A dozen long-stemmed white roses wrapped in white paper and silk ribbon were waiting for me on my desk when I returned to the station that afternoon. I slipped the card off the plastic stem, crumpled it without reading it, and buried it deep in my trash. Then I walked across the reporters’ bullpen in the center of the newsroom and placed the flowers on one of the news interns’ desks.
I’d done this every time I’d received flowers from him. One of the interns asked me once if I knew who had left expensive flowers on her desk, but I feigned ignorance. I didn’t want to explain why I was giving away flowers from my fiancé.
Ex-fiancé. We had broken up six months ago, but Jack couldn’t wrap his head around the idea that we were never getting back together. At first I’d assumed that if I didn’t return his phone calls or acknowledge the flowers, he’d stop trying. But Jack was used to getting what he wanted, and my ignoring him didn’t discourage him.
The newsroom’s receptionist hailed me from across the bullpen. “Kate, there’s a man on the phone asking for you. He’s rambling on about a Good Samaritan or something.”
No wonder we ranked fourth in the market. Our own employees didn’t even watch our newscasts. “Thanks, Ann. You can put him through.” I waited for her to transfer the call.
“Kate Bradley?” the man on the phone said. His voice was full and deep, almost chocolate in its smoothness. “Saw your report about Good Sam today. Have any idea who’s behind it?”
“Not yet,” I said. “Can I get your name?”
“Rather not say. You think there’s some kind of Good Samaritan behind this?”
“Probably not,” I said. “It could be some kind of marketing promotion. Maybe a radio station or an Internet start-up giving away money to get publicity.”
“They do that?”
“Last month Gnarly.com staff members stood on a street corner in Manhattan in the middle of rush hour and handed out twenty-dollar bills with an announcement about their new outsourcing service. They gave away ten thousand dollars in an hour and got ten times the value of that in marketing exposure.”
“That’s fine for ten thousand. But what does anyone hope to gain from giving away three hundred thousand dollars?”
“Actually Good Sam has only given away two hundred thousand,” I replied.
“Two hundred doesn’t include me. I found a hundred thousand dollars on my front porch this morning too.”
I gripped the phone tightly. “What is your name?”
“He left a note with the money.”
I scribbled a giant question mark on my notepad. “What did the note say?”
“It says, ‘This is for Lauren to go to law school.’ Lauren’s my daughter.”
I put down my pen. “Does she want to go to law school?”
“She got accepted at Georgetown last fall, but I’m on a pension, and she doesn’t earn enough as a second-grade teacher to afford it.”
“Do many people know that your daughter wants to go to law school?”
“Just about everyone she knows.”
“Can you think of anyone who might’ve wanted to help her get there?”
“Lots of people want to help. But they don’t have a hundred thousand dollars to give away,” the man said with a chuckle. “You got any idea who’s behind all this?”
“Not yet. But I’d like to record an interview with you.”
Silence. Then he cleared his throat. “Can’t do that. If people knew we got a windfall like this, there’d be no end to the calls and e-mails asking for a piece of it.”
The muscles in my shoulders tensed like they always did when I was on the verge of losing an important interview. “There’s not much of a story if I can’t talk to you on camera.”
He didn’t answer.
“Will you reconsider?” I continued.
More silence. He had hung up.
Channel Eleven offers its newsroom employees quite a few perks. We get free tickets to movies distributed by our movie studio parent company, and at Christmas we get discounts on used cars at one of the mega car dealers that buys commercial time during our afternoon talk shows. But the perk everyone covets the most is the Cellini. Time after time this gleaming hunk of chromed steel in the newsroom kitchen brews up a perfect, frothy confection of milk and espresso; topped with whipped cream and sprinkled with just the right touch of cinnamon, it’s pure heaven.
I had just started on my third perfect cup and was scrambling to finish a story about Good Sam for the Channel Eleven website when Alex, one of the intern reporters, rushed over to my desk. He was dressed in the standard intern uniform: khaki pants pressed a little too carefully, a button-down shirt, and Converse tennis shoes.
“This just came over the scanner. Police were called to the scene of a robbery-assault in Westwood.”
I kept typing. “Anyone injured? Dead?”
“No, but—”
“Is a current or former celebrity involved?”
“No.”
“Do we have photos? Cell phone video?”
