Page 25 of Making It Live!

"I've been a journalist for quite a while now, Mr.Mackenzie.I have sources.Dr.Vasquez was a contact from a documentary I produced on drug pricing in 2019.She's been waiting for someone to put her on a platform with a real audience."I paused."Fourteen million people seemed like a real enough audience."

The room went very still.I had just, in front of the entire editorial staff, reminded Nelson Mackenzie that I had something his previous EPs didn't: a Rolodex built from years of investigative work in the field.I hadn't meant it as a flex.It was simply the truth.But in this room, with this man, the truth had edges.

Nelson studied me a long moment.I held his gaze.Those ice-blue eyes were doing the thing they did — the thing I remembered from classroom debates at Columbia — where they went very still and very focused, and you couldn't tell whether he was about to agree with you or destroy you.

"The whistleblower stays," he said."But I want to review the pre-interview notes before broadcast.If the sourcing is soft, we pull it."

"The sourcing isn't soft."

"Then you'll have no problem with me reviewing it."

It wasn't a question.I nodded once."I'll have notes on your desk by five."

Nelson stood.The meeting was over because Nelson decided it was over.He picked up my lineup — without the sticky note, I noticed, which meant he'd read it — and walked out without another word.

The room exhaled.Writers started talking.The PAs scattered.Ray caught my eye from the corner and gave me a look I was learning to translate:

Not bad, new guy.

I allowed myself one slow breath.I'd won the B-block and the C-block.Nelson had kept the A-block unchanged, which meant it was strong enough that even he couldn't find fault.Three for three.

It didn't feel like winning.It felt like round one.

* * *

The broadcast started at seven, and for the first fifteen minutes, everything was professional.

I sat in the EP chair with my headset on and my eyes on the monitors and I did my job.I called the shots, talked to Ray, managed the graphics queue and the live feeds and the timing, and I spoke into Nelson's earpiece with the calm, measured precision of a man who was absolutely not thinking about the fact that his voice was inside his ex-boyfriend's head.

Nelson was flawless.He delivered the A-block with the authority of a man born to sit behind an anchor desk, and when the legal analysts disagreed on air — sharply, almost combatively — he moderated the exchange with the kind of surgical control that made you understand why millions tuned in every night.He didn't raise his voice, because he didn't need to.Nelson Mackenzie at a whisper was more commanding than most people at full volume.

The B-block package ran.Four minutes and forty seconds.I watched Marla deliver the story on the monitor and felt the old pride — the pride of a story well told — and I let myself think, just for a second:

This is good.No — this is fucking excellent.

Then the C-block arrived, and everything got complicated.

Dr.Vasquez was live via satellite.The interview was Nelson's — he'd reviewed my prep notes and added three questions of his own, which were annoyingly sharp — and for the first two minutes it ran like a textbook segment.Vasquez was poised, articulate, damning.Nelson guided her through the story with the patient precision of a man who knew exactly when to press and when to let a source breathe.

Then Vasquez dropped a name that wasn't in the prep notes.A sitting senator, implicated in collusion with Pinnacle's lobbying arm.

The control room went electric.Ray sat up straighter.The graphics lead looked at me with wide eyes.This was live television doing what live television did best — breaking open in real time, uncontrolled, surprising everyone, including the people making it.

I had a choice.Pull back — cut to a package, buy time, let legal review the claim before we aired it.Safe.Responsible.What Greg Fletcher would have done.

Or lean in.

I pressed the earpiece button."Stay with her, Nelson.Let her finish."

On Monitor Three, I saw it.The smallest shift.Nelson's chin lifted a fraction of an inch.His shoulders settled.It wasn't a flinch or a blush — it was something subtler, something only someone who'd learned to read Nelson Mackenzie's body would have caught.He'd heard me, and processed the direction.And in the half-second before he responded to Vasquez, his cadence shifted — just barely, a degree warmer, a degree slower — as if my voice had physically adjusted something in his delivery.

He stayed with Vasquez, asking the follow-up that needed asking — clean, direct, giving the source room to either substantiate or retreat.Vasquez substantiated.The segment ran two minutes over, and it was the best television I'd seen in years.

When the broadcast cut to commercial, Ray pulled off his headset and turned to me."That was a hell of a call."

"That was the source making the call," I said."I just didn't get in the way."

"Fletch would've cut to the package."