Page 18 of Making It Live!

"Nelson—"

"Twenty minutes."

He left without another word.I walked the rest of the hallway alone, my footsteps clicking against the floor in a rhythm that sounded like a countdown.

I reached my dressing room, closed the door, and locked it.Then I stood in front of the mirror and looked at the man staring back — black hair, blue eyes, charcoal suit, flawless under the lights — and forced the mask to hold.I watched it hold, the way it had held through every broadcast and every crisis and every empty night in an apartment that looked like nobody lived there.The mask held.It always did.

But underneath it, in the place I never let anyone see, something was shaking.

Jimmy's fucking voice in my head.Jimmy Goodman was in my control room, in my building, in my broadcast, and the walls between us had just become the thinnest barrier in the world.

I pressed both palms flat against the vanity and leaned forward until my forehead nearly touched the mirror.

I did not cry.Nelson Mackenzie never cries.

ChapterEight

Jimmy

He knew.

I saw it happen.From behind the glass, on Monitor Three — the one angled on the anchor desk from the waist up — I watched Nelson's hand grip the edge of the desk the instant I spoke into his earpiece.The movement was small.Controlled.If you didn't know what you were looking for, you'd have missed it.

I knew what I was looking for.

"Tell me he's fine.He looks fine, right?He seems fine."Bruce Coleman was standing behind my chair.He'd been standing behind my chair for the entire broadcast, which was approximately forty-five minutes longer than any human being should have to endure Bruce Coleman standing behind their chair.I could see his reflection in the glass, and his hand was on his tie.Again.I was starting to worry he'd strangle himself with it."He seems fine.I think he seems fine.Tell me he seems fine, Jimmy."

"Bruce," I said, without turning around."Please stop hovering."

"I'm not hovering.I'm observing."

"You're hovering."I pulled a pair of scissors out of the top desk drawer and spun around in my chair."You've been pacing behind me like a man waiting for lab results, and if you touch your tie one more time, I'm going to cut it off you."

He let go of the tie.Picked up a pen instead.Tapped it against his palm.This was somehow worse.

"It was supposed to be last night," he hissed under his breath."I was going to tell him in his dressing room before he left for the night.But he must have raced out right after the broadcast, so I didn’t get a chance.I had a folder, Jimmy.A bound folder."

"Bruce, stop."

"With your byline samples.Tabbed.The Peabody on top, because he respects the Peabody."

"Bruce—"

"And instead, he walked onto set tonight without knowing the voice in his ear belonged to the man I hired without telling him.I hid your hire for weeks, Jimmy."

"I'm aware.I was the man being hidden."

"He vetoed three EPs over the last eighteen months.Three.With memos.Memos that ended careers.Memos that sent grown men into therapy."

"I have been informed about the memos."

"And the next time Nelson walks into my office, he’s going to ask me, in that voice—" he gestured vaguely at his own throat, as if Nelson's voice were a physical object he could reach for, "—that voice — how exactly it is that his new executive producer was in his ear for an hour without his prior consent, and I don’t have a good answer prepared.I have nothing."

"Maybe rehearse something."

"I’ve been rehearsing for two weeks.I have nothing."

I looked at him.The VP of Programming.Expensively dressed, survivor of many years in a building that ate executives like potato chips, currently on the verge of crying into a tie that did not deserve this.Some part of me — the part that had spent the last hour producing my first show in this building while a grown man hyperventilated behind me — wanted to be merciful.