Page 58 of Making It Live!

My gaze locked with hers.I'd stared down senators, criminals, and dictators.I could handle Marla St.John.

She leaned against the doorframe.Crossed her arms.And then, dropping her voice into a lower, murmuring register, she said:

"'That's it.Just like that, Nelson.You're right there.'"

Every drop of blood in my body went cold.

She'd heard it.Jimmy's voice through her earpiece — the same open channel, the same feed — and she was quoting it back to me word for word.

"No EP has ever talked to me like that," Marla continued, studying my face.A beat."But then, he wasn't talking to me.Was he.”

It wasn't a question.

I couldn't speak.I stood there with my hand on the door and my career suspended in whatever Marla decided to do next.

Something shifted in her face.Not softness — Marla didn't do soft — but something that lived in the same neighborhood.

"Relax, Mackenzie.I'm not going to HR."She straightened from the doorframe."I've been hearing EP chatter in this earpiece for decades.Tuned it out years ago.It's usually background noise to me."

"Then how—"

"Because I started watching you."Her voice went quiet."The way your shoulders change when Jimmy talks.The way you reach for that water glass.I started watching, and then I started listening, and once I was listening—" She spread her hands."It's not exactly subtle."

My jaw was clenched so tight my molars ached."What do you want, Marla?"

"What do I want?"She seemed genuinely surprised."I want the show to be good.Tonight it was great.The Mercer interview alone will generate a week of clips.Whatever's happening between you and that control room — I don't care about the details.I care about the broadcast."

She adjusted a cuff.Gave me a look so layered I couldn't begin to unpack it in a hallway.

"Whatever's happening, Mackenzie — either fire him or marry him.The ratings can't take much more of this ambiguity."

Then she turned and walked down the hall with the easy stride of a woman who'd just detonated a bomb and had dinner reservations at nine.

* * *

The town car pulled away from the building at 9:15.

I sat in the back seat and stared at the city sliding past.One of the small luxuries of my contract was a car service after evening broadcasts — a black sedan with a driver named Terrence, who had the professional discretion to never ask why the most controlled man in cable news sometimes sat in his back seat looking like he'd been hit by a truck.

Fire him or marry him.

I pressed my forehead against the cool glass of the window.The avenue streamed past — restaurants, bars, the late-night rhythm of a city that never quite stopped moving.I wanted to go home, pour a glass of wine, and not think about the fact that Marla had figured everything out.That Jimmy's voice on an open channel had been broadcasting our situation to my co-anchor for weeks.The only reason it had taken this long for her to figure it out was that Marla hadn't been paying attention until my body gave the game away.

The car slowed at a light.I turned my head, not really looking, just letting the streetscape blur past—

And saw them.

A wine bar on the corner.Warm light spilling through the window onto the sidewalk.A table near the front, clearly visible from the street.

My assistant Harry.Sitting with his coat draped over the back of his chair, a glass of red in front of him, leaning forward with the relaxed posture of someone who was not on a first outing.Or a second.Or a fifth.

And across from him, gesturing with a breadstick, glasses perched on her nose, laughing with the kind of volume that could be heard through plate glass—

Jillian Morris.

The light changed, and the car pulled forward.I twisted in my seat to keep them in view for another half second before the wine bar slid past and was gone.

Jillian Morris.Jimmy's best friend since freshman year at Columbia.The woman who'd been in Jimmy's life through all of it — through us, through the breakup, through thirteen years of whatever came after.I'd known Jillian.Eaten dinners with her, listened to her hold court in our tiny living room off Morningside.She always took up more space than any five-foot-two person had a right to, telling stories that made Jimmy laugh so hard he couldn't breathe.