He shook his mop of shaggy brown hair.
“Not much of a story then.” I drained the rest of my espresso and stood.
“The only thing is—”
“Look, Alex,” I interrupted, “if we reported every robbery that happened in LA, there wouldn’t be any time left for important stuff. Like celebrity news. And if we don’t make time for celebrity news, we don’t sell commercials. And if we don’t sell commercials, we don’t have jobs.”
I started to walk away. I knew I sounded like a blowhard, but I hoped I had conveyed an important lesson about what kinds of stories were newsworthy at Channel Eleven.
“I heard on the scanner that the guy was assaulted because the thief was trying to steal a large canvas bag from his front porch. I guess the homeowner put up one heck of a fight and the burglar didn’t get away with it.”
“Where’s the story in that?” I said over my shoulder.
“I thought it might be related to your Good Sam story. You know, because of the canvas bag on the front porch.”
I whirled around. “Smart thinking. I’m impressed,” I said, with my best crow-eating smile. “Where are you going to school, Alex?”
“Northwestern University.” He handed me a Post-it note. “I took down the address. You think I could work on this Good Sam story with you?”
Interns don’t usually get assigned to individual stories or specific reporters. They work wherever they’re needed most each day—usually researching story ideas, retrieving video, answering phones, or working on scripts. But Alex clearly had strong reporter instincts and he was bold enough to ask me for an assignment, something most interns rarely do.
“Definitely. I’ll get David to assign you to me and this story.”
As Josh and I raced to the address Alex had given me, my phone flashed with a text from my father. Well, actually it came from his assistant because my dad definitely doesn’t send text messages. It read: NY Times says LA is hit-and-run capital of US.
If there’s any bad news about Los Angeles, my dad always let’s me know about it. From his perspective, the city is filled with shallow, celebrity-obsessed people who lounge on the beach and regularly dodge bullets from gang members, get stuck in snarled traffic, and breathe smog-choked air.
But that’s not the Los Angeles I live in. Yes, LA is a place of gorgeous beaches and paradise weather, but it’s also a reporter’s dream with its mudslides, wildfires, and earthquakes. Millions live well below the poverty line and many thousands are in gangs, yet LA is also home to one of the world’s greatest concentrations of millionaires and billionaires. Which makes it a city where anything can—and does—happen. An ordinary news day can include a brush fire, a celebrity meltdown, a big-rig crash, a dead body on a hiking trail, a freeway chase, and a dust storm.
“This is it,” Josh said, interrupting my thoughts. We pulled in front of a modest one-story home, a brown bungalow with a broad front porch. But what distinguished this bungalow from all the others on this quiet street in West Los Angeles was its lawn. The grass was the deep emerald green that you would see on the East Coast where they get rain year-round. Seriously, it looked like it something out of Better Homes and Gardens—there wasn’t a single weed or blade of crabgrass growing anywhere, and the edges looked as though they’d been trimmed by hand. I’d seen grass this perfect once in front of a condo building in Beverly Hills. But that stuff turned out to be artificial grass. I leaned down to touch it; this was the real deal.
Josh waited in the van again while I headed for the front door. Given that the man we hoped to interview had scuffled with a thief, we both suspected he wouldn’t be nearly as welcoming as Cristina Gomez had been and we didn’t want him to slam the door when he saw the camera. When there was no answer at the front door, I walked down the driveway to the backyard. A white-tiled pool glittered in the late afternoon sun. Most people would have thought it a beautiful sight—pale blue water, its surface rippled in the light breeze. But after my near-drowning experience last month, I hated water and all its camouflage. Oceans, lakes, swimming pools—I despised them all. Water had nearly claimed me once, and I was certain that, given the chance, it would attempt to finish what it had started.
“What are you doing back here?” A voice startled me from behind.
I swung around to see a thin man standing on the back porch. He was about my dad’s age, with a neatly trimmed beard and silver wire-rimmed glasses.
I walked toward him and extended my hand. “Hi, I’m Kate Bradley from Channel Eleven.”
He looked at my hand but didn’t shake it.
“I understand police were called here because of a robbery-assault,” I continued.
His face darkened. “I already talked to another reporter about it. From Channel Four. Anna Hernandez.”
