Sunday afternoon at The Flame. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d set foot here on a weekend. It’d been at least a year, if not longer. Once I’d expanded the staff to include Nate, Lane, and the rest, weekend work—if and when it came up—never fell on my shoulders. The benefits of being the boss, I thought. At least I still have some small element of control over this part of my life, but who knows how much longer that’ll last.

Truthfully, I didn’t know why I was there. I had no real reason to be. There wasn’t any work to be done, or at least nothing pressing that couldn’t wait until Monday. But it wasn’t really about work, it was about being a creature of comfort and savoring the space of the so-called War Room before it disappeared—because The Flame was almost certainly doomed, as cooked and done as my reputation was. So there wasn’t really anything all that comforting about being in the office, but I didn’t want to be home, didn’t want to deal with the gaggle of paparazzi who’d set up permanent camp at the entrance to my building, and I didn’t want company, either.

I just wanted to be alone, in the silence of the office.

After what’d happened during the live stream last night, I didn’t want anyone to see my face ever again. It was easily the most humiliating thing I’d ever been through. I’d been exposed as a liar on several different levels to millions of people and had the wool pulled over my eyes thanks to Jeff and Lee. They’d orchestrated the entire thing together, they must have, and perfectly set it up to spring the trap on me during the stream so I couldn’t get away while social media engagement peaked. They’d probably even planned for me to storm away like I had, so maybe I played right into their hands when I shouldn’t have, but it didn’t matter now.

Nothing I could’ve done would’ve softened the blows I’d already taken and the blows that were sure to come. I’d turned my phone off when I left NewSpin last night and hadn’t bothered to turn it back on since then because I didn’t want to be inundated with texts and phone calls all asking for comment and clarification. I couldn’t give them what they wanted because I wasn’t even sure what’d happened. I didn’t have words to adequately express how I felt, but betrayed and crushed were pretty good ones to start with.

“Somehow I knew I’d find you here,” a voice said, startling me. I whirled around in my chair to find Joel standing in the entrance, a sad half-smile on his face.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“You know damn well what I’m doing here. You fell off the face of the earth last night, understandably so, and haven’t been returning any of your texts or calls. I was worried about you, like, really worried. I thought you’d… done something stupid,” he said and a wave of guilt swept over me.

“Jesus, Joel, no… I’m fucked up right now but I’m nowhere near that level,” I said. He crossed the room and wrapped his arms around me, and for the first time, I felt like it was OK to cry, to grieve what’d happened. I hadn’t allowed myself to shed a single tear since I left the NewSpin offices, because I refused to give Jeff and Lee the satisfaction, even if they couldn’t see me crying.

“It’s OK, let it out. You deserve to,” he said, rubbing my back. We stayed that way for what seemed like forever, and I cried so much that eventually I didn’t have any water left to shed. When I’d settled down enough, he pulled back and sat down in the chair next to me, reaching over to take my hand in his.

“I’m so sorry you’ve had to go through this,” he said.

“For a second, I really thought you were going to say ‘I told you so’ and I was going to punch you so fucking hard if you did,” I said and he laughed.

“I do enjoy saying that to you, but not this time. Nothing about this situation makes me happy,” he said.

“You’re not alone,” I laughed, wiping my eyes. I felt childish for being so upset and for letting Joel see it, but if I couldn’t let it out with my best friend, then who could I let it out with?

“You know we’re going to lose all of this, right?” I asked, waving an arm around the office.

“I know,” he said. “I knew it from the second you agreed to shoot this series, though I would never have guessed it’d go down like this.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” I said and he laughed.

“I didn’t mean it like that. I just knew that as soon as you landed that gig, you weren’t coming back here. Like, I knew that things would never be the same again. You’d go off and become some celebrity and get your own show or whatever and we’d be here in the dust without you trying to figure out how to keep the ship afloat,” he said.

“Well, I definitely became a celebrity and for all of the wrong reasons,” I laughed.

“Yeah, that’s what I meant when I said I didn’t think it’d go down that way.”

“And yet here we are. I’m so sorry, Joel. This is all my fault. If I hadn’t been so greedy, so short-sighted, none of this would’ve happened.”

“Bullshit. I’m not buying any of that so you can stop right now. You would’ve been stupid not to take the chance with NewSpin and the documentary. It was a risk, a big one, and it might not have panned out the way we wanted it to, but you couldn’t have afforded not to take it. High risk, high reward,” he said.

“Yeah, but at what cost? The Flame’s been snuffed out, you’re all going to lose your jobs, and God only knows what’s going to happen to me. I haven’t dared to look online to see what people are saying about me. How bad is it?”

