Page 36 of Making It Live!

Jimmy's voice.In my ear.Last night, after two hours and thirteen minutes of the most extraordinary live television I'd ever been part of.Eight words.A standard production call.And the sound of it — low, slightly hoarse from two hours of nonstop talking, ragged at the edges in a way Jimmy's voice only got when he was spent — had embedded itself somewhere in my nervous system and refused to leave.

Katya moved to my lower back.Her hands were strong, impersonal, clinical.This was a professional touching a client.There was nothing intimate about it.And yet my body, which had spent the last twelve hours replaying Jimmy's voice on a loop, couldn't seem to tell the difference between hands that meant nothing and a voice that meant everything.

I pressed my face deeper into the padded ring.

Stay with me, Nelson.

He'd said that during the Chicago coverage.A perfectly professional direction that meant don't toss to the correspondent yet, I need another ten seconds.That was all it meant.That was all it could mean, in a control room full of people, during a breaking news broadcast, with millions of viewers watching.

My body did not care what it meant in context.My body heardstay with mein Jimmy's voice and went somewhere else entirely.

Katya's hands moved down to my legs.She worked the muscles of my calves with firm, rhythmic pressure, and I concentrated on the sensation — the physical reality of knuckles against muscle, the warmth of the heated table, the neutral scent of massage oil — and I tried, with the full force of emotional discipline, to stop hearing Jimmy's voice in my head.

It didn't work.Jimmy's voice had taken up residence somewhere between my brainstem and my spine, and no amount of Swedish deep-tissue work was going to evict it.

Katya moved back to my shoulders.The silence held.The playlist murmured.My body was warm and loose and betraying me in ways I was grateful the padded table concealed, and I was thinking about the look through the glass wall — Jimmy's face in the blue light, his eyes meeting mine, the raw, startled softness I'd seen there and the answering crack in my own chest — when Katya spoke.

"You covered the explosion last night."

My eyes opened.Katya did not speak during sessions.That was the rule.

"In Chicago," she continued, her thumbs still working."I watched.Very frightening.You were very good."

The compliment landed on my back like an icy fist.I didn't want to talk about Chicago, or the broadcast.Thinking about the broadcast meant thinking about the voice in my ear, and thinking about the voice in my ear while lying face-down on a table with someone's hands on my body was a combination I could not afford.

"Thank you, Katya," I said.The words came out with just enough frost to remind us both of the arrangement.Professional distance.Silence.No discussion of what happened outside this room.

Katya's hands paused for a fraction of a second — the pause of a woman recognizing she'd crossed a line — and then resumed their work without another word.Silence returned.

I shut my eyes, pressed my face into the ring, and instructed myself, firmly and specifically, to stop thinking about Jimmy Goodman's voice.

* * *

The earpiece went in at 6:55, and my shoulders were already climbing toward my ears.

I'd spent the afternoon reviewing Jimmy's lineup — strong, as always, annoyingly free of serious flaws — and sitting through the editorial meeting, where Jimmy had presented the Chicago follow-up coverage with the controlled authority of a man who had covered bombings in places the rest of the room couldn't find on a map.He'd booked a former FBI counterterrorism director for the A-block interview.He'd sourced a second whistleblower for a B-block package on federal building security protocols.The C-block was a human piece — families of the injured, handled with restraint and genuine editorial sensitivity.

I'd found nothing to cut.Nothing to question.Nothing to seize on as evidence that Jimmy Goodman was anything less than the best EP this show had had in years.

This was becoming a pattern I didn't know how to break.

The countdown began.The theme music rolled.The red light ignited.

"Good evening.I'm Nelson Mackenzie.Tonight, new developments in the Chicago federal building explosions.The FBI has confirmed that both devices were placed deliberately, and a joint task force has been assembled to lead the investigation."

I hit the pivot."In a press briefing this afternoon, the lead investigator described the explosions as 'a coordinated and targeted act,' and confirmed that surveillance footage from the building's fourteenth floor is now in the hands of federal analysts.With me now is Gilman McNeil, former director of counterterrorism."

The A-block interview ran long because the man was excellent — articulate, specific, willing to say things on camera that former officials rarely said.Jimmy didn't cut him off.He trusted the material, and trusted me to manage the conversation.

That was the thing about Jimmy's producing that was hardest to fight.He gave me room to work.Every EP before him had either hovered or retreated — micromanaging every breath or disappearing into the background and leaving me to carry the broadcast alone.Jimmy did neither.He was present in my ear, constant, guiding — and then, at precisely the right moment, he stepped back and let me work.

It was like being held by someone who knew exactly when to let go.

Damn it.I didn't want to think about Jimmy's producing in terms of being held.I did not want that metaphor anywhere near my conscious mind.I buried it and moved on.

The B-block package ran.It was excellent.I reached for my water glass.

"Easy, Nelson."Jimmy's voice came through the earpiece as the package neared its end."Let it breathe.You've got plenty of room on the back end."