Damn. Anna Hernandez, the guerilla reporter. Anna could take even the simplest fender bender and sensationalize it into a matter of national security. I had no doubt she’d position this story of a foiled robbery into something akin to a standoff in the Die Hard movie franchise.
Once, when doing a story about carjacking, she stood in the middle of Hollywood Boulevard, yanking open the passenger doors of unsuspecting drivers to illustrate how vulnerable we all were to potential carjackers.
“I’m not here about the robbery. I’m here about the contents of the bag on your front porch.”
He dismissed me with a wave of his hand. “Just some old clothes. Nothing valuable. I already told Anna and the police all that.”
I motioned toward the small red and black bruise by his right eye. “Looks like you put up a big fight to keep the guy from stealing your ‘old clothes.’”
He rubbed his face. “Probably shouldn’t have…”
“My guess is that bag contained a hundred thousand dollars in cash, and there was a lopsided number eight stamped on it.”
He fixed a pair of steel gray eyes on me. “How could you possibly know that?”
“I’ve interviewed three others who also found one hundred thousand dollars on their front porch. It was on the Channel Eleven news yesterday and today. We’re calling him Good Sam, short for ‘Good Samaritan.’”
“I don’t really watch Channel Eleven much. The anchors shout too much.”
I frowned. Could that be why we ranked fourth? “Why would someone want to give you so much money?”
“No idea. I thought there’d been some mistake when I found the money. But the bag was addressed to me.”
I straightened. “Could I see it?”
He stepped back inside for a moment and brought back an empty canvas bag. On the side was the same lopsided eight I’d seen on Cristina’s bag, but pinned to the bag was a note written in careful block letters. It read, “Dr. K.”
“Dr. K?”
“Most people mispronounce my last name, so I have them call me ‘Dr. K.’ Easier than Kryvoskya.”
“Then whoever gave you this money must be someone you know.”
He combed his fingers through thin waves of gray hair. “That’s a lot of people. Factoring in all my students and people I’ve met in twenty years of teaching, I’d say we’re talking about a potential pool of ten thousand.”
“You’re a teacher then?”
“I’m a professor in the entrepreneur program at UCLA’s Anderson School.”
“Can you think of anyone who had the means to give you a hundred thousand dollars?”
“Plenty of my former students have the ability to give away that kind of money. But I can’t think of a single one who had a reason to give it to me.” He glanced at his watch. “Look, you’re wasting your time with me. Larry Durham also got money. And he saw the man.”
“He saw Good Sam?”
“Says he did.”
I scribbled the name in my notebook. “How do you know Larry?”
“He’s done carpentry work around my house over the years. He called me this morning, asking if I knew anything about the money he found on his front porch. He actually thought I might have had something to do with it. Me, on a college professor’s salary!”
It was well past five when Josh and I reached Larry Durham’s home in Hollywood, a faded brown one-story house that sat behind a tired front lawn and a sagging wooden fence that had seen its better days during the Reagan years.
While Josh readied his camera equipment, I started up the sidewalk to the front door. As I reached the front porch, a man rushed out, shrugging on a denim jacket as he pressed a cell phone to his ear. He appeared to be in his midthirties with closely cropped hair and a curved barbell piercing above his left eyebrow. I opened my mouth to say something and he put up his hand.
“I’ll be there in under thirty,” he said into the phone. Then he slipped it into his pocket. “If you’re here to give me your Watchtower literature, you’re wasting your time.”
I looked down at my black jewel-neck jacket and tailored Donna Karan pants and couldn’t see why he thought I was a door-to-door Jehovah’s Witness.
“Actually I’m from Channel Eleven.” I waited as my words sunk in. Most people brighten when they hear I’m from a TV station, hopeful at the possibility of being on the news.
Larry wasn’t most people. “And?”
“We heard you found a hundred thousand dollars here on this porch. Can we talk about it?”
He met my question with stony silence. “Rather not,” he said finally, slipping his other arm into his jacket and shaking it on.
“Can I ask why?”
“You can ask. But I gotta run.” He brushed past me and loped toward a faded green Oldsmobile Cutlass.
I followed him to the car. “I only need a few minutes of your time,” I implored through the window.
He rolled down the window. The edge of a blue tattoo peeked out over the neckline of his T-shirt. “Look. I don’t want to be on TV. I’m out of work. I don’t want people knowing my situation.”
