Page 130 of The Thing About My Prince

“Ladies,” he says with a nod, and walks off.

I immediately lift the Coke to my forehead.

“Bliss.” My eyes close on a sigh the instant the icy glass hits my skin.

“Ow, argh.”

Agnetha’s yelp snaps my eyes open and jolts my heart rate. I learned quickly that you never know what a sudden cry might mean around here.

But all is fine. Agnetha’s just resting her bottle against her pant leg a few inches below her knee. She hurt it this morning when she was walking along, looking through her viewfinder and didn’t see a pothole.

“I’m sorry I wasn’t watching out for you,” I say for the tenth time since it happened.

“It’s only a bruise. I’ve done worse things in my time than fall on my ass on a Yemeni street.”

Agnetha has been a war photographer and videographer for thirty years. She’s worked for every prestigious news outlet you could name. Won award after award after award. So if she’s struggling here, it must be hard.

“What makes you keep coming back for more?” I ask.

She shrugs. “What else am I going to do?”

She has no family. Her parents both passed away in the last decade, she has no kids, and she’s never been married or, it seems, had any kind of a long-term relationship.

“Spend the rest of your life sipping margaritas by your backyard pool in Tucson?”

Agnetha is from Arizona. She bought a house there years ago, when she got her first job, but has never lived in it. It’sbeen rented out since the day she got the keys because she’s always overseas.

“Could you actually see me doing that?” she asks. “Okay, I might enjoy the first day. But the next morning when I got up and there was nothing else to do but the same thing all over again…?Pfft. It would be a living hell. Like being in a very sunny jail.”

I pour my drink slowly down the tilted side of my glass, watching the bubbles wiggle their way to the surface. “Do you ever wish you’d done anything differently?”

She rubs her leg where the bottle just was. “Nope. Can’t imagine it any other way. The idea of a spouse and kids is terrifying. Give me a war zone any day.”

I take a long, slow sip of the thirst-quenching fizz.

“How about you?” Agnetha pours her Coke straight into the glass without tipping it, forming a thick froth that quickly rises to the brim. “Would you give this up for that?”

“Can’t you have both?”

“Ha.” She rocks back in her chair. “Maybe. But I’ve never seen it. I’ve worked with women who’ve tried, and not a single one managed it. It works out for the male reporters, but not the female.” She picks up her drink. “If you ask me, we haven’t come as far as we think.”

“Honestly”—a tremor rises in my throat at the thought of verbalizing something I never thought I’d say—“I’m not sure I can do another contract here.”

She rests her elbows on the table and leans toward me with a gleam in her eye. “You got a guy at home you haven’t told me about?”

“No.” Agnetha doesn’t read trash publications, which I hope means she doesn’t know about the Oliver thing. If she does, she’s never brought it up. And I sure as hell haven’t. “It has nothing to do with a guy. It’s more about not feeling like this makes the difference I thought it would.”

“You mean, you thought your editors would take everygreat story you pitched? That they’d see the value in shining a light on the plight of regular folks suffering at the hands of powerful assholes with an entire nation’s weaponry at their fingertips and want to bring it to the world’s attention?”

“Yes, that’s exactly what I mean.”

“You’re not green, not wet behind the ears, and definitely not stupid.” She shakes her head and pauses to take a long drink. “You know it’s the face on the cover of a magazine that drives sales. People buy the story of how the cool tech bro of the day made his most recent ten billion. They don’t buy kids in a crowded hospital ward who are dying because there isn’t enough medication, or blood, or doctors.”

“I realize that now.” I draw a line down the condensation on the outside of my glass. “And it’s bullshit.”

“It is, my dear. It is,” she says. “But you’re not going to be able to single-handedly change that. You can’t be in this biz just because you think it’s an important job that needs doing—it also has to be thelifeyou want to live. If these three weeks have already taught you that this job you’ve worked toward for however many years has turned out not to be right for you…” She leans back in her chair. “Well, don’t waste time trying to convince yourself it is. Don’t worry about losing face. And most of all, don’t wreck your life for a job that isn’t going to change the world like you’d hoped.”

She turns her head to look up at the menu written on a chalkboard in Arabic. “I’m going to have that chicken thing I had last night again. It was good.”