“Um . . . Colton?” the previously booming voice from the control room whimpered. “Bob wants to see you in his office.”
Colton sighed in response to his summons from the network president. “Yeah. On my way.”
Everything was moving in slow motion as the pieces finally began clicking into place. Cut the feed? There had been a feed? We had been . . . live?
The breath I had been holding released in a gust of words and angst and trembling. “But the light never came on. You told us to stick with four, and we were looking at four the whole time. You . . . someone . . . said thirty seconds, and there’s no way that was—”
Colton’s head was hanging, and then it began shaking from side to side in that horrible “I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed” way that is so much worse than being yelled at. “The whole day was a wreck. I told the control room to stick with four. As in the New York affiliate link—NY4. And thirty seconds was for Elena and Hayley. That’s when we went live. It wasn’t . . .” He sighed again. “That part wasn’t your fault. The day was a wreck.”
He turned away from us and faced the crew. “That’s on me, everyone. We’ll, um . . .” He cleared his throat. “We’ll sort it out. The wreck’s on me.” He began walking toward the door but stopped just short of it. He spun on the heels of those Ferragamos one more time, but his entire demeanor had changed. Now he just looked like a dejected teenaged boy trying to fit into his dad’s fancy suit for prom. “Brynn?”
“Yeah?”
“I need you to wait for me in my office.”
I nodded. “Okay.”
My eyes followed Colton until the studio doors closed behind him, and then I turned to seek a little bit of consolation from the other half of the dynamic duo, but he was already off the stage and heading toward his dressing room. And there wasn’t a single set of eyes in the room that would meet mine.
Wham, bam, thanks for nothing, fam.
Chapter 2
Brynn
Friday, March 18
10:18 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time
The obnoxiously large grandfather clock in the corner of Colton’s office seemed to be losing time. It wasn’t, the reasonable side of me knew, but it sure seemed to be. The seconds were ticking on, slower and slower. I’d taken as long as I could getting unmic’d, changing my clothes, and cleaning my face, and still I’d been sitting, waiting, dreading, and absolutely losing my mind for thirty-five minutes.
You’d have thought my phone call with my agent would have killed more time, but it had basically consisted of Robyn saying, “Fix it!” over and over again in a voice vaguely reminiscent of a coyote yipping at a freight train, until she finally hung up with an emphatic “It’ll be fine.”
I still didn’t understand what had happened. Oh, I understood that I’d stepped into a pile of poo bigger than the one Mark had been teasing me about just over an hour earlier, but I was having a difficult time understanding how it had happened. One moment I’d been having a shallow-but-promising bonding moment with my cohost and had been at the top of my game. So near the pinnacle of my industry. And the next, the security guard outside the studio was avoiding my eyes as he held the door for me.
“Hey, Brynn.” Colton greeted me wearily as he walked through the door of his office. “Sorry that took so long.” Before closing the door, he called out to his assistant, “Please hold my calls, Claudia.”
I’d startled when he entered, and my cell phone fell out of my shaky hands. I’d been holding it loosely, trying to muster up the courage to google myself and ultimately being too much of a coward.
“That’s fine.” Fine. Robyn probably hadn’t believed in the word when she used it any more than I did now. I reached down and grabbed my phone from the floor and stuffed it into my jeans pocket as I stood from the leather couch.
He sat on the other end and left plenty of room for me to sit back down and join him if I so chose. I did. I wasn’t sure how long my knees would last standing.
“Colton, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know we were live.” I rolled my eyes at myself. Yeah, I think that much was obvious. “I mean, I really thought you told us to stick with camera four . . . Not that I’m blaming you. I’m not. I just hope you know I never would have said what I said . . .” Again, obvious.
What wasn’t obvious, at least to me, was how much of what I said had made it to air. The only thing more frightening than what people were saying about me was what I had actually said. For about half a second I had comforted myself with the possibility that only the tail end had been broadcast before Colton cut the feed, but then I remembered that the tail end was the part where I essentially called our viewers gullible dimwits for believing I was a good person. There was no bright side here.
I cleared my throat. “Colton . . . how much of what I said—”
“From Elena and Hayley’s thirty-second cue on.”
I was pretty sure I was already sitting down, so why did it feel like I was falling?
“So when I said that stuff about twelve brain cells and forty bucks . . .”
“It was forty-two bucks, but yeah. Clear as a bell.”
In an instant, my legs catapulted me up from the couch just as my throat seized and the air I was attempting to breathe got caught somewhere between my throat and my lungs. I released a very undignified honking sound from my mouth—maybe from my nose . . . who could say?—and my eyes flew open in terror and panic. Maybe because I couldn’t breathe. Maybe because I’d just perfected the mating call of the Canada goose. Or maybe, just maybe, because I’d known it was bad. Now I knew how nice just “bad” would have been.
“Hey, hey, hey.” Colton jumped up and flew over to me. He wrapped one arm around my shoulders and squeezed my arm. “Breathe. Come on. Nice and slow. In and out.” He began demonstrating, and I was grateful. Turns out I’d forgotten how that was supposed to work. “In and out. That’s good. Keep going. In . . .” Deep breath in. “And out . . .” Deep breath out.
He repeated the process several more times for me, and I tried to focus on a framed photo of his family on the table in front of us as he patted my back gently. They were at Disney World. Colton’s wife and their three daughters, who looked to be preteens at the time, laughing at Colton, who was wearing one of those Goofy hats with the ears hanging low and two buckteeth protruding from the cap. The Epcot ball glistened behind them, but nothing else was happening in the picture.
Those laughs. That ridiculous smile on my boss’s face. It was all fueled by the five of them being together.
“I bet you’re a really good dad.” My voice was raspy and my breath ragged, but I felt like I was in control once again. Of breathing, anyway.
He followed my eyes and then smiled as he patted me on the back one final time and pulled away. He guided me back to my spot on the couch and said, “I hope so.”
“How old are your daughters now?”
He sighed. “Skye is twenty-four, Roma is twenty-two, and Lizzie’s nineteen. She’s finishing up her first year at University of Southern California.”