Page 22 of Making It Live!

"What else?"I asked, because he was still in the door frame, and Harry only lingered when there was something he hadn't said yet.

He hesitated.Harry never hesitated.It was like watching a clock skip a second.

"Columbia," he said."Same school, same years as you.Journalism program."

The room went very still.

"You knew him," Harry breathed.It wasn't a question.

I held his gaze for three full seconds.I didn't confirm or deny, because confirming meant opening a door I wasn't ready to open, and denying meant lying to the only person in this building I didn't usually lie to.

"Thank you, Harry.That will be all."

He left.Harry always knew when to leave.It was one of his finest qualities.

I sat back down and opened the folder again.The headshot stared up at me.Auburn hair.Green eyes.Freckles.

Jimmy.

Thirteen years of silence.Thirteen years since he left that note on our coffee table.I'd spent those years building myself into something uncrackable, untouchable, unreachable — and Bruce Coleman, in his infinite talent for avoiding consequences, had hired the one man on earth who had already proven he could rattle me.

I closed the folder, set both palms on the desk, and took a deep breath.Held it.Released it through my nose.

Then I picked up the folder and walked out of my dressing room.

* * *

The control room was still lit when I reached it.Through the glass I could see the overnight monitors cycling through feeds, the skeleton crew at their stations, and in the center — in the EP chair, in jeans and a blazer and a headset, reviewing something on a screen with the focused intensity of a man who had no intention of leaving — Jimmy Goodman.

The control room lights caught his hair — auburn, smoother than I remembered, deliberately styled in a way the Jimmy I'd known at twenty-two would have found absurd.He was leaning forward slightly, chin propped on one hand, studying the screen with the same expression he'd worn in the editing bay at Columbia when he was cutting a story he cared about.

I hadn't seen that expression in years, and it nearly stopped me in the doorway.

I did not let it stop me.

I opened the door.The sound was small — a click, a shift of air — but every head in the room turned.Two overnight producers and the technical assistant monitoring the feeds.All of them registered who I was and went very, very still, because Nelson Mackenzie never came to the control room.The control room came to Nelson Mackenzie, or it didn't come at all.

Jimmy turned slowly, the way you turn when you've been expecting something and want to meet it on your own terms.

Our eyes met.

Thirteen years of memories compressed into a single second.Every fight, every kiss, every whispered plan about the famous journalists we'd become.The note.The empty apartment, and the silence that followed, vast and terrible, stretching across years like a wound that never closed.I hadn't closed it.Closing it would mean it had healed, and it hadn't healed.I was standing in a doorway looking at the man who had wounded me — auburn hair, green eyes, freckles — and he looked—

He looked like Jimmy.

Not the version I'd built in my head over the years — the villain, the coward, the man who'd run away from us.This was just Jimmy.Older.Tired around the eyes.Handsome in the way he'd always been handsome, the kind that crept up on you and then wouldn't leave.Sitting in a chair in my building, wearing a headset, looking at me with those green eyes that had never once in their entire existence managed to hide a single thing he was feeling.

Right now they were feeling a lot.I could see it all — the fear, the defiance, the guilt, something underneath all of it that I refused to identify, because identifying it would be dangerous.

The room was silent.

I walked forward and stopped at the edge of the EP desk — close enough that Jimmy had to tilt his chin up slightly to hold my gaze.He was seated.I stayed standing.I let the room arrange itself around the fact of me the way it always did, and I did not offer him the courtesy of sitting down to meet him at eye level.The geometry was deliberate.

I set the manila folder on the desk between us.The sound was very small and very final.

"Mr.Goodman," I said.My voice was cool, professional, and absolutely steady."I'm Nelson Mackenzie.I anchor this broadcast."

Jimmy held my gaze without flinching.I'll give him that — he did not flinch.