by Dete Meserve
“Joe?” I heard the words come out of my mouth, sweet and friendly. “Joe Raley?” He turned to look at me, and I started to cross the street. “It is you,” I said, buying time.
He towered over me. “Do I know you?”
“Not yet.” While my stomach quaked, my voice sounded surprisingly calm. “I’m Kate Bradley.”
A look of recognition swept across his face. “I’m not . . . this isn’t gonna—”
“Please don’t go. I’ve spoken to Alexia and Logan. I know about the plane tickets you gave to the tow truck driver.”
His breath quickened. “Then why are you chasing me when my family has asked you to leave me alone?”
I didn’t have a sound bite. Or an answer that might persuade him. So I landed on the truth. “I get why you’d want to help people you care about. Your friends. Family. I also understand why you’d want to help the poor. But why are you helping people you don’t know? Complete strangers?”
He set down his box. “That’s what you want to know?”
I smiled. “Well, that and a few other things. What happened in that car ride from Dallas to Manhattan?”
He stiffened. “I can’t talk about that.”
“At least tell me how I can find Marie.”
He drew a deep breath, thinking. “She could be anyone.”
Alexia had said the same thing. Was this their party line? My frustration mounted. “Why won’t you tell me?”
His anger flashed. “You got a lot of nerve badgering me like this. You wanna know how I spent my day? My day was about being turned down for job after job. Did a tour of duty in a war zone, did over four hundred debriefings of Taliban members. But I’m not qualified to track inventory for an aircraft-parts supplier here. Or work the warehouse at the dollar store. Even the frame store won’t hire me. And now you’re stalking me to find Marie.”
I softened my tone. “I’m sorry for what you’re going through. I didn’t mean for it to feel like that.” I saw his body tense and decided to take another approach. “Everyone I’ve talked to says she’s special. Is that your experience too?”
He relaxed his shoulders. “Marie, she’s not like everybody. When I met her, I was so weighed down by my sister’s death that it took all my energy just to breathe. I didn’t talk. But Marie saw past all that. She invited me into the car without even a question. A big guy like me can be scary to a lot of people. But not her.” He lifted his box. “She has reasons she doesn’t want to be found. Honor that.”
It was time to give up.
Time to admit that I wasn’t going to find Marie and the other three were never going to agree to be interviewed.
Time to move on.
But even as I reached that frustrating conclusion, a new idea was forming. A sense that there was another way through this, even if I didn’t know yet what it was.
In the newsroom the next morning, I focused on a report about the Supreme Court’s ruling on unconstitutional gerrymandering in two states, working the phones to get reactions from federal judges and other advocacy groups. But my heart wasn’t in it.
Instead, another idea was percolating in my mind. Maybe I would never get the Secret Four story I had desperately wanted, but what if I could make something of my failure? What if I used what I knew to do something important?
I was headed to the assignment desk to talk through the idea with Mark when I caught a glimpse of Scott entering the newsroom. I had thought a few days away from him would give my feelings a chance to scatter and weaken, but it’d had the opposite effect. My cheeks warmed.
This had to stop.
Anyone with good observational skills—meaning most of the reporters here—would notice that my face was flushed when I was around him.
The next thing I knew, he was heading toward me. “What have I missed on this story while I’ve been buried in Wonders prep?”
My heart sped up as I walked him through the discoveries I’d made. The dead ends. Marie’s illness. All of it. Even though we talked through every story point with complete professionalism, a flicker of a flirty smile crossed his face, and he laughed at one of my lame attempts at humor. The charge was still there. Stronger even. But it was clear neither of us was going to do anything about it.
He glanced at his watch and frowned. “I’m late for a meeting upstairs. Can I join you for your morning run tomorrow?”
His question caught me by surprise. My face heated again. “I start at five. Are you sure you want to run with me that early?”
“I can’t think of anything I’d rather do.”
The sunlight was making the sidewalks sparkle. In a few hours, they would be bustling with activity, but in the hushed early-morning light, they glittered, beckoning Scott and me to follow them into areas of the city neither of us had been before. Along the three-mile route, I told him the crazy idea that had been bubbling up over the past day.
“I’m probably never going to find Marie,” I said. “Never going to get the four of them on camera.”
He turned to look at me. “Wait, you’re giving up?”
“I’d say I’m ‘pivoting.’ If I’ve learned anything about adapting to this city, it’s that when something isn’t working, you’ve got to try a different approach. I may not ever be able to find them or convince them to let me interview them. I’m probably going to fail on this story. But there’s something I can do. Something we both can do. We can help them.”
“Help them? How?”
“Alexia received a kidney transplant from an anonymous donor. She wants to know who it is. All she knows is that he’s a high school principal in Idaho. Let’s help her find him.”
He brightened. And instead of telling me all the reasons it wouldn’t work or why we shouldn’t do it, he said, “It’ll take a bunch of phone calls and digging, but I bet we can track him down.”
“That’s step one. Because even if we find him, he still may not want to meet her. We’d have to come up with a compelling reason.”
His gaze was intimate. “I don’t know if you’re aware of this, Kate, but you’re very persuasive. I think you can use those powers to talk him into it.”
