Chapter 29
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Nelson
The script pages had stopped meaning anything an hour ago.
I'd read the open four times and couldn't have told you what was in it.
The words were just shapes on the page, blurring under the punishing white of the vanity lights, and my fingers kept finding the same dog-eared corner like a worry stone.
I checked my phone. The screen stayed black, the way it had been staying black all afternoon. Three texts. Two missed calls. Nothing.
That was what I couldn't get past. Not the silence itself — Jimmy could be a fortress when he wanted to be — but what the silence meant.
Jimmy didn't miss check-ins. He didn't let things drift.
He was the man who knew the satellite feed was going to drop before the feed knew it, the metronome under everything I did, and somewhere in the past five hours he'd stopped keeping time.
Something was wrong. I didn't know what, but I knew something was wrong.
The door opened and my heart pulled hard against my ribs before my brain caught up. Just Harry. Garment bag over one arm, glancing at his watch.
"Harry." I straightened. "Where's Jimmy? He isn't on his office line and he's not picking up his cell."
He hung the bag without quite looking at me. Odd. Harry always looked at me. He was the only person in this building who looked at me like he wasn't waiting for a verdict.
"Haven't seen him since lunch." A beat too long before the next part. "I assume he's in the booth. There's something wonky with the London satellite."
"Since lunch is five hours, Harry."
"I'm sure he's fine."
He turned, and the door was halfway closed before I could push him further. I wanted to, but Brad came in like a roiling weather system — the high frequency of a man perpetually three minutes behind schedule — and the moment was gone.
"Don't tell me you're still out of the jacket, Nelson." He thudded the bag onto the vanity. "Twenty minutes to teaser and you currently look like a beautiful man who just napped through a coup. We need The Nelson Mackenzie."
"Brad. Not today."
"Oh, is it the day where I pretend I don't notice?
" He snapped the cape around my shoulders and tipped his head, peering at me in the mirror the way he peered at lighting — diagnostically, without apology.
"Pupils like map pins. Skin gone gray. If I didn't know you better I'd say you were having an actual feeling. "
"Brad."
"Stop. Emotions are terrible for the foundation."
He started in, hands moving faster than his mouth, which was a feat.
I sat there because in seventeen minutes I was going on live television, and I let him paint me into the creature the camera knew.
Underneath the cape my phone screen timed out, twice, and I watched it black itself in the mirror.
Each time I felt something inside me drop one more inch.
* * *
The studio at four minutes to air had the temperature of a meat locker and the quiet of a held breath.
The cameras stood like the mechanical long-legged animals they were, red eyes still asleep.
A floor director crossed in front of me without a sound; everyone moved the way they moved before air, light on the balls of their feet, all the noise saved up for later.
I sat at the desk. Smoothed the line of my jacket. Reached for the earpiece.
My hand was shaking. Not much, but enough that I noticed and forced it to stop.
I looked up at the glass.
The control room cut a band of white light across the dark and there Jimmy was in the EP chair, the silhouette I knew by the shape of the shoulders alone. He wasn't moving. He was staring at the wall of monitors the way you look at something you don't quite see.
But he was there. And I could breathe again.
"Sixty seconds, Nelson, Marla." A voice said in my earpiece.
Not Jimmy. The new associate producer — Sarah — voice neat and impersonal in my ear.
"Where's Jimmy?"
A short pause. "He's in the chair. He's — he's here."
Five. Four. Three.
The red light bloomed.
"Good evening. I'm Nelson Mackenzie. This is Beacon News Tonight.
Joining us this evening is Republican Senator Thom Whitfield of Tennessee, who has spent the past forty-eight hours explaining to anyone with a microphone why a vote he cast in March is not the vote we have on tape. Senator. Welcome."
"Nelson. Always a pleasure."
"Mm."
In my ear: "Camera two."
That was all. Two words flat as a held note.
No Nelson, no go deeper, no easy on him for thirty seconds and then end him — none of the small private things he said only to me, in the cadence I had been pretending didn't reorganize my entire nervous system every time he used it.
Camera two. Like he was reading it off a card he'd never seen before.
"Senator, on March eleventh —"
"Camera three."
Jimmy's voice was wet at the edges, almost like he was forcing himself to speak. He cleared his throat afterward, small and apologetic, and I felt it land somewhere under my collarbone.
"On March eleventh you stood on the floor of the Senate and said, and I'm quoting —"
"Tighter. On him." Jimmy's voice trembled. What on earth was wrong?
I asked the senator my question. He gave me an answer he had probably rehearsed in the car on the way to the interview.
"Senator, that was Tuesday. I'm asking about Thursday's vote."
In my ear, nothing. A long, empty nothing where a direction should have been. I turned a page on the desk that did not need turning and counted, because counting is what I do when I am about to fall apart.
One. Two. Th —
"Sorry. Sorry — three on him. Hold on three."
He had never said sorry in my ear before. Jimmy did not apologize on the line. Jimmy gave the direction and moved on. The sorry came through small and frayed and entirely without armor, and I felt my hand close on the edge of the desk where the cameras couldn't see it.
I went to three. Held him. Watched the senator's pupils do the thing they do when a man realizes everyone knows he's lying.
"Nelson —"
That was the way he said my name. That was it — all the months of those two syllables in my ear, and he had not, in any of them, said them the way he said them now.
Then, immediately, smaller, more level, like he was hauling himself back over a wall: "B-roll. Run the b-roll."
The b-roll was not supposed to come for another ninety seconds.
I knew the rundown. But the b-roll came up on the prompter and rolled, and I sat in the half-second of dark while the package took over, and inside that half-second, very faintly through the open channel, I could hear him breathing.
