Chapter 23
Chapter Twenty-Three
Nelson
I was almost to my dressing room when Marla fell into step beside me.
She'd taken her time, the way she always did. Unclipped her mic, exchanged a few words with a floor director, adjusted a ring. Marla St. John didn't rush for anything, including the slow implosion of a co-anchor three feet to her left.
"Good show tonight," she said.
"Thank you, Marla."
"The Mercer thing was exceptional. SEC filings. The man's own numbers. That was a surgical takedown, Mackenzie."
"I appreciate it." I reached for my dressing room door.
Marla put her hand on the doorframe. Not blocking me. Just staying.
"I've never seen you look at the control room window during a broadcast," she said, her voice dropping to a register that was somehow more unsettling than if she'd shouted.
"Not once. The camera is there." She pointed left.
"The window is over there." She pointed right.
"You never look to the right. Well. Until tonight. "
My hand froze on the door handle.
"It was a good interview," I shrugged. "I looked up, Marla. It happens."
"Sure." She nodded slowly, watching me with those shrewd eyes that had interviewed presidents and never once missed a lie. "And the blush the other night during the ambassador segment? That just — happened too?"
"It was warm under the lights."
"The lights haven't changed in years.”
My gaze locked with hers. I'd stared down senators, criminals, and dictators. I could handle Marla St. John.
She leaned against the doorframe. Crossed her arms. And then, dropping her voice into a lower, murmuring register, she said:
"'That's it. Just like that, Nelson. You're right there.'"
Every drop of blood in my body went cold.
She'd heard it. Jimmy's voice through her earpiece — the same open channel, the same feed — and she was quoting it back to me word for word.
"No EP has ever talked to me like that," Marla continued, studying my face. A beat. "But then, he wasn't talking to me. Was he.”
It wasn't a question.
I couldn't speak. I stood there with my hand on the door and my career suspended in whatever Marla decided to do next.
Something shifted in her face. Not softness — Marla didn't do soft — but something that lived in the same neighborhood.
"Relax, Mackenzie. I'm not going to HR." She straightened from the doorframe. "I've been hearing EP chatter in this earpiece for decades. Tuned it out years ago. It's usually background noise to me."
"Then how—"
"Because I started watching you." Her voice went quiet. "The way your shoulders change when Jimmy talks. The way you reach for that water glass. I started watching, and then I started listening, and once I was listening—" She spread her hands. "It's not exactly subtle."
My jaw was clenched so tight my molars ached. "What do you want, Marla?"
"What do I want?" She seemed genuinely surprised. "I want the show to be good. Tonight it was great. The Mercer interview alone will generate a week of clips. Whatever's happening between you and that control room — I don't care about the details. I care about the broadcast."
She adjusted a cuff. Gave me a look so layered I couldn't begin to unpack it in a hallway.
"Whatever's happening, Mackenzie — either fire him or marry him. The ratings can't take much more of this ambiguity."
Then she turned and walked down the hall with the easy stride of a woman who'd just detonated a bomb and had dinner reservations at nine.
* * *
The town car pulled away from the building at 9:15.
I sat in the back seat and stared at the city sliding past. One of the small luxuries of my contract was a car service after evening broadcasts — a black sedan with a driver named Terrence, who had the professional discretion to never ask why the most controlled man in cable news sometimes sat in his back seat looking like he'd been hit by a truck.
Fire him or marry him.
I pressed my forehead against the cool glass of the window.
The avenue streamed past — restaurants, bars, the late-night rhythm of a city that never quite stopped moving.
I wanted to go home, pour a glass of wine, and not think about the fact that Marla had figured everything out.
That Jimmy's voice on an open channel had been broadcasting our situation to my co-anchor for weeks.
The only reason it had taken this long for her to figure it out was that Marla hadn't been paying attention until my body gave the game away.
The car slowed at a light. I turned my head, not really looking, just letting the streetscape blur past—
And saw them.
A wine bar on the corner. Warm light spilling through the window onto the sidewalk. A table near the front, clearly visible from the street.
My assistant Harry. Sitting with his coat draped over the back of his chair, a glass of red in front of him, leaning forward with the relaxed posture of someone who was not on a first outing. Or a second. Or a fifth.
And across from him, gesturing with a breadstick, glasses perched on her nose, laughing with the kind of volume that could be heard through plate glass—
Jillian Morris.
The light changed, and the car pulled forward. I twisted in my seat to keep them in view for another half second before the wine bar slid past and was gone.
Jillian Morris. Jimmy's best friend since freshman year at Columbia.
The woman who'd been in Jimmy's life through all of it — through us, through the breakup, through thirteen years of whatever came after.
I'd known Jillian. Eaten dinners with her, listened to her hold court in our tiny living room off Morningside.
She always took up more space than any five-foot-two person had a right to, telling stories that made Jimmy laugh so hard he couldn't breathe.
And now Jillian was having wine with my personal assistant like it was the most natural thing in the world.
I sat very still in the back seat while the math assembled itself.
Harry had been my assistant for three years. He'd seen my schedule, my moods, my unguarded moments. He'd noticed the scratch on the vanity. Harry knew more about my daily life than anyone.
Jillian knew Jimmy's side of our history. She knew about the note, and Jimmy's reasons for leaving. And Jillian Morris was not a woman who kept observations to herself.
Harry had my side. Jillian had Jimmy's. And they were sitting in a downtown wine bar comparing notes with the comfortable ease of people who'd been doing it for a while.
I should be furious. My assistant was fraternizing with the one person in this city who had the full file on my romantic history with Jimmy. The betrayal of it should have sent me calling Harry to demand an explanation.
But what I kept seeing, as the car carried me farther from that window, wasn't the betrayal. It was Harry's face. Relaxed. Laughing. Looking happier than I'd ever seen him look in three years of working for me.
Harry had a friend. A real one. Not a colleague, not a networking contact, not someone who tolerated him because he was my gatekeeper.
I didn't have that.
The thought arrived plain and enormous and I couldn't look away from it.
Terrence turned onto my street. The building appeared — glass and steel, immaculate lobby, the apartment that looked like a hotel suite nobody lived in. He pulled to the curb and I sat for a moment before reaching for the door.
Marla knew about the earpiece. Harry and Jillian were sharing notes. Jimmy's voice was back in my ear and my body had responded tonight like a plant turning toward light. Every wall I'd built had cracks in it now, and every crack was letting in the same thing.
The same person.
"Thank you, Terrence. Good night."
"Good night, Mr. Mackenzie."
I rode the elevator alone. Let myself into the apartment. Stood in the foyer and listened to the silence — the deep, curated, nobody-lives-here silence of a space designed to need nothing and no one.
Fire him or marry him.
I set my bag on the counter, poured a glass of wine, and sat on the sofa in the dark. Then I asked myself the question I'd been dodging since Marla said it: if everyone around me could see what was happening, how much longer could I pretend I couldn't?