“Someone has to be.”
“Maybe,” Savannah said. “But not all the time.”
They held each other’s gaze for a moment too long. Then Tilly cleared their throat and turned back to the monitor. “I’ll color correct this for the ten.”
Savannah lingered a beat before heading for the door. “You’re welcome, by the way.”
Tilly waited until she was gone before hitting play one last time. The clip rolled in silence, her voice sharp, alive, undeniable.
They hated that she was right. Hated more that, for the first time in a while, the story felt alive too. And that it was Savannah Wells who’d brought it back to life.
Four
The piece ran at ten.
Savannah watched it from the newsroom, standing behind the producer’s desk while Jamie led into the story. On screen, the footage cut clean: her questions, Tilly’s shots, the perfect balance of confrontation and control. The kind of segment that hit right where it needed to.
For once, she didn’t fidget. Didn’t hover over the playback, didn’t second-guess the b-roll or her tone or whether she’d smiled too much on the stand-up. She just watched.
When her closer hit, she knew. It was good —reallygood. The kind of good you felt in your chest before anyone said it out loud.
Phones started ringing at the assignment desk before the segment even finished. Someone yelled, ‘Line three’s a viewer!’ over the hum of the scanners. A couple of the younger producers high-fived, and one of the anchors leaned around a monitor to give her a small, impressed nod.
She tried not to smile too widely.
The viewer calls kept coming, and a congratulatory email from Aimee hit her inbox before the credits rolled. Someone tossed her a ‘Nice work, Wells’ as they passed by.
She’d been at WDTV three days. Three. And her story was already trending locally on X and in the Metro feed. The clip had a caption someone else wrote:Reporter grills developer overhousing delay — refuses to back down.Comments used words like ‘fearless’ and ‘refreshing.’
It felt good. It felt earned.
She stayed a few minutes after everyone else drifted off to the overnight shift, pretending to finish notes but really just watching the newsroom settle — monitors dimming, scanners chattering into the night. Her name in the rundown looked almost out of place next to the station regulars. She liked that.
Across the newsroom, Tilly watched the same playback in silence from the edit bay. When it ended, they didn’t say a word. Just logged the footage, closed the project file, and walked out.
She told herself she wasn’t looking for their reaction — she was too busy pretending not to glow under the attention — but she still found her gaze drifting toward the edit bay anyway.
Like it mattered more than it should have.
Tilly wasn’t smiling, wasn’t celebrating, wasn’t doing anything except shutting down the monitors like the piece was nothing special.
It bothered her more than she wanted it to.
More than the viewer calls. More than Aimee’s email. More than any of it.
Not because she needed their approval — she didn’t — but because the story had worked, and they were a part of that. The segment had her face and her voice, but she knew the clean snap of it, the tension, the punch, had come from the way Tilly framed her questions.
She waited for… something. A nod. A look. A tiny acknowledgment.
Something that felt like it was meant for her.
Nothing.
Savannah noticed. Of course, she noticed.
* * *
By morning, the buzz had spread. Someone printed the analytics sheet and taped it to the whiteboard like a trophy. #WDTVHousingProbe was still climbing. A couple of people were already joking about her “ten-o’clock takeover.”
