Chapter 31
Sloane
Joss stops texting me, which is how I know it’s serious. So I drive to her bar on a night I’m not scheduled to need anyone, and let the one person who reads me better than I read everyone order for both of us.
She’s behind the bar when I come in, and she clocks me in the door the way she clocks everything — first, completely, before I’ve got my coat off.
She doesn’t say finally or I was wondering.
She just tips her chin at the back booth, the one that’s been ours since we were twenty-three and broke and splitting one plate of fries, and brings over the standing order without being asked: her terrible house red, my soda water with the lime she knows I’ll pretend I didn’t want.
“Okay,” she says, sliding in across from me.
“I’m asking this as your friend, not as a journalist, and you’ll know the difference because as a journalist I’d have a recorder running and I’d have opened with the question instead of the wine.
” She folds her hands. “How are you, actually. Not the version you’d put in a release. ”
“I’m fine.”
“That’s the release.”
“Joss—”
“I covered your last one, remember.” She says it gently, but it’s a key turning.
“I had a front-row seat to the Lucas era. I watched a man take the smartest woman I know and turn her into a content calendar, and I watched you not see it, which — no offense — was the single most disorienting thing I have ever witnessed, because you see everything. You caught it in everyone but him.” She turns her glass.
“So forgive me if I’ve been a little quiet lately.
I’ve been watching the tape again. New player, same league. ”
***
Here’s the thing about Joss that the people who only know her byline miss: she’s not my mirror.
She has her own whole life happening at full volume — the bar she nearly lost and clawed back, the brother she’s putting through school, the story she’s sitting on right now that would make her career and end a friendship, and she carries all of it without once making me carry any.
“You could file it,” I say. “The campaign. The real version. You’ve got enough.”
“I’ve got all of it. I’ve had all of it for weeks.
” She says it plainly, no martyrdom. “Sentinels comms chief, fake romance, the whole machine — it’s a great piece, and it’s been sitting in a doc called no.dom on my desktop because the day I put your private life in my column to make rent is the day I become him. ”
“So delete it.”
“I can’t, and that’s the part I drove you here to say out loud.
” She turns the terrible house red without drinking it.
“There’s a freelancer sniffing around it.
She doesn’t have what I have, she doesn’t have fifteen years of you, but she’s got enough to run something ugly and wrong.
And the second she does, my editor remembers I’m the one with the access.
He’s already circling. Pulled me into his office Tuesday and said — quoting — you’re sitting on the best sports-culture story of the summer and I can smell it on you.
” A breath. “He’s right. I am. It’s a career-maker, Sloane.
The byline that means I stop worrying about the bar’s rent for good.
And I’m letting a stranger get close to scooping me on it, on purpose, because the alternative is doing to you the exact thing that was done to you. ”
“Joss—”
“I’m not telling you to feel bad.” Fast, heading me off. “I’m telling you so that when this is over, you know it wasn’t free. I’d rather keep the one I read first. But don’t let anyone tell you I didn’t have a choice. I had a great one. I’m turning it down with my eyes open.”
***
I drink my soda water so my face has a job, because here’s the thing I can’t say back to her:
I know exactly what it costs to sit on a story. I’ve spent my whole career being the one who files — who gets ahead of it, who turns the messy human thing into clean approved copy before it can hurt anyone, me most of all.
I have never once been on this side of it. I have never once been the story somebody chose to protect instead of tell.
I don’t have a drawer for that. It’s the second time tonight she’s handed me a thing I can’t file, and she knows it, and she lets it sit there between the wine and the lime like something we’ve both seen now and can’t unsee.
***
We don’t stay in it. That’s the other thing about fifteen years — you can walk right up to the edge of someone’s whole interior and then, by mutual unspoken agreement, step back and be ridiculous, because the friendship is older than the crisis and it’ll outlast it.
She tells me about a regular who proposed to a different woman at the same booth two weekends running.
I tell her about Jules and the macroeconomics flashcards.
She does an impression of my professional phone voice that’s so accurate I nearly send the lime across the table, and I laugh — the real one, the one I only have with her, the one that doesn’t cost me anything because she’s already seen the worst version and stayed.
She walks me out. The street’s wet and quiet. The found family I keep at a carefully managed distance just got one person closer without filing the paperwork, and I let it, which is its own small terror.
“Drive safe,” she says, and hugs me — quick and fierce, the way she does about once a year.
I’m at my car when her phone goes, and I’m close enough to see it light the dark between us: her editor’s name, and the front edge of a text before it cuts off. Vega story — need your—
She turns the phone face-down against her leg before I can read the rest, gives me a smile that doesn’t reach, and says, “Go home, Sloane.” So I go.
Because there’s nothing I can do tonight about the price tag I just watched land on a fifteen-year friendship — except, maybe, for once in my life, be worth it.