Chapter 12: Not His Fault

The station's newsroom is on the third floor of a glass building on Lakeside Avenue.

I walked in there at noon on Wednesday with Tobias beside me and a visitor's badge stuck to my blazer.

He had called six times that morning, and no one had called back.

"You don't have to come," he had said last night, outside my door.

"I'd like to," I had said.

"What will you say?"

"I don't know yet."

That was true.

I had only decided that I wasn't going to sit in my flat while a roomful of strangers wrote my face for me.

The newsroom was loud and low-ceilinged, with two dozen desks and a wall of televisions.

On every screen, silently, a woman in a navy blazer smiled at a lawyer.

The caption under her still read, "The Ice Queen Who Laughed at a Fire."

People stopped typing as we crossed the room.

A man in a rolled-up shirt came out of a glass office with a coffee in his hand.

He was the news director, and he smiled the smile of someone who has had this conversation before.

"Tobias," he said. "Look, I understand you're upset about the archive clause."

"I'm upset about the caption."

"It's an engaging caption."

"It's cruel," Tobias said, and his voice shook, but he did not look away.

The director turned to me and put on a larger smile.

"And you must be our star."

I looked at him.

I did not smile back, because I couldn't, and for the first time in my life I did not apologize for it.

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