“You’re putting a lot of faith in these supposed powers of mine.”
He smiled, not taking his eyes off me. “I’ve seen them up close.”
His words distracted me. Made my thoughts evaporate. I tried to get the conversation back on track. “We wouldn’t stop there. We’d help all three of them. Joe Raley told me he’s been having a tough time getting a job after his tour of duty in Afghanistan. Maybe we can help him find a job?”
We slowed to a stop at a restaurant with a red awning and ginormous sign that read: MOST FABULOUS RESTAURANT.
“That might be tougher,” he said, taking a swig from his water bottle. “But I have an idea. Remember that story we did about the Wall Street guys who gave a job to the homeless veteran in the wheelchair? What if we reached out to them and asked them to meet with Joe?”
“We could at least help him get an interview.”
“Problem is, we don’t know anything about him. We’d need a résumé or something to convince them to recruit him for an interview.”
“We know he’s a veteran,” I said. “And we’ve got another secret device. You.”
“Me?”
“You say I’m persuasive, but I’m pretty sure you can charm those Wall Street boys into taking the meeting. Just flash that smile of yours. Charm them with a story or two. They’ll set the interview.”
He arched a skeptical eyebrow. “This ‘charm’ thing you’re talking about. Does it work on everyone?”
I met his gaze and felt my pulse jump. Could he see the effect he was having on me? “It works on some people,” I teased.
“You guys coming in?” A stout, bald guy appeared at the restaurant door and called out to us. “Or are you just gonna stand there staring at each other?”
“Give us a minute,” Scott answered.
“New York rule number thirty
-two,” I said. “No standing on the sidewalk and staring.”
“Were we staring?”
I shook my head. “We weren’t staring,” I said. Even though we had been. “We were figuring out a way to help Logan.”
“How will we do that when we know so little about him?”
“He told me someone wrecked his car in a hit-and-run. Said he couldn’t scrape together the deductible. So maybe we can—”
“We’d have to find the body shop.”
“How many body shops could be in a town of a thousand people?”
“I’ll split the cost with you.”
“Deal,” I said. Then a strange feeling came over me. Warmth. Like the way sunshine felt. I was so excited about what we were going to do for them that for the first time, I glimpsed what it must feel like to be them, knowing that you had made someone’s life easier. Better.
“You know what I’m thinking we should do to celebrate our plan?”
“Let me guess. Waffles,” I said, motioning toward the restaurant door.
He grinned. “Your mind-reading skills are on the fritz this morning.”
“They’re broken, are they?”
“I was thinking eggs and a bowl of oatmeal.”
“Sure you were,” I teased.
His eyes met mine. “There’s something I want to tell you, first. Before I lose my nerve.”
My stomach twisted. Ideas flashed in my head, none of them good. I wondered if he was going to tell me he couldn’t work with me on this story anymore. Or maybe, like my dad, he was going to tell me that he just got engaged. But he was taking so long to say anything that I rushed to fill the silence.
“You’re going to finally admit that you left me the Harriet the Spy book on my desk?”
A warm look spread across his face, and I knew it wasn’t that. His voice was low. “I didn’t want you to hear it first from the ANC rumor mill . . .”
My breath hitched. Was he going to tell me he was engaged? If so, I would have to make sure to hide my disappointment and act, through the awkwardness of it all, as though I were happy for him. Wouldn’t I be happy for him?
And then, as he stood before me, crushing words about to fall from his mouth, I suddenly realized what I was losing. Someone who understood me, my range of moods. Who shared my love for journalism. Who made me laugh.
Who was smart and sexy as hell. I was about to lose all of it.
I held on to the moment‚ the two of us standing there in diamond light while the city awakened. Until he uttered the bruising words, everything could remain as it had been between us.
“Paige and I have broken up,” he said. Or I thought he had. But a van wheezed by in the last part of his sentence, and I wasn’t entirely sure.
“Say that again?”
He repeated the words, and this time, the door to the diner opened, and a sweet wave of waffles and pancakes perfumed the air, swirling around us.
“I’m so sorry,” I said, but my voice sounded dreamy, confused. The mixture of surprise and relief made me speechless.
His eyes said more than his words. “Don’t be.”
My heart felt wild, untethered.
“We’d only been dating for a few months. But she wanted something more. And I couldn’t.”
He let that hang in the air. The reporter in me wanted to know why. I couldn’t imagine what was stopping him from taking the next steps with her. But even though I made a living asking questions, I couldn’t ask this one.
He seemed to be reading my mind. “Because she’s not you, Kate.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
My heart raced through the entire breakfast. Once we’d slipped into a mint-green vinyl booth in the diner, I was so afraid—of what he’d said, of what I may have misunderstood, and of what was yet to be explored—that I made sure we talked about everything except what he had just told me.
“What do you have going on today?” I asked, but even as he answered, my mind kept playing over and over what he’d said.
“First, I’m heading to the doctor to get a typhoid booster. Then I’m meeting with a cinematographer we’re thinking about hiring for the Alaska episode.”
Like a reflex, I kept asking questions. “What do you hope to find in Alaska?”
