Page 15

chapter nine

Jillian

Jill: Graham looks so sexy today

Meghan: First of all, NO.

Meghan: And second, I’m screenshotting this and printing it on the front page of the Sunday edition.

Jill: Do it. I said what I said

I slipped my phone into the pocket of my dress, smiling because Meghan didn’t scare me at all.

Well, maybe a little.

Sliding onto my stool behind the news desk, I opened my laptop, wondering if Olivia would be back from lunch soon.

After sitting through orientation all morning, she let her dad take her to Moretti’s to celebrate her first day on the job.

It was kind of cute, watching the two of them leave together.

I couldn’t help but notice the way she tried to duck out as quickly as possible, like she was embarrassed to be associated with the CEO.

Sighing, I pulled up my doctor’s website, navigating to the appointment scheduling page. With Meghan’s words in the back of my mind, I scrolled through the available times, almost wishing Dr. Boyd didn’t have openings.

Unfortunately, there were so many afternoon slots to choose from the following week, I could take my pick. My cursor hovered over the first available appointment after lunch on Monday—I might as well get it over with as soon as possible.

I hesitated, thinking back to my last appointment with Dr. Boyd in November.

I’d mentioned having persistent pain in my shoulder and upper back, and he scribbled out a prescription for opioids without much discussion.

I never even picked it up, because it felt like a temporary solution to a recurring problem.

He’d probably be able to see that in my chart, wouldn’t he? I wasn’t ready to explain why I never filled it. And I was even less ready to sit there and have another painkiller prescription thrown at me.

I needed answers.

“Jill,” Marco said, coming around the side of the desk. He ran one hand through his dark curls, holding one of his trusty spiral notebooks by his side. “Please tell me you haven’t gotten too far into tomorrow’s parking meter feature?”

I closed my laptop as though I’d been caught looking at something nefarious. “Haven’t started. Why, what’s up?”

“I want to push that aside for next week. Let Chase shoot some B-roll over the weekend, after they’re installed. Can you come up with something different for that slot?”

I could’ve screamed.

While it was true I hadn’t pieced together my story on the new parking meters, I’d already mentally written the script. And now I had to come up with something different to fill that time? “Yeah, no worries,” I lied, flashing him a smile. “Give me an hour.”

Marco gave me a half grin. “Just let me know if you need me,” he said, one of his go-to phrases that always felt more like habit than sincerity. He was being pulled a million different directions, too, and to admit I was drowning would only add to his plate. “Where’s your intern?”

“At lunch with her dad.”

He nodded, leaning in closer to whisper, “I hate this internship program. Hate it.”

I blinked up at him in surprise. “You do?”

“It’s costing us out the ass, and for what? None of us have time to teach a bunch of kids how the news operates. Imagine if they gave us a second morning anchor instead of implementing this bullshit.”

“I don’t know, Marco,” I said, resting my chin on my fist. Back when Silas was our CEO, Marco and I had plenty of complaints about his every decision.

We’d huddle together and quietly whisper about him, calling him every name under the sun.

Now that Graham was in charge, this conversation was making me uneasy.

The internship program wasn’t his brainchild, but he’d given it the green light to continue.

“Investing in the future of journalism feels pretty important.”

“But if we weren’t wasting money baby-sitting high school kids, that’d cover half the salary of a co-anchor. Don’t you want that?”

Of course I did, but I knew it was beyond the realm of possibility.

We lost our biggest advertiser after Silas’s dramatic departure.

I knew the board was looking for ways to trim the fat, not add to it.

“I’ve been doing it alone all this time,” I said.

“And hey, now I’ll have a fifteen-year-old doing some of the grunt work for me. ”

“Fifteen.” Marco repeated, furrowing his brows. “She can’t drive?”

“I’d assume not.”

He let out a sharp exhale. “It’s going to be pretty difficult sending her on errands then, isn’t it? What happened to the older kid you were originally assigned?”

I raked my fingers through my hair, pretending like I didn’t know exactly what happened—and why. “Um, I think they stuck him in the advertising department…?”

“They’ve got that backwards,” Marco grumbled.

