Waiting had never been natural for me. I wasn’t sure if it was growing up with brothers who would eat everything if you didn’t grab your own, or with parents who said if you weren’t winning you were losing, or if it was some other psychological bullshit. Idespisedwaiting.
Waiting resulted in a loss of position. Waiting let someone else decide the pace. Waiting allowed the story to bleed out in front of you while you watched the moment pass.
Waiting was where stories went to die.
I clicked through a few more tabs anyway, like my willpower alone could force a headline to appear.
Network sites first. The big ones. The ones that had been forced to acknowledge the situation when I went live, then pretended it was their idea all along.
“Is McBryan Being Sidelined?” one chyron teased under a smiling anchor’s face, the words framed like concern but sharpened like a knife.
“Sources: Network Under Pressure After On-Air ‘Message’”another site claimed, the article written in that breathless tonepeople used when they wanted everyone to think they were “in the know.” Posers.
A media blog I’d never heard of ran a screenshot of my face mid-segment—eyes narrowed, lips parted—like it was evidence.
She knew.
You can see it.
She wastalkingto him.
The comments beneath were worse.
Half of them called me reckless. The other half called me brave. A few called me “hot” like that was the only metric that mattered. A surprising number were convinced the entire thing was a stunt. Oh, and my favorite—I was a bitch just out to make some poor dude look bad.
Kill me.
A “true crime” TikTok account had clipped my line—what you refuse to rush—and layered it over ominous music with a slow zoom, as if I was the killer and not the one standing in front of a camera trying to keep my own pulse from giving me away.
I closed the tab. Opened another. Then another. The same cycle, different fonts. They were filling the void because there was nothing new. Nothing to highlight and say “breaking development.” So they speculated. They invented. They built narratives out of theabsenceof one.
The worst part of the whole damn thing, theyweren’twrong. If you didn’t feed the machine, it ate you. Behind me, the kettle clicked off with a soft mechanical finality.
Despite giving a little jerk, I didn’t turn. I didn’t have to. Other agents might come and go, but the only constant had been Brewster. He slipped in and out, stealthing around on silent feet and barely audible breathing.
It was like having a ghost for a roommate.
An irritating one.
Because once I knew he was there, it was impossible to ignore him, whether he said anything or not.
He set a mug on the table near my elbow without comment. Black coffee. No sugar. No little packet of fake cream. He’d noticed how I took it on day one and never asked again.
That should’ve been nothing. It wasn’t.
“Morning,” I said anyway. My voice sounded rougher than I wanted.
“Morning,” he replied, calm as if the last three days hadn’t happened.
That calm made me want to throw my laptop. At him. Or at least swing it, so I had a solid chance of hitting him in the head. Luckily for him, I didn’t.
I took a sip. Bitter. Hot. Functional.
“Any updates?” I asked, and hated that I sounded like I was asking permission to hope.
“No,” he said. Then, because he was annoyingly precise, “Nothing we can see.”
The words hung between us like smoke after a shot fired—no proof it had hit anything, just the raw certainty that someone had pulled the trigger.
