“I have to go.” Robin slammed down the phone, her cheeks burning. The words had come out louder than expected. She could feel eyes on her, Jill gesturing at her dramatically, the phone still in her hand from the Thai order, mouthing,Are you okay?
“Publicist,” Robin said, affecting an eye roll. As she stood up and started for Eileen’s office, she could still feel the phone in her hand, his voice in her ear, her pulse in the tips of her fingers. And that tingling, as though there were something horrible taking place just out of her eyeshot and if she turned ever so slightly, just enough to catch a glimpse...
“Shitty publicist,” Michael said.
Robin forced out a laugh. “Right?” She had to shake this off. She was worked up. Emotional. It had to be hormones. Or a chemical imbalance. She’d been on meds for a short time as a teen—low-dose Valium to calm her. Ritalin to help her focus. A rarity in her neighborhood back in those days, but not when your dad was a psychiatrist. Maybe she needed a similar combo now, in early middle age. Maybe she should ask her father for the name of a good shrink...
No. What she needed was a decent night’s sleep. Robin had terrible insomnia lately, and it was taking its toll. Obviously.
Quentin Garrison was mistaken. Robin’s mother was a housewife from Tarry Ridge who baked pies and volunteered at the hospitaland had once nursed a baby bird back to life. She’d been married and a mother for nearly as long as she’d been alive. What would she know about the Inland Empire Killers, whoever they were?
Robin gripped the back of her chair, hoping no one was watching her. She took a steadying breath and headed for Eileen’s office feeling better, but still... Still.
There was one thing she couldn’t shake off. That name. April Cooper.She’d heard it before.
“WHAT I’M TRYINGto say is, I’m worried for your safety,” Eileen said.
Robin was in her office, holding a cup of French press coffee, Eileen’s “secret stash” as she called it—they both hated the crappy breakroom coffee. “Like the old song says...”
“Stop.”
“Come on, Eileen.”
“I mean it, Robin,” said Eileen, who had just finished reading Robin’s column about theMagnificent Sevenreboot. “This is a legitimate concern.”
For someone who walked through the newsroom repeating, “clickbait, clickbait,” like a mating call, Eileen was surprisingly squeamish when it came to actual controversy. Robin was probably the only person here who knew that about her. She’d been working for her since the launch of the site ten years earlier, and before that, they’d gone to Columbia Journalism School together, the two of them roughly the same age, the oldest Daily Culture staffers by far, though that too was something only Robin knew. Eileen Rand was assiduously, emphatically ageless.
Robin tried, “How about we run the column as is, and I stay off social media for twenty-four hours or ten minutes or however long it takes everybody to be outraged at something else?”
“It’s feminist propaganda.”
“It’s amovie column.”
“Not in my opinion, of course. I’m just trying to imagine what the trolls might say.”
“We’re pandering to trolls now?”
“No,” she said. “No, of course not. Let me think here...”
Robin brought the mug to her lips. She swallowed the coffee too quickly, searing her tongue.
“Maybe we could just soften the lede a little,” Eileen said. “Talk about what a classic the originalMagnificent Sevenwas before launching right in.”
“Fine.”
“Then there’s that late reveal, where you announce that you’ve opted to be... you know...”
“What?”
“Child-free.” She actually said it in a whisper.
Robin rolled her eyes. “Take it out,” she said. “Whatever.” She might have cared enough to put up a fight an hour ago, or at least to call out Eileen for treating the phrase “child-free” as though it were some type of slur. But now she just wanted to get out of this meeting.
“Okay, you win,” Eileen was saying now. “I’m being too nervous Nellie about this. It is a movie column. Not theSCUM Manifesto.”
Robin looked at her. “So, no edits? We’re not going to make it into a listicle or a meme?”
Eileen sighed. “I’ve gotta stop worrying so much,” she said. “And you know what else?”
