“Of course you do.”
She squeezed my shoulder once before leaving. “Call me if you forget who you were before the circus.”
I stayed where I was after she left, coffee cooling in my hands, listening to the ordinary noise of the city.
For the first time since Europe, telling the truth hadn’t felt like a risk.
It felt like standing still.
Apex had booked me a flight to Budapest with a twenty-four-hour stopover in London so I could meet with Thea. As I waited to board the flight, I thought again about what I would say when I got to the Apex headquarters.
Accepting Thea’s offer wasn’t just a big step forward for my career. It would mean committing to Jonathan’s world completely. Following his career, his travels, his successes and failures for the foreseeable future. Our relationship had survived three months of careful choreography, but making it the foundation of my professional life felt like a different level of risk entirely.
As soon as I walked into Thea’s office I knew something was wrong. She didn’t ask me to sit, and she closed her office door with a measured click, leaned back against it like she needed something solid, and said, “Michael Hirsch called me.”
All the oxygen left my body. My notebook felt suddenly stupid in my hand, like a prop from a play I was no longer in.
“He told me you’re sleeping with his son.” Her voice wasn’t loud. It was something worse, precise. “All this time you’ve been fucking Jonathan Hirsch? While I’ve been putting your work on the front page? How in God’s name did you let this happen?”
Heat crawled up my neck. “Thea,” I began.
“Don’t.” She cut the word in half. “Don’t insult me withit didn’t affect my journalism.Every mediocre reporter thinks they’re the exception.”
I stared at the floor between us, at the thin run of carpet that had probably seen a hundred similar confrontations. My mouthtasted like copper. Somewhere down the corridor a printer hummed; it sounded a thousand miles away.
She pushed off the door and started to pace, hands lifted, then closed, like she couldn’t find a place to put the anger. “You were embedded with the team, writing analysis that moved markets, while you were in his bed.” She shot me a look that wasn’t disgust so much as disbelief. “Do you understand what that does to my credibility? To the magazine’s?”
“I told Michael I wanted guardrails,” I managed. “Two weeks ago, after Silverstone. I asked for editorial firewalls. He said he’d call you to work out the details.”
“Oh, hecalledme.” A humorless laugh. “He called to tell me not to worry because he’d ‘work out the details’ with me. Like my newsroom takes direction from a billionaire father trying to launder his son’s PR risk.”
“He wasn’t.”
“Wally.” She stopped pacing. My name landed like a verdict. “No more half-truths. Not with me.”
Silence stretched until the radiator hissed to fill it. I could feel the shame without needing her to list my sins: the nights in hotels, the care I’d taken to keep our names out of each other’s texts, the way I’d convinced myself that not lying outright was the same as being honest.
“I should fire you,” she said, almost conversationally.
The floor went soft under my shoes.
She rubbed at her temple, then let her hand fall. “But here’s the problem. Your copy is good. It’s not just access porn, it’s observed, it’s clear, it’s fast. You see the story when everyone else is looking at the lap chart. That’s rare.”
I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding and hated myself for the relief.
“Look at me,” she said.
I did.
Her anger had cooled into something sharper. “I don’t want to lose your insider coverage. I do want to be able to look my counterparts in the eye and say we run a clean shop. If you stay, and note the if, we do this my way.”
I nodded. It was either that or head back to Philly and start over again.
“Guardrails,” she said, ticking them off on her fingers. “One: you disclose any personal contact with Jonathan to me. Immediately. Texts, calls, dinners, everything. I don’t care if you made out in a lift or discussed tire degradation in a parking lot. I know about it.”
I winced, which told her more than I meant to.
“Two: Meridian gets no prior review. Ever. Michael calls me again, he can leave a voicemail I won’t return. Three: you don’t publish a sentence without me or my desk on it. If you think that slows you down, that’s a consequence of your choices.”