“It’s bad. Like, really bad. It’s a good thing you haven’t looked. I was hoping you hadn’t been sitting and obsessing about all of that,” he said. “But you’ll be fine, one way or another. You’re too smart, too talented for it to go any other way.”

“That’s sweet of you to say but now’s really not the time to kiss my ass,” I said and he chuckled.

“I’m not kissing your ass, I’m telling you like it is.”

“Even at my lowest, I can always count on you to keep it real,” I laughed. He smiled at me and for a brief moment I felt like maybe it all would be OK, like maybe I would land on my feet after all of the dust had settled. A few moments passed while we looked at each other and around the office, admiring what we’d built together.

“Have you heard from Jeff?” he asked and my heart lurched.

“No. And I don’t want to. What could he possibly have to say to me at this point?” I asked and he shook his head. “What? You don’t agree?”

“No, it’s not that… it’s just that I think you’re being, well, a little irrational,” he said.

“Keeping it real, indeed,” I scoffed. “Irrational? How the hell am I being irrational, Joel? For fuck’s sake, you saw the stream, you saw what happened and what they did. They totally sold me out, played me like a fucking instrument.”

“You don’t really believe that. I know you don’t,” he said.

“What? What the hell are you talking about?” I asked, anger rising at the back of my throat.

“I don’t think Jeff had anything to do with this. Kile, I know you don’t want to hear it, but you didn’t see it, the way he looked at you throughout the stream, and the look of horror on his face when that teaser trailer was over,” Joel said.

“The only thing that showed was Jeff trying to swallow the guilt he was feeling, if he even felt any at all,” I said and Joel shook his head again.

“You’re right, it was guilt, but not the kind of guilt you think it was. Taylor’s a hard-ass, no doubt about it, but he’s not like that. He wouldn’t throw you under the bus for his own good.”

“And how do you know that? You don’t even know him, you never met him,” I said.

“True. I don’t know, I can’t explain why, but there’s just something about it that doesn’t feel right in my gut. I listen to that feeling more often than not because it’s almost always right. Like, sometimes when I see people I instantly get a feeling that there’s something about them, like they can’t be trusted or something’s fishy about them, and nine times out of ten that gut instinct is right about those people,” he said and I laughed.

“Well, that’s great and all, but excuse me if I don’t put much stock in your gut when it comes to something like this,” I said.

“I didn’t expect you to,” he said. “But why don’t you at least talk to him? Just to be sure? You’ll never really know until you do.”

“No. Absolutely not,” I said. “I don’t have anything to say to him. He’s the reason we’re going to lose all of this, I don’t think anything he could say could convince me that he’s not a self-serving dirtbag.”

“You’re only saying that because you love him,” he said and I felt like he’d just punched me square in the chest.

“What?”

“You heard me. You love him, and the thought of someone using you, hurting you the way that Brandon did all those years ago, is so painful that you’d rather believe it’s true without really knowing it is just to save yourself the grief of being wrong,” he said. I glared at him.

“You’re treading on shaky ground here, Joel,” I said, my voice low.

“And you’re getting upset because you know I’m right. This is what always happens when things go this way,” he said, wearing a smile. “I’ve known you long enough to know when I’m right. It’s written all over your face, you just don’t want to hear it.”

“Stop.”

“No, I won’t. If you don’t want to hear it, I’ll make you. I saw those pictures in the District Inquirer, I saw the other ones in the teaser trailer at the end of the episode last night… Those photos didn’t look to me like one guy leading another one on. He loves you too, Kile, and I think that’s why you’re so willing to give up on all of this. You think that he worked with Lee to set you up, but really it’s just a convenient way for you to duck the hell out of the relationship before it has a chance to get any more serious,” he said and my head spun. He was right, I didn’t want to hear this, and I also didn’t want to ever admit that there was truth to what he was saying.

As much as I wanted to believe it, there’d always been a part of me that couldn’t accept that Jeff would do something like this. I’d gotten to know him, or at least I thought I had, and seen a tender side of him that I doubted he showed to many other people. He cared about me, about other people. He had to, or why else would he have gotten so worked up that night I was on his show? He had convictions that ran deep, things he really believed in, and I found it hard to accept that a guy like that would sink so low just to rebuild his own career.

But there was so much evidence that pointed in that direction. How else would Lee have found out where we’d be if Jeff wasn’t ferrying that information back to him? How else could the footage of our argument backstage at the university have made it into the show? Jeff destroyed the memory card, I saw it with my own eyes, and yet I also saw still photos of that same conversation on the teaser trailer, which could only have come from the video camera Ross was using.

