Page 15 of Making It Live!

His voice came through the control room monitors, and something in my chest cracked open so fast I had to grip the armrest.It was the same voice.Deeper, maybe.More controlled, definitely.But under the polish and the cadence and the years of practice, it was the same voice that had murmured into my hair at two in the morning in a walk-up off Morningside.

I pressed my back to the wall and made myself breathe.

You knew who he was when you took this job.You Googled him at least once a month for thirteen years.You watched every clip.You fucking knew!

But knowing and seeing were two very different things.A screen was safe.A screen had distance and pixels and the comforting fiction that the person on it wasn't quite real — not in the way that mattered.This was twenty feet away, through a wall of glass, and he was so real it hurt.

For the next hour I sat in the back corner of the control room and watched Nelson Mackenzie do the very thing I'd left him over, and he did it brilliantly.

He was ice.That was the only word.Every transition seamless.Every pivot precise.When a live interview veered off the rails — a defense analyst grandstanding about something that had nothing to do with the question he'd asked — Nelson shut it down with a single sentence so elegantly devastating that the man actually apologized on air.The crew exchanged glances.Somebody whispered, "Damn."

His co-anchor, Marla St.John, sat beside him with the easy confidence of someone who'd been doing this for decades.Even she deferred to him, and I could see why.Nelson didn't share a desk.He presided over it.The energy in the studio — visible even through the glass — orbited him like he was generating his own gravity.

And not once, in sixty minutes of live television, did he look at the control room.

Not once did he acknowledge the twenty people behind it making his broadcast possible.He looked at the camera, at Marla, at his copy, at the monitor.That was it.The control room might as well have been a wall of brick.

Part of me — the part that had produced shows for years and understood the mechanics — recognized this as discipline.The anchor's job was the audience.The control room's job was the anchor.You didn't cross those lines.

But another part of me — the part I wasn't examining too closely — recognized it as something else.A wall.Something that kept the world on one side and Nelson on the other, and if you happened to be standing in the wrong room, you simply did not exist.

I'd been very good at not existing to Nelson Mackenzie.I'd done it for thirteen years.

The broadcast ended.Nelson unclipped his mic and stood, and a young man — brown-haired, well-dressed, moving with the quiet efficiency of someone who'd done it a thousand times — appeared at his side.They traded a few words I couldn't hear, and then he was gone, walking off the set without looking back, the crew parting around him like water around a stone.

The control room exhaled.People stretched, pushed back from the desk, reached for coffee that had gone cold an hour ago.The monitors switched to the handoff for overnight coverage.Someone made a joke I didn't catch, and someone else laughed.

I stood in my corner and didn't move.

That is the man you're going to work with tomorrow.My voice will be in his ear, and this broadcast will be my responsibility and those ice-blue eyes are going to look at me across a room for the first time in thirteen years and—

I stopped the thought.Shut it down.Locked it in a box and shoved it into the back corner of my brain, where I kept everything I wasn't ready to look at.

He was extraordinary.That was undeniable.Whatever I thought about corporate news, whatever I thought about the machine this network represented, Nelson Mackenzie was extraordinary at what he did.The twenty-two-year-old I'd left behind had wanted to be a reporter.This man was something far more dangerous.Nelson was an institution.

And I'd left him because I was certain he'd become a talking head.Shallow.Inconsequential.

The irony sat in my stomach like a stone.

I slipped out of the control room.The newsroom was still humming — it would hum all night, the overnight crew already settling in — and I moved through it fast, head down, a ghost, just like Bruce had asked.

In the elevator, I caught my reflection in the polished steel doors.Green eyes that looked wider than usual, and a little wild.Tomorrow, there'd be nothing between us but a wall of glass and thirteen years of silence.

Could I actually do this?

ChapterSeven

Nelson

Iarrived at the building at 4:15 p.m., exactly two hours and forty-five minutes before broadcast, the way I always did.My driver dropped me at the side entrance — the one the on-air talent used to avoid the lobby, though truthfully I used it to avoid people — and I went through the security checkpoint with my bag over one shoulder and my coffee in my left hand.My right hand was for my phone, which was already open to tonight's editorial lineup.

The lineup was a mess.Not actively terrible, but shapeless — the product of a newsroom that had been running without a permanent EP for weeks and was starting to fray at the edges.The A-block was fine; the Senate confirmation hearings would carry themselves.The B-block had a pharmaceutical-pricing package that needed stronger sourcing.And the C-block was a human-interest segment about a rescue dog that had, frankly, no business on a primetime news broadcast.This meant someone in the editorial meeting had clearly panicked and needed to fill time.

I made three notes on my phone.I'd raise them in the pre-show meeting, because if I didn't, no one would.

Harry was waiting outside my dressing room with a garment bag and a look that suggested he had opinions about my evening.

"The charcoal or the navy?"he asked, holding up the bag.