Page 35 of Making It Live!

The red light died and the studio went quiet.

Nelson sat behind the anchor desk for a long moment, not moving.He didn't unclip his mic or reach for his water glass.He just sat there, in the silence after two hours of the best live television I had ever been part of, and then he did something he had never done in all the nights I'd been watching from behind the glass.

He looked at the control room.

Not a glance.This was deliberate.He turned his head and looked through the glass wall, directly at me.

Our eyes met through the glass.

The distance between us was twenty feet.The glass was thick, slightly tinted by the blue of the monitors.The studio lights were down on his side, the control room lights low on mine, and in the strange half-dark we looked at each other across the space that had separated us, and for a moment the glass wasn't a wall.It was a window.And through it I could see something in Nelson's face I hadn't seen in years.

He looked cracked open.Not broken — Nelson Mackenzie would never look broken, not in this building, not in front of a crew.But the ice was thinner.The mask had slipped, just a fraction, and underneath it was something raw, startled, and almost soft.It was aimed directly at me.

I didn't look away, because I couldn't.

Three seconds.Five.An eternity compressed into the space between two heartbeats.

Then Nelson blinked.He straightened his jacket, unclipped his mic, stood, and walked off the set, and the glass wall was only a wall again.

Ray pulled off his headset beside me."That," he said, "was the best broadcast this show has done in years."

I nodded, unable to speak.My hands were steady on the desk, but something behind my ribs was not.

The crew filtered out.People clapped my shoulder as they passed.Someone said "Hell of a show."Someone else said "Welcome to the big leagues, Goodman."I thanked them and smiled.I did all the things you do when your team has just done something extraordinary.

And then the control room was empty and I was alone.I put my face in my hands and sat there for a very long time.

Because what had just happened on that broadcast — the sync, the instinct, the way we'd moved together like two halves of something that had never stopped being whole — was not professional chemistry.I'd produced under fire in places where getting the story wrong got people killed.I knew what professional chemistry felt like.

This was not that.

This was Nelson looking at me through the glass with an expression that saidI felt it too.

And I didn't know what to do with that.I didn't know what to do with any of it — the face on the monitor, the man behind the glass who I'd walked away from thirteen years ago and who was now, broadcast by broadcast, night by night, direction by direction, becoming the most important person in my life all over again.

I picked up my phone, stared at it, then gingerly put it down.

I wasn't calling Jillian, because I couldn't say the words out loud.Saying them would make them real, and I wasn't ready for them to be real.

Instead I picked up my headset, put it on, and started reviewing the overnight feeds.The way I always did.The way I'd keep doing, night after night, on this side of the glass.

But something had changed.I felt it the way you feel a season turning — not all at once, not with any single gust of wind, but in the quality of the air itself.Something between Nelson and me had shifted tonight, and it was not going to shift back.

ChapterFifteen

Nelson

Every Wednesday at noon, I lay face-down on a heated table in the spa on the third floor of my building and let a woman named Katya put her hands on me.

This was the only hour of my week in which another human being touched my body.I'd been coming to Katya for two years.She was Russian, in her fifties, built like a woman who could carry a refrigerator up a flight of stairs, and she had a policy of absolute silence during sessions.This was the primary reason I'd chosen her.No small talk, no idle conversation.Just the sound of the ventilation system and the low, impersonal hum of whatever playlist the spa piped through its speakers.Katya's hands were excellent for working the tension out of muscles that had been clenched all week.

It was the closest thing I had to a ritual of surrender.For one hour, I wasn't Nelson Mackenzie, anchor for the Beacon Broadcasting Company.I was a body on a table with my face in a padded ring, and the only thing required of me was stillness.

Today, stillness was proving difficult.

Katya's thumbs dug into the knot between my shoulder blades — the one that lived there permanently — and I closed my eyes and tried to empty my mind.

That's our show.Toss to the overnight desk.