"What I'm thinking about right now, Jillian, is that a man named Dominic is about to chemically restructure my fucking hair cortex with something called a Japzilian.I'd like to focus on one crisis at a time."
"Oooh."Dominic's shears paused mid-snip.His eyes flicked between us in the mirror like he'd just realized this appointment came with a floor show."Who's Nelson?"
"Nobody," I said.
"His ex," Jillian said.
"Jillian."
"Drama, girl."Dominic resumed with renewed enthusiasm, his shears moving faster, like they were being powered by gossip."I am living for it.Keep going."
"There's nothing to keep going about," I said."It was thirteen years ago.We were in college.It ended.The end."
"Thirteen years."Dominic let out a low whistle."And now you're going to work together?Honey, that's not a job.That's a season of reality television."
"It's really not."I shut my eyes a moment."We're both professionals.I'm sure we'll—"
"Does he know you're coming?"he interrupted.
I said nothing.
"Oh, he definitely does not know."Dominic caught Jillian's eye in the mirror.
"Can we focus on the hair, please?"
"Babe, I am focusing on the hair.I can multitask."He set down the shears and reached for a bottle of something that smelled like coconut, chemicals, and money."Japzilian time.Lean back."
I leaned back and stared at the ceiling while Dominic painted what felt like warm silk into my curls, section by section.It smelled expensive.Everything in my life had suddenly started to smell expensive, and I didn't know what to do with that.
Jillian waited until Dominic stepped away to mix more product before she leaned in close.Under the teasing, her eyes had gone serious.The real Jillian — the one who'd held my hand in a hospital in Berlin and talked me through a panic attack in a hotel room in Istanbul.
"Jimmy."Her voice was low enough that only I could hear it over the dryers and the piped-in pop music."I need to ask you this for real.Can you handle it?Working with Nelson every day?Because I know you, and I know what Nelson meant to you, and I need to know you're going into this with your eyes open."
The salon hummed around us.Dominic had his back to us, but the angle of his head said he was still listening.In the mirror, my reflection stared back — green eyes, auburn curls already starting to fall into something sleeker, something that made me look like a stranger.A man who'd soon work in a building with polished floors and corporate logos and millions of viewers.A man who'd see Nelson Mackenzie every single day.
Nelson, who I'd walked out on thirteen years ago and never looked back.
Until now.
I met Jillian's eyes in the mirror.
"I don't really have a choice, do I?"
ChapterSix
Jimmy
The Beacon Broadcasting building rose out of the Manhattan skyline in steel and glass, gleaming and self-important — the kind of architecture designed to make you feel small on approach and powerful once you were inside.The logo, that lighthouse beam sweeping in a slow arc above the entrance, was lit against the evening sky, and I stood on the sidewalk staring up at it with the queasy fascination of a man who'd just agreed to move into a house he was fairly sure was haunted.
My first official day was tomorrow, Tuesday.The plan — Bruce's plan, carefully constructed and delivered with the nervous precision of a man defusing a bomb — was for me to arrive for a formal introduction to the staff, and for him to not tell Nelson until I walked in for my first day.
I thought it was a bad idea.Bruce said it would be better to apologize than to ask permission, because Nelson hated every hire he'd ever floated for the EP chair.He'd spent the past two weeks dodging Nelson's questions about the search with the bureaucratic vagueness that was apparently his signature survival skill.
And yet here I was, a day early.On Monday.
I couldn't help it.I'd spent two weeks filling out paperwork and pretending I wasn't terrified, and now I was supposed to sit in my apartment one more night and not think about the fact that tomorrow I'd be running a show I'd spent my whole adult life calling a symptom of everything wrong with American journalism.No.I needed to see it first.I needed to walk through the door, breathe the recycled air, get a look at the machinery up close.I needed to know what I was walking into before it swallowed me whole.
I showed my temporary badge to the security guard, who barely looked at it, and pushed through the glass doors into the lobby.