“Don’t thank me yet.” He’d smiled, showing teeth. “The Times will chew you up and spit you out if you’re not careful. The hours are brutal. The standards are impossible. And every day, someone’s waiting for you to fail so they can take your desk.”
“Sounds like every newsroom I’ve ever worked in.”
“Magnified by a factor of ten.” Jim leaned back in his chair. “But if you can handle it, if you’re as good as your clips suggest, there’s no better place in the world to do this work. We break stories that change things. That’s not hyperbole. That’s the job.”
I wanted it. I wanted it so badly I could taste it—the flavor of ambition and fear that came with reaching for something just beyond your grasp.
But I also wanted Maggie.
And I wasn’t sure, yet, if I could have both.
The hotel room was small and generic, the kind of place the Times put up candidates who didn’t yet rate anything better. I’d taken a shower, ordered room service, and now I was sitting on the bed in the hotel bathrobe, staring at the phone.
She’d sounded happy for me. Genuinely happy, not the fake happiness of someone who’s secretly calculating how my success would affect their life. But I knew Maggie. I knew the way she could smile while she was planning her escape.
Except—did I know her? The Maggie I’d been talking to for the past week wasn’t the Maggie I’d spent a year failing to hold onto. That Maggie had been slippery, elusive, always one conversation away from pulling back. This Maggie was… present. Engaged. She said what she meant and meant what she said, and when I asked her to wait for me, she’d saidtogetherlike it was a promise instead of a placeholder.
Something had changed. I didn’t know what, didn’t know how, but the evidence was undeniable.
She wasn’t going anywhere, not this time.
I picked up the phone and dialed her number from memory. She answered on the second ring.
“Hey,” I said. “Did I wake you?”
“Yeah.” Her voice was soft, sleep-roughened. “But I’m glad you did.”
We talked for an hour. About nothing. About everything. About the way her voice sounded through a phone line from a thousand miles away, and how that distance somehow made me feel closer to her than I’d felt in months.
After we hung up, I lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling.
Three times. Three times she’d pulled away, and three times I’d let myself believe it would be different, and three times I’d been wrong. The letter in my trash can back in Boston, the one I’d written and crumpled and thrown away, was evidence of how close I’d come to giving up.
But she was different now. I was certain of it.
The question was whether different was enough.
I closed my eyes and let myself hope.
Just a little.
Just enough.
13
Maggie
I woke up reaching for her voice.
Not the memory of it, as of now I still had that, the knowledge that Emma’s laugh had been bright and sudden, the kind that made everyone around her smile despite themselves. But the actual sound—the specific pitch, the way her mouth shapedAunt Magswith that little tilt at the end—that was gone. Somewhere between falling asleep and waking up, the last recording of her had been erased from whatever part of my brain stored such things.
I lay in bed and tried to reconstruct it. Emma at seven, losing her first tooth and calling me to share the news. Emma at twelve, furious about something her mother had said, ranting into the phone for forty-five minutes while I made agreeable noises.
The memories were still there. But they were silent films now, images without sound, and no matter how hard I concentrated, I couldn’t make her speak.
She called me Aunt Mags.
I knew it. I couldn’t hear it.