“So, let me ask you this,” Joel continued, ripping me out of my thoughts and back into the conversation I didn’t want to have. I looked up at him, totally unaware that I’d looked away until now, and he was staring at me, his eyes hard and intense. “Do you really want to keep pretending in order to make money, or do you want to be happy?” he asked.

“What the hell kind of loaded question is that?” I asked and he laughed.

“It’s not a loaded question, it was an honest one. And I meant it. I want to know the answer. Do you want to make money, or do you want to be happy?”

“Who says they’re mutually exclusive?” I asked and he raised an eyebrow at me.

“Come on, Kile, stop bullshitting me. I’ve been in this business with you long enough to know that you’re not happy. You’re not ever going to find what you want here, not with The Flame or with any other publication like it. Your heart’s not in it anymore. You don’t believe the shit you’re saying and telling other people to believe,” he said.

He was right. Jeff had seen and said it long before Joel had, and I’d bristled then, too. It was one thing to hear it from Jeff, the guy who’d seemingly been using me for his own gain, but it was another thing entirely to hear it from Joel, who’d always stood behind me and had my best interests at heart.

“And what if I don’t?” I asked. “What the hell does that leave me with? I’m nothing if I’m not this.”

“That’s horse shit and you know it. You’re a lot of things that all add up to one pretty fucking awesome package. But all of that talent’s going to waste here doing this. You’re better than this, you always have been. Maybe what you’re going through now is what you needed to make you realize it,” he said and I stared at him, finding it hard to believe that these words were coming out of Joel.

“Where’s all of this coming from? If you’ve always known this about me, you’ve certainly never told me, and you never hesitate to tell me what you think,” I said. He shrugged.

“I don’t know. I never had the courage to say it until now. I mean, I don’t want to kick you while you’re down or anything like that, but it’s just so obvious, now more than ever. This used to give you life and make you happy when you had that fire in you, that passion to spread your message, but you’ve been different for a while now and it only got worse when you started dating Taylor,” he said.

“So what should I do then, oh wise one?” I asked and he smirked.

“Go to Jeff. At least give him the chance to explain himself. I think you might be surprised what he has to say. Believe it or not, Kile, the entire world isn’t out to get you,” he said and chills ran across my body, every inch of it, before reaching my toes and bouncing back up. My scalp crawled.

The last thing I wanted was to see Jeff, not now, and hopefully not ever, but what Joel was saying made too much sense. Maybe I had overreacted—I had a habit of doing that, it came with being dramatic, which I’d also always had a habit of being.

“Worst case scenario, he proves you right and then at least you’ll know, you’ll have that closure. It won’t be an open wound dragging you down while you’re trying to build the next chapter of whatever it is you go on to do. Because this isn’t the end for you. You know it as well as I do,” he said.

“What am I supposed to do? Just call him up and tell him to explain himself?”

“I don’t know the answer to that. I’m sure the opportunity will present itself if you pay attention,” he said.

“And what am I going to say? I think you’re a lying, scheming piece of shit but I want you to confirm that you are?”

“That’s up to you, I guess, though I wouldn’t recommend using those words, exactly,” he said and I couldn’t help but laugh. “Look, Kile, have I ever steered you wrong?”

“No, but you certainly tried to pooh-pooh this thing with NewSpin. In retrospect, I should’ve listened.”

“But you didn’t then. Now I’m telling you again what I think you should do. Have you learned your lesson about not listening to me?” he asked, wearing a wide smirk.

“You’re a real bastard, you know that?” I asked through my own laughter. I couldn’t believe he was convincing me to do this, but I’d be lying if I said that there wasn’t a part of me that didn’t want to know, didn’t want the certainty that only talking to Jeff could bring. I only hoped it wouldn’t come back to haunt me like everything else about working with Jeff had.

“I’m sure that’s not the last time I’ll be hearing that from you,” he said. I picked my phone up off of the table where it’d been sitting powered off in front of me since I’d gotten here.

“Go on, turn it on, make the call,” he said, nodding at my phone. I stared at it for a minute, not feeling fully prepared to face whatever waited for me in my notifications. After taking a deep, deep breath, I pressed the power button and kept my eyes closed until the phone vibrated in my palm to alert me that it was ready to be used. I punched in my passcode and immediately was overwhelmed by notifications. I set the phone down on the table and waited for all of the vibrating and chiming to stop so I wouldn’t have to read any of the thousands of negative emails and tweets I was sure to have gotten.