Two breaths. Three. The third one caught.
I didn't move. I did not give the camera anything. But I closed my eyes for a count I knew was too long. I knew Sarah saw it on Monitor Three and did not say a word, and I knew Jimmy didn’t see it because he wasn’t looking at the monitors anymore.
When the package ended I came back on Camera One and interviewed a British MP on a live feed.
There were no directions in my ear for nineteen minutes.
Sarah picked up the slack at the back end — commercial in thirty, hard out at the half — a stranger's voice doing somebody else's job.
Once, underneath Sarah, I heard the smallest sound.
Not a sob. The sound before a sob. Then it cut, like a hand had gone over the mic.
The broadcast felt like it took a year and a half. When the credits ran and the red light died, I sat there with the earpiece still in, listening to a channel he hadn't bothered to close, listening to Jimmy breathe on the other end of it.
I stared through the glass, found his eyes, and lifted my chin a quarter of an inch.
My dressing room. Now.
I pulled the earpiece out with a sharp tug, the plastic rubbing the skin of my ear raw, and walked off the floor without a word.
Harry appeared at my shoulder. "Nelson, the post-show notes from the—"
"Home, Harry."
"But the digital team—"
"Home. Now." I didn't look at him. I couldn't. If I looked at anyone, the frost I was using to hold myself together would shatter.
My footsteps rang against the corridor floor like rifle shots. My thoughts were racing, and by the time I reached my dressing room, I was just a man in a stiff, expensive jacket trying to remember how to breathe.
I shut the door and started to pace — three steps to the vanity, three steps to the door — my pulse a frantic, jagged rhythm in my throat.
Then the door groaned open. No knock. No two-knuckle warning. Jimmy came in like someone walking through a hurricane.
"Jimmy." I crossed the room, my hands reaching for him instinctively, but he looked so brittle I was afraid I'd snap him. "Jimmy, what happened? I've been calling you for hours—"
"They fired me."
The air left the room.
"What?" My voice was a rasp.
"Restructuring." He gave a hollow, terrifyingly mirthless laugh. "For the 'post-cable era.' They're invoking the probationary clause. Friday is my last day."
He moved toward the couch, his legs looking like they might give out. I didn't let him get that far. I reached out, my fingers curling around his forearms, and guided him down. I sat beside him, so close I could feel the frantic heat radiating off him.
The words began to spill out of him then — a frantic, broken stream. He told me about the calendar invite from Bruce. The corporate lawyer, Lauren, sitting in that second chair like a vulture. He told me about the scripted praise, the "renaissance" of the show, and then the knife in his back.
"Optics," he whispered, his voice finally breaking.
I felt a surge of pure, vitriolic heat rise in my chest. "They said optics?"
"They wrote down 'conflict of interest,' Nelson.
The supervisor and the anchor — clean, defensible, the version Legal can put in a file.
" He finally looked at me, and a single, heavy tear broke the line of his cheekbone.
He didn't wipe it away; he looked too exhausted to try.
"But that's the shield. The real reason doesn't go in writing, because the real reason costs them a lawsuit.
They'll bank the ratings from a gay President they had no choice but to air, and then get squeamish about two men on their own payroll.
So they're protecting you, the star. I'm the liability.
I'm the problem that gets 'restructured' out of a job. "
I reached out and pulled him to me, my arms wrapping around him with a fierce, possessive strength. He collapsed against me, his face buried in the crook of my neck. Jimmy clutched the back of my shirt, and he started to shake. Deep, racking sobs.
I held him, smoothing my hand over his hair, my fingers tracing the tension in his scalp. My own eyes were stinging, but the tears were being boiled away by a white-hot fury.
The fucking network had done this to him. They’d taken his brilliance, his awards, his years of war-zone grit, and reduced it to a PR problem. And they had done it in my name.
"They think they own the anchor chair," I murmured into his hair, my voice vibrating with a cold, surgical rage. "They think they can edit my life like it's a thirty-second clip. But the network forgot that the chair is nothing without the man in it. Me. Nelson Mackenzie."
"Nelson, don't." Jimmy pulled back just enough to look at me, his eyes red-rimmed and panicked. "Please. I can find another job. The severance is enormous. It'll tide me over. I'll move into the new place, I'll… I'll be fine. Just don't risk the show. Don't let them do something awful to you, too."
He was asking me to let him go. Again.
Thirteen years ago, he’d left me with a note on a kitchen table, and he'd carried that guilt like a stone for over a decade. Now he was standing on the edge of the same cliff, ready to jump just to keep me on the air.
I looked at him — really looked at him. I saw the freckles on his nose, the way his hands were still shaking on my lap. This was the man who had taught me how to be a person again, and how to love.
I'd spent half my career being told what I could and could not do.
I had a list — a long, quiet list of lines I'd drawn for myself when I was young, frightened, and learning that if you don't draw them, the network will draw them through your heart.
Don't use the leverage. Don't burn the bridge. Don't make anything personal.
I watched Jimmy try to pull himself together for my sake, and every line on that list went out like a row of blown bulbs.
I would burn it, all of it. I would burn the anchor desk, the eight-figure renewal sitting in my agent's drawer, and my carefully constructed reputation. I would burn the whole damned broadcast down if it meant I didn't have to watch Jimmy walk away from me twice.
The realization didn't arrive like a thunderclap; it arrived like the first light of a winter morning — clear, cold, and undeniable. I loved him. Not the memory of the idealistic boy from college, but this man. And I wasn't going to let a man in a corner office fire him for "optics."
I reached for the phone.
"Nelson." Jimmy's voice was very small, his hand coming up to touch my wrist. "What are you doing?"
"I'm fixing this," I said. "All of it. Tonight."