One
Tilly Franklin had stopped counting how many late nights they’d spent in the WDTV edit bay, but the hum of the monitors had started to sound like a heartbeat they didn’t own. The glow from three screens painted their face in shifting blues and whites; the light caught the sharp line of their cheekbone and the faint shadow under their eyes, each timeline a ribbon of sound and image they’d trimmed and spliced so many times the clips had lost all meaning. Their eyes burned from the hours, that particular ache that lived behind the socket. They rolled their shoulders once, feeling the familiar stiffness there, like the job had slowly molded their posture into something permanently braced.
Tilly looked like someone who’d been awake too long and didn’t care who could tell. They were lean and compact, built for carrying gear and moving fast through crowds, shoulders roped with muscle under a faded hoodie. Tattoos climbed their forearms in dark, half-hidden lines when their sleeves rode up, and their hands were always marked by the job: a nicked knuckle, a faint smear of ink from a Sharpie, calluses where the camera grip sat. Their face was all angles in the monitor light, sharp cheekbones and a tired mouth, eyes a hazel-brown that stayed alert even when everything else felt drained. They wore their hair short and messy, stubbornly falling forward, like they’d given up trying to tame it years ago.
They scrubbed through B-roll of a ribbon-cutting ceremony in Dorchester—the mayor’s smile frozen mid-cut, scissors glinting—and felt absolutely nothing about it. Cut here, dissolve there, nat sound up at 0:04. Muscle memory.
The newsroom beyond the glass buzzed in that familiar pre-broadcast rhythm, phones ringing, printers spitting. Jamie Garrison’s voice floated from the studio as she ran through headlines one last time before the ten o’clock. Nothing urgent, nothing thrilling, just the steady pulse of Boston at night. It should have felt comforting. Instead, it felt like static.
They leaned back in their chair, drained the last of a lukewarm coffee, and told themself this was fine. Routine was good. The quiet was good. The station hadn’t had much of that lately.
After the Commons shooting and the months of fallout that followed, the newsroom had learned to lower its volume. Fewer jokes between segments. Fewer late-night edits that bled into arguments. For a while, everyone had been walking on eggshells around Jamie and Erin Calhoun, like one wrong word might send the whole fragile calm cracking open again.
Tilly still remembered the weight of those weeks. It was the kind of mess that made Tilly decide quiet wasn’t just easier — it was safer. The three a.m. edits where Jamie would go silent mid-sentence. The way Erin’s emails shifted from paragraphs to single lines. The night they’d found Jamie in this same edit bay, alone, playing back footage she had no reason to be watching again.
They’d made it through, somehow. Jamie was behind the desk now, steady and composed, and Erin still sent over the Boston Police Department updates, her emails clipped but professional. From the outside, it all looked normal again.
Tilly knew better. They’d been there for the long nights and the quiet mornings after, for the half-finished sentences in thefield and the way Jamie’s laugh had changed by the end of it all. The newsroom had a short memory for breaking news but a long one for heartbreak. It lived in the spaces between soundbites, the glances, the hesitations, the things people stopped saying on camera.
They didn’t blame either of them. They just knew what it looked like when work started bleeding into something else, and what it cost to stitch it back up again.
Tilly had learned that lesson the hard way.
They hadn’t planned to blur the lines before. Not back then. It had started the way it always did in news — overlapping hours, shared jokes in hallways, someone who understood the job without needing it explained. Erin Calhoun had been smart and easy to talk to and close enough to feel safe. A friend first. Always a friend first.
Until one day she wasn’t.
Erin hadn’t yelled. She hadn’t lied. She’d just stepped back, quietly, like the ground had shifted and Tilly hadn’t felt it happen. Said she needed space. Said work was complicated. Said it wasn’t what Tilly thought.
The aftermath had been worse than the ending.
Emails rewritten. Conversations rerouted. Every interaction filtered through professionalism so tight it left no room to breathe. Tilly hadn’t lost Erin all at once — they’d lost her in inches, inside the same building they still had to walk through every day.
That was the part Tilly remembered now.
Not the relationship. The cleanup.
Tilly had made a different choice. The edit bay was where they lived most days—more hours than their apartment in Allston—but it didn’t own them. They clocked in, did the work, and went home to a quiet one-bedroom where nobody needed anything from them. It wasn’t loneliness. It was safety.
So yeah, routine was good. Quiet was good.
The newsroom was too awake for a Monday night. Phones rang, chairs scraped, printers stuttered. Normal sounds, but there was something threaded through them tonight. A hum, a pulse, a shared curiosity that passed between desks like a rumor with legs.
Tilly caught it first in Harper Montgomery’s voice, that particular pitch it hit when she had information nobody else did yet. She was leaning over Matt Reeves’ desk, one hand cupped around her mouth, but her whisper carried the way whispers in newsrooms always did—just loud enough. Matt was one of the dayside producers, the kind who kept his head down and his rundowns clean.
“I’m just saying, Aimee’s been in meetings all week,” Harper said. “And you know they only do that when someone’s coming, or someone’s going.”
Matt glanced toward Aimee’s office, glass-walled and dark. “Could be budget stuff.”
“Budget stuff doesn’t make her smile like that.” Harper straightened, arms crossed. “Twenty bucks says it’s a new hire.”
“Providence,” someone else chimed in from across the room. “I heard it’s someone from Providence.”
“Everyone’s from Providence,” Matt murmured.
Tilly tried to tune it out, their focus fixed on the monitor, but even they could feel the shift. WDTV was a place where news traveled fast, sometimes faster than the facts. Promotions, firings, new hires. It all started the same way: a few low voices, a laugh that carried, and a feeling in the air that something was about to change.
Harper appeared at their shoulder without warning, coffee in hand. “You hear anything?”