When the torrent passed, I picked my phone up again. Joel watched me as I did so. I tapped on the phone icon and started to dial when I was interrupted by a call from an unknown number.

“What is it?” Joel asked, his brow furrowed.

“I dunno, it’s not a number I recognize.”

“Answer it,” he said. “Maybe it’s Jeff trying to trick you by using a different number.” I laughed at that, thinking Jeff would never be that clever, but slid to accept the call anyway.

“This is Kile Avery,” I answered.

“Hi, Kile. This is Wade Barrett, President of NewsAmp. How’s your Sunday afternoon going?” a deep voice asked. I nearly dropped the phone.

“Who is it?” Joel hissed but I waved at him to shut up.

“It’s been better, to say the least,” I said. Wade laughed.

“Understandable. Listen, I don’t want to keep you, I just wanted to call and tell you about a strategic management reshuffle at NewSpin,” he said. I repeated the words in my head, not quite comprehending, not quite believing that I was talking to the President of NewSpin’s parent company.

“Oh?” I asked meekly.

“Yes. I’ve been filled in on what happened between you and Lee Noble and while it’s a shame to say, I thought you’d like to know that Lee is no longer with the company,” he said and my heart stopped.

“I’m sorry, what?” I asked and he chuckled on the other end of the line.

“Jeff Taylor called me earlier this morning. He told me everything that happened with Lee, about how he tried to blackmail you. Many people try to assert that NewSpin is a less than scrupulous organization, but even we have our boundaries for acceptable behavior,” he said, and I had to blink, really squint down on my eyelids, to concentrate and make sure I was hearing him correctly.

“Wait, are you saying that Jeff didn’t have anything to do with all of that?”

“It’s early in our investigation into what happened and what Lee was up to, but so far it doesn’t look like Jeff was tied to it in any way and based on the conversation I had with him earlier, I can’t imagine he’d turn himself in by talking to me and asking me to investigate Lee,” he said.

“Holy shit,” I whispered.

“Kile? Are you OK?”

“I’m fine, I’m just stunned, I… I don’t know what to say.”

“Well, how about this? I’ll give you a few days to think on it and, when you’re ready, you can come into the studio and we’ll record a statement. We’ll lay everything out, or you can in your own words, with or without Taylor. I can’t have this sort of thing lingering over NewSpin, not when we’re in this critical period of growth,” he said.

“Yeah, I’d like that. I’d like that a lot,” I said, my tongue heavy and thick in my mouth. This all felt so surreal. Jeff really didn’t have anything to do with the situation, and he’d gone out of his way to talk to Wade to right things.

“Good, I’m glad to hear it,” Wade said. “Though, bear in mind, the sooner we can get this out there, the better.”

“Right, yeah, of course. I can come in tomorrow morning if that works for you,” I said.

“That’s perfect. I’ll have everything in place. We’ll probably record in the same studio as last night.”

“Alright, perfect. I’ll be there and I’ll be ready,” I said, though I wasn’t sure how true that was. I didn’t think there was any amount of preparation I could do that would prime me enough for this.

“Great. And Kile?”

“Yeah?”

“On behalf of NewsAmp and NewSpin, I’d like to apologize to you personally for all of this. I want you to know that Lee Noble is not representative of either of our companies, and that this kind of behavior is never acceptable,” he said. “I can only imagine the kind of damage this has done to your reputation and to your career, but I promise you, we’ll work together to fix that.”

“Thank you, Wade. Thank you so much,” I said, fighting back the tears that were forming at the corners of my eyes and the burning in the back of my throat.

“No need to thank me. I should be thanking you, you don’t owe us this chance to fix things, but I’m glad you’re giving it anyway. I’ll see you in the morning,” he said.

“See you then,” I agreed and hung up.

“Holy shit,” Joel said, his eyes as wide and his face as white as mine must’ve been.

“Yeah, seriously,” I said, my head reeling. I couldn’t quite wrap my mind around it all.

“I guess I was right after all, huh?” he laughed.

“Maybe so,” I said, though it pained me to admit it.

“I wonder if Taylor will be there?”

“I don’t know. I’d assume so, if NewSpin is really trying to fix all of this,” I said.

“Are you going to be OK to see him?”

“I will,” I said, and I meant it. Though NewSpin owed the world an apology on my behalf, I owed Jeff one that was much more important. How could I have ever really believed that he’d do something like that to me? After all we’d shared and been through together? I felt stupid and out of control.

“This is your chance, Kile. So, what’s it going to be? Money or happiness?” Joel asked and my stomach swam with warm fuzzies.

“Happiness,” I said.