I pressed my lips firmly together, knowing in my heart he was right, but there was nothing I could say. He pushed away from the news desk, shaking his head and muttering something in Spanish as he walked off.

A few minutes later, I noticed him huddled in the corner with Elaine, the intern coordinator. He was gesturing animatedly as he quietly vented, and she nodded her head like she understood. Perhaps even agreed.

Graham had better get started with that damage control campaign.

He escorted Olivia back to the newsroom at five past noon, giving her a quick, “I love you” at the double doors before walking in the direction of his office.

Growing up in a family that gave out I-love-yous like candy, it warmed my heart to see the Harlowes were the same way.

Olivia rolled her eyes as she made her way over to me, but there was a tiny hint of a smile on her face.

I perked up on my stool. “Do you finally get to work with me now, or are they going to make you sit through some more trainings?”

Olivia tugged at the hem of her open black blazer, which hung loosely over a mint-green top tucked into gray dress pants.

This was a far cry from how she looked when I met her, with her torn-up denim shorts and mascara smudged beneath her eyes.

“I think I’m done,” she said. “Which is a relief, because I’m not sure if I could look at another slide about ethics in journalism.

” After a beat of silence, she quickly added, “Not that I don’t understand how important that is. ”

I looked up at her from the desk with a close-lipped smile. “Important, yes. But pretty boring.”

She smiled from one side of her mouth, crossing her arms like she didn’t know what to do.

I picked up my laptop and nodded for her to follow me over to my cubicle, a space I didn’t use as often as the anchor desk—because it made me feel isolated and lonely.

I liked being out in the open, where I could tease Bernard, see Chase coming and going, and holler at Meghan if I spotted her walking down the hallway.

“I set aside a little desk area for you in here,” I said, nodding at a clear space on the long counter at the back of my cubicle. “There’s a drawer there for your purse.”

“Thank you,” she said, nervously moving forward to put her purse in the filed drawer.

As she stood up, she paused to look at all the pictures I had taped to the cabinet doors above my desk.

It took her no more than three seconds to zero in on a selfie of Xander and me at the comic convention. “Is that your boyfriend?”

I yanked the picture off the cabinet and tossed it face down onto the desk. Xander hadn’t pissed me off enough to warrant ripping the picture in half, like I would have for any other ex-boyfriend. “Not anymore.”

Olivia smirked, her eyes shifting to a picture of Meghan and me, also at the comic book convention, posing inappropriately with a cardboard cutout of Jason Mamoa. Her eyes widened. “Wow.”

“You know what? Just don’t look at any of the photos hanging up there.

” I giggled in embarrassment, covering that photo with my hand.

“And listen, I really hope this doesn’t make it seem like I’m brushing you off on your very first day with me, but my producer—Marco, you’ll meet him—just piled some extra work on me, and I’ve got a full plate this afternoon.

I’ve got a job for you, though, in the meantime. ”

“What is it?”

“Think you can do some social media scouting?” I asked her, sitting in my desk chair. She followed suit, sitting in the chair on her side of the cubicle before turning toward me.

“What do you mean?”

“I need you to check the local Facebook groups and Nextdoor for anything newsworthy—community events, complaints, weird police scanner reports, anything that might make a good local story. Then, compile it all in a doc. Can you handle that?”

She nodded, already pulling her phone out of her pocket. “Yeah. Concerned Citizens of Woodvale, here I come.”

“Just don’t engage. It’s bad for the soul,” I said, turning around and opening my laptop.

I skimmed through the notes I’d already jotted down for potential stories, trying to find something worthy of filling the open slot.

A puff piece on the new family-owned print shop that just opened?

A follow-up on the library’s summer reading program?

God, I was scraping the bottom of the barrel.

Behind me, Olivia was glued to her phone, her fingers moving at lightning speed as she scrolled through Concerned Citizens of Woodvale and whatever else she had pulled up. Every now and then, she’d let out a quiet huff or an amused snort, but she was otherwise silent.

I continued working, keeping one ear on her, waiting for questions that never came. Maybe I had underestimated how much handholding she’d need.

Thirty minutes later, after I got off the phone with the owner of the new print shop, an email notification popped up. OLIVIA HARLOWE HAS SHARED A DOCUMENT WITH YOU.