I flashed him a pleading look, a hint of a flirty smile. “What situation is that?”
He pulled a pack of cigarettes from his jacket pocket. “Hurt my back a while ago. Laid me up for three months. No one wants to hire a carpenter on the injured list.”
“So someone put a lot of money on your front porch to help you out. A Good Samaritan perhaps. Any idea who it was?”
He lit his cigarette. “Could’ve been lots of people.”
“You know many people who would help you out with a hundred thousand dollars?”
“That’s the thing. I never told anyone I needed money.” He gripped the steering wheel. “No one knows I’m out of work.”
“Surely someone knew. Someone in your family, a friend—”
“I never told anyone.”
I straightened. “Dr. K says you saw the man who put the money on your porch. Is that true?”
“Yeah.” He turned the key in the ignition. The car chugged for a few seconds, then it started. “But it was dark—after midnight—and I only caught a glimpse of him. By the time I opened the door, he was gone.”
“Would you talk to me on camera?” My breath was caught up high in my throat. I had a feeling his answer would be no.
“Can’t. Gotta run.”
“Can I level with you, Larry?” I said, lowering my voice to a half whisper. “If I don’t get this interview, my assignment editor is going to consign me to stories about baby zoo animals and lightning-bolt survivors.”
He shrugged and put the car in gear. “At least you’ve got a job.”
Okay, so that approach wasn’t working. “Look at it this way,” I said. “Other stations are already on this story, and it’s only a matter of time until they track you down. Do you really want swarms of reporters descending on your house like locusts at all hours of the day and night? Or do you want to do an exclusive interview with me and get it over with?”
He thought about it for a moment, then he turned off the car. “Three minutes. That’s it. If you’re not done in three, I’m taking off.”
Minutes later I had a microphone in my hand and Josh was pointing a camera at Larry. After years on the Bummer Beat, I’d become adept at nabbing quick sound bites from hurried interviewees. There’s an adrenaline rush that comes with it, akin to what a day trader must feel when she sees her stock start to take off or what a basketball player experiences when he throws the ball from the three-point line. In that moment, anything is possible.
But I was also worried. With his tattoos, pierced eyebrow, and tough demeanor, Larry Durham wasn’t exactly the kind of person you see in TV news interviews, unless he’d been arrested for a crime.
“Larry, you found one hundred thousand dollars on your front porch this morning,” I said, opening the interview. “Do you have any idea who might have given it to you?”
He shook his head. “Nope.”
“Why do you think you were singled out to receive the money?”
“No idea.”
I bit my lip. If he continued with one-word or two-word answers, I’d have to work miracles with the editor to make this interview worthwhile.
“Do you think there could be a Good Samaritan behind it?”
“Nah. Los Angeles isn’t kind of place where you’d find a Good Samaritan. You hear about those kinds of things happening over the holidays in small towns, where people know each other. Not in a big city like this in the dead of January.”
I smiled. I couldn’t have written a better intro for this story if I’d had all day to think about it. “What are you going to do with the money?”
“Pay off my bills, save a little. Maybe give some of it away.”
“Some of the other recipients of Good Sam’s generosity found the number eight on the bags with the money. Was there a number eight on your bag too?”
“I didn’t see if there was or not.”
“Does that number mean anything to you?”
A strange look brushed across his face for a brief instant, but then he shook his head.
“Are you certain?” I pressed.
“Yeah, I’m sure.” He glanced at his watch. “Time’s up.”
The Good Sam story aired four minutes into the all-important six o’clock newscast. I watched on one of the dozen or so monitors scattered throughout the newsroom. One of the anchors, Kelley Adams, introduced the report.
“Under cover of darkness, he drops one hundred thousand dollars in cash on the front porch, leaving no clues to his identity,” Kelley announced. “Who is the mysterious Good Samaritan who has given away nearly half a million dollars to local residents? Channel Eleven’s Kate Bradley is in Hollywood with the latest.”
There I was standing in front of Larry Durham’s house with chunks of concrete missing from his front steps and a battered aluminum screen door as a backdrop.
“Throughout the day on this station’s newscasts and on other news programs around the country, we report on the frightening, the grim, the tragic,” I said, in the taped report. “We tell you about acts of crime, cruelty, violence, and trauma with headlines like ‘Neighbors Mourn Deaths of Six Children’ or ‘Man Drowns in Freak Accident.’ But what you’re going to see next isn’t that kind of story.”
