.
"Four-forty stays," Nelson said. "If the sourcing holds."
I felt something loosen in my chest. I didn't let it show.
"C-block: live interview with a pharmaceutical-pricing whistleblower. Dr. Renata Vasquez, former VP of pricing strategy at Pinnacle Pharmaceuticals. She's on the record, she's prepped, and she's willing to name names."
This got a reaction. Not from Nelson — Nelson's face didn't change — but from the rest of the room. The writers exchanged glances. One of the PAs actually leaned forward. Even Ray uncrossed his arms.
"How did you get her?" Nelson asked. The question came at me with the laser focus of a man who knew whistleblowers didn't just fall into your lap.
"I called her."
"You called her." Nelson's left eye twitched.
"I've been a journalist for quite a while now, Mr. Mackenzie.
I have sources. Dr. Vasquez was a contact from a documentary I produced on drug pricing in 2019.
She's been waiting for someone to put her on a platform with a real audience.
" I paused. "Fourteen million people seemed like a real enough audience. "
The room went very still. I had just, in front of the entire editorial staff, reminded Nelson Mackenzie that I had something his previous EPs didn't: a Rolodex built from years of investigative work in the field.
I hadn't meant it as a flex. It was simply the truth.
But in this room, with this man, the truth had edges.
Nelson studied me a long moment. I held his gaze. Those ice-blue eyes were doing the thing they did — the thing I remembered from classroom debates at Columbia — where they went very still and very focused, and you couldn't tell whether he was about to agree with you or destroy you.
"The whistleblower stays," he said. "But I want to review the pre-interview notes before broadcast. If the sourcing is soft, we pull it."
"The sourcing isn't soft."
"Then you'll have no problem with me reviewing it."
It wasn't a question. I nodded once. "I'll have notes on your desk by five."
Nelson stood. The meeting was over because Nelson decided it was over. He picked up my lineup — without the sticky note, I noticed, which meant he'd read it — and walked out without another word.
The room exhaled. Writers started talking. The PAs scattered. Ray caught my eye from the corner and gave me a look I was learning to translate:
Not bad, new guy.
I allowed myself one slow breath. I'd won the B-block and the C-block. Nelson had kept the A-block unchanged, which meant it was strong enough that even he couldn't find fault. Three for three.
It didn't feel like winning. It felt like round one.
* * *
The broadcast started at seven, and for the first fifteen minutes, everything was professional.
I sat in the EP chair with my headset on and my eyes on the monitors and I did my job.
I called the shots, talked to Ray, managed the graphics queue and the live feeds and the timing, and I spoke into Nelson's earpiece with the calm, measured precision of a man who was absolutely not thinking about the fact that his voice was inside his ex-boyfriend's head.
Nelson was flawless. He delivered the A-block with the authority of a man born to sit behind an anchor desk, and when the legal analysts disagreed on air — sharply, almost combatively — he moderated the exchange with the kind of surgical control that made you understand why millions tuned in every night.
He didn't raise his voice, because he didn't need to.
Nelson Mackenzie at a whisper was more commanding than most people at full volume.
The B-block package ran. Four minutes and forty seconds. I watched Marla deliver the story on the monitor and felt the old pride — the pride of a story well told — and I let myself think, just for a second:
This is good. No — this is fucking excellent.
Then the C-block arrived, and everything got complicated.
Dr. Vasquez was live via satellite. The interview was Nelson's — he'd reviewed my prep notes and added three questions of his own, which were annoyingly sharp — and for the first two minutes it ran like a textbook segment.
Vasquez was poised, articulate, damning.
Nelson guided her through the story with the patient precision of a man who knew exactly when to press and when to let a source breathe.
Then Vasquez dropped a name that wasn't in the prep notes. A sitting senator, implicated in collusion with Pinnacle's lobbying arm.
The control room went electric. Ray sat up straighter. The graphics lead looked at me with wide eyes. This was live television doing what live television did best — breaking open in real time, uncontrolled, surprising everyone, including the people making it.
I had a choice. Pull back — cut to a package, buy time, let legal review the claim before we aired it. Safe. Responsible. What Greg Fletcher would have done.
Or lean in.
I pressed the earpiece button. "Stay with her, Nelson. Let her finish."
On Monitor Three, I saw it. The smallest shift.
Nelson's chin lifted a fraction of an inch.
His shoulders settled. It wasn't a flinch or a blush — it was something subtler, something only someone who'd learned to read Nelson Mackenzie's body would have caught.
He'd heard me, and processed the direction.
And in the half-second before he responded to Vasquez, his cadence shifted — just barely, a degree warmer, a degree slower — as if my voice had physically adjusted something in his delivery.
He stayed with Vasquez, asking the follow-up that needed asking — clean, direct, giving the source room to either substantiate or retreat. Vasquez substantiated. The segment ran two minutes over, and it was the best television I'd seen in years.
When the broadcast cut to commercial, Ray pulled off his headset and turned to me. "That was a hell of a call."
"That was the source making the call," I said. "I just didn't get in the way."
"Fletch would've cut to the package."
"I'm not Fletch."
Ray looked at me a beat longer than was strictly comfortable, then put his headset back on. "Yeah," he said, mostly to himself. "You're definitely not Fletch."
The broadcast closed cleanly. Nelson delivered the outro, held for three on the graphic, and unclipped his mic. He stood, and didn't look at the control room.
But right before he turned to walk off set — right at the edge of the moment, in the space between the red light dying and the floor director calling clear — his hand went to his earpiece.
Just for a second. Not to adjust it. Not to remove it.
Just to touch it, the way you touch something that has left an impression you're not ready to examine.
I saw it on Monitor Three.
"It doesn't mean a thing," I whispered.