“Excuse me, Tom?” It still wowed her to be talking to such a TV icon in her city. He turned to her with a big smile.
“Yes, Olivia?” He had told her and the other interns that he made it a point to learn all of the new names by day two.
“Sorry to bother you. I… uh… I just saw Faith in the parking lot and she asked me to give this to you. I don’t know what it says.” Olivia immediately regretted saying the last part. Why would she know what it said? She bit her lip as she pushed the little square at him.
He looked at the paper quizzically.
“Thank you. You’re a dear for delivering it.” He put it in his breast pocket. Olivia didn’t even mind that he called her a “dear.” In the mouth of someone else it might have sounded off-putting, sexist even, but she got the feeling he was like her grandpa and referred to women as “dears” in a well-meaning way all the time.
“You’re welcome,” she said, and turned to find Laura.
Olivia was able to focus on her intern work for the next few hours. She had brought her own dinner and ate at her desk while trying to work on writing a “bump” that Laura had assigned her. This was a tease to the next segment, along the lines of “Coming up next…,” but Olivia found it extremely difficult to summarize a story without giving it away.
“Remember, it’s a tease,” Laura had said. “You can’t tell the audience the whole story in the bump or they won’t tune in. So instead of ‘Delta Airlines is giving away two-hundred-dollar travel vouchers to every American to get you to book with them’ you might say ‘What airline is offering a massive incentive that just might make you jump sky-high?’ Get it? Don’t say the airline, don’t say the incentive, and use a fun play on words like ‘sky-high.’”
So Olivia was laboring over how to write a bump teasing a new social media app called Picture Me that preteens wereflocking to but parents found extremely dangerous. “What app could be killing your kids?” seemed a bit harsh, so she was playing around with the wording.
Suddenly it was after ninePM, and Laura seemed flustered by something. Then Laura pulled some others into a conference room. Olivia was trying to pretend she wasn’t looking through the glass walls into the room, but she saw Laura gesturing and others nodding and appearing solemn.
A short time later Olivia overheard the assignment-desk manager calling Matthew and imploring him that he had to come in, saying Faith had not returned from dinner break.
Everything seemed to move very quickly from there. The producer, Kyle, asked Olivia if she was finally done with the bump. She showed him what she had written, something long and bulky that tried to play on the wordpicture,and he said, “Here’s a simpler way,” and changed it to “A warning all parents MUST hear about a popular but potentially dangerous new social media app…” She nodded and made a note to write in a more straightforward manner.
It was almost showtime. Laura was still on the phone in the conference room. Matthew showed up complaining loudly to the entire newsroom that he had been out to dinner and had to drop off his fiancée and come in to fill in for Faith; other people were whispering and wondering what was going on with Faith.
The show went on the air and no one at home would have been the wiser about the meteorologist switch, except for Aunt Carol, who texted Olivia right away asking why Faith wasn’t on the eleven o’clock broadcast and wondering if Faith had a hot date.
After the show, the night crew was clearly still flustered by Faith’s absence and talked about it as they walked to their carsin the parking lot. Some people were mad, saying it was typical Faith behavior, while others expressed worry. Olivia remained very quiet.
Checking social media when she got back to her apartment and seeing the Reddit thread and speculation on X, she tossed about in bed until at least fourAM. Now Aunt Carol was waking her up wanting more answers than Olivia knew.
She shut her eyes again, willing darkness and slumber back into her body. She needed it. As she fell back asleep, she was dreaming of Faith. In the dream, Faith was on vacation, sipping wine overlooking the sea in Italy, when Olivia’s mother, Evelyn, walked up to her and asked if they could talk. Evelyn started telling Faith that Olivia had looked at the note she was specifically asked to just give to Tom. Olivia jerked awake, her heart hammering.
Just a dream,she told herself,just a dream. No one can possibly know. You were alone in the bathroom.She looked at her clock: 11:30AMGizmo jumped on the bed and started meowing, giving her a stare-down. It was late for his breakfast.
“OK, fine, Giz.” She pushed the covers off as her heart started to stabilize from the dream. Olivia lived alone. Well, she should have been living with Mom in the condo, but Mom was gone.
“I’ll just be a few months, maybe a teensy bit more,” Evelyn had said when she first took off. “You don’t know the freedom I feel right now, with you deep into college and Dad and I no longer together. It’s like I’m twenty years old myself. I need to harness this energy and do things I never thought I could do.”
One year later she had returned once for Christmas but said that the nomadic European lifestyle suited her and that Olivia should just fly over to visit when she could. But how was Olivia supposed to have time to do that?
At least her mom still paid for the condo. With a full-time, unpaid internship, Olivia could not deal with mortgage payments. Mom sent money for food—she was financing all of this from cashing in stock options from her longtime corporate job. Olivia looked after the condo and the cat in exchange for the free housing, food, and a Netflix subscription.
Olivia got up and fed Gizmo, then started coffee for herself. She took a frying pan down from its hook above the stove and cracked open some eggs. While she waited for them to cook, she scrolled her phone, looking for more Reddit posts about Faith, but there was nothing startling, just more of the same. As she used a wooden spoon to whisk the eggs, she thought about why she hadn’t told her aunt Carol that she had read the note Faith gave her.
Guilt. That was why. Olivia felt terrible about being a bad intern and disobeying orders to deliver the note straight to Tom. As for the content of the note, it was odd but it might be absolutely nothing. Maybe people with upcoming birthdays or an invite list to a party. Yet, now Faith had disappeared for the elevenPMshow.
She didn’t want to lie to her aunt. Maybe after breakfast she would be more clear-minded to tell Carol everything.
After pouring a cup of coffee and adding the vanilla cream she favored, she put her eggs on a plate, shook a little salt and pepper over the top, and went to sit down.
Her phone made a sound. Glancing down, she saw it was a breaking-news alert from Channel 9.
CHAPTER THREE
Carol and Jim
June 2