His gaze locked on mine. “We’re looking for billions of pounds of copper hidden deep in the ground near Bristol Bay,” he said, but the way he was looking at me was making me breathless. “Hoping we can also capture the world’s greatest sockeye salmon run.”
The waiter, the same bald guy who had shouted at us, ambled up to our table. “Know what you want?”
Know what I want? Yes. I wanted this. All of this. But my pulse was racing so fast that I wasn’t sure how to respond. How to get back to what he’d said.
I managed to blurt out an order. Waffles, of course. Scott ordered the same.
When the waiter left, Scott kept up the casual banter, but his eyes were questioning. “I saw your father on the news last night,” he said, taking a slug of coffee. “He was talking about the bill he and another senator are sponsoring. Wanting to close down the tunnels at the border. He’s smart, very intense. Is he like that in real life?”
“He can be,” I said, trying to focus. “When we debate about the news, the discussions can get very heated. But he’s also pretty normal other times, running with me or playing wicked games of chess and backgammon. He’s the kind of dad that would let me stay up past my bedtime to watch 60 Minutes with him. What was your dad like?”
“He died when I was little, so all I know about him is from photos. There’s one of my parents at their wedding. And then, when I was leafing through one of the family albums, a clump of loose prints fell out. Photos of my parents at, I think, Niagara Falls a few months before I was born. They’re about the age I am now. Which seems strange. My mother is so happy, posing and showing off her bump. My father has this mop of hair, and he’s smiling like he’s on top of the world. He was only around a fraction of my life, but I still miss him.”
“Sometimes I miss my mother, even though she died when I was five. She’d been an adviser to the mayor of San Francisco, so my parents’ career lives were extensively photographed. But what’s missing from any of the photos I’ve seen were the nights she must have tucked me into bed or celebrated my birthdays or walked with me around the neighborhood. I’ve always wondered what it was like when I was her daughter.”
I paused, worried that I’d shared too much, crossed the line. Most conversations stopped whenever I talked about my mother, as if my friends and lovers had been afraid of speaking about loss. Acknowledging its existence. But Scott was still with me.
“I wonder what they’d think of us if they met us now,” he said quietly.
Sometimes moments passed by without you realizing their importance. But not then. I felt the shift to something deeper, his full attention on me, me wholly attuned to him. I knew I was experiencing something solid. Rare. Real.
He reached across the table and rested his hand on mine. I felt the weight of his gaze, and my pulse accelerated. “I like this. You and me,” he said softly.
I could feel his unspoken question floating between us. How do you feel about me?
I trembled. Running into a burning warehouse or chasing a robbery suspect down a dark alley was easier than saying my feelings aloud. Those required a different type of fearlessness. An easier kind of bravery.
“I do too.”
In that gauzy moment in the diner, it didn’t seem to matter that a romance between two journalists at the same network was an HR nightmare and big trouble for our careers. As we dove into a shared mountain of waffles, I was stunned by how happy it made me to hear him laugh.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
That afternoon, one of the conference rooms became the “war room” for helping the Secret Four. The fabric walls were plastered with everything we knew: photos, maps, and anything we could glean online about them, studded with colorful Post-its.
&n
bsp; A production intern, Robbie, who was built like he played Texas football—and it turned out he had—posted photos of Joe and Logan and a placeholder photo of a blonde girl for Alexia.
“Joe now has an interview with Russell Bransfield,” Scott said. “He’s the exec who’s in charge of the veterans initiative at Goldman Sachs.”
“You think there’s any chance he’ll get the job?” I asked.
“The interview’s tomorrow. They’ll let us know.”
“And get this: we found Alexia’s donor,” Isabelle said, rising from her chair. She pinned a photo on the wall. “His name is Derek Nielson.” The man was tall, with closely cropped brown hair and a neatly trimmed goatee. “He’s a high school principal in Westfield, Idaho. Problem is, he doesn’t want to meet Alexia.”
“Did he say why?” I pressed.
“Hard to pin him down about why. But it was a definite no.”
“You sense there’s any chance he’d consider a reunion?”
She shook her head. “Doubt it. But I told him you’d call him.” She handed me a Post-it. “Maybe you can change his mind.”
“Robbie has news,” Scott said.
Robbie’s face flushed. “I called the only body shop in Hawesville, Kentucky, and found out that Logan’s 2011 Toyota Corolla was there. I used your credit cards to pay his deductible. And made them swear not to tell him it was from you.”
I smiled. As I looked around the room, I realized we were all doing the same thing. Beaming. We weren’t likely to find Marie or get any of them to talk with us, but it felt insanely good knowing we had found a way to make something good out of our failure.
The letter was on top of the day’s mail when I returned home that night. Addressed to me. No return address. I stared at it, wondering if I should open it. The postmark read “New York, NY,” but I knew few people here, and none of them were likely to mail me a letter.
Was it from Jordan? Was this proof that he was going to continue to threaten me about Marie? I wondered if I should show it to the police before opening. On a mail fraud story I’d worked on back in LA a few years ago, I learned that only about half the fingerprints on paper could be made sufficiently visible, even with the latest forensic techniques. Still, 50 percent was better than nothing.