“That’s my Katie!” someone said from behind. I didn’t need to turn around to realize who it was.
“Dad!” I said, hugging him briefly. “I thought we were having dinner tomorrow.”
“We are. But I was in the area and thought I’d swing by and see if you were here.”
My dad never changed. Even at age sixty-two, he still had a thick head of wavy hair, only a little grayer than I remembered. Despite all the dinners and lunches out and the high-powered events he attended, he’d managed to stay surprisingly trim. When I was a kid, he used to take me on five-mile runs, and I had to push to keep up with him. Now, I imagined, he probably had slowed down a little, but clearly he was still staying in shape.
“I’m having dinner with the head of the California Democratic Party and some of his officers tonight.” He brushed a speck of lint from his tailored brown merino wool suit. “I was hoping you’d join me.”
I frowned. “I already have dinner plans. And you know how much I love spending the evening listening to political talk.”
“You might actually find this dinner interesting. Election season is almost here, and a few key California congressional seats are going to be up for grabs.”
“So they brought you out here to get your opinion on who should run and who can win.”
“That’s the drill.” He put his arm around my shoulder. “Katie, you know, now would be a perfect time to segue into a political beat at CNN. Dan Rawlings there keeps asking me when you’re going to stop covering breaking news out here and come work for him on the political beat.”
“I actually like what I’m doing here.”
“Reporting on child abductions, bomb threats, gang shootings, murders. … Katie, you’re much smarter than that.”
This wasn’t the first time my dad had registered his disapproval of my career choices. In fact, he managed to make it a part of nearly every one of our conversations in recent months. As he entered his sixties, I think it began to weigh more heavily upon him that his only child wasn’t following in his political footsteps. Last month, he had paved the way for an interview working the political desk at MSNBC. Now he was working on a job for me at CNN. At this rate, he’d have me hosting a Sunday morning political show before the year was over.
“Dad,” I said, trying hard not to let him know he was getting under my skin, “I’d like to think I’m covering the stories where the criminal gets caught, the person in trouble gets rescued, and the house in the midst of the mudslide is saved. I’d like to think that maybe amid all the violence and cruelty, I’ll find some good in this world. The first responders on the scene. The people who catch the suspects. The average guy who helps out the stranger...”
His expression softened. “You remind me of your mother when you talk like that. She would be so proud of how you turned out.” He paused, and then his tone brightened. “I am proud of you too. And the upcoming election is shaping up to be one of the most newsworthy in a long time and I don’t want you to miss this opportunity to cover it. Think about it, and let me know when I can call Dan at CNN.”
I squeezed his hand. “Okay, I’ll think about it.”
He left a few minutes later, after pressing several crisp fifty-dollar bills into my hand and giving me a quick peck on the cheek. It had been a habit of his since I was little. The amount of money changed, but thankfully my dad hadn’t changed much at all.
I was on my way out of the newsroom a few minutes later when Judy, the nighttime receptionist, stopped me. “A man named Jack Hansen called for you. He wanted me to tell you…” She glanced at the notes she’d taken. “He’s back in town from New York and wanted to see if you’d meet him at The Ivy at eight.”
“Would you call him back and let him know I can’t make it?” I fired back. Then I felt bad for putting her in the middle. Judy had been a receptionist at Channel Eleven for thirty-two years. She’d been working for the news department before there were computers in the newsroom, before we did live reports from remote locations, before women reporters got much airtime. So she took this business seriously, never gossiped, and never got involved in anyone’s personal life.
“He told me you’d say that,” she said efficiently. “And when you did, I was supposed to tell you to meet him for cream and toast.” She glanced at her notes again. They were written in shorthand, so I couldn’t fathom how she could read them. “No, that was cinnamon toast.”
I didn’t mean to smile, but one crept across my face anyway. The night I’d met Jack nearly three years ago, we had eaten cinnamon toast.
The way Jack tells it, he saw me from across a crowded restaurant and “knew instantly he had to get to know me.” Even though I was already on a date with someone else, he came over, introduced himself, and whisked me away to a French bistro, where we talked through the night.
That’s not exactly what happened.
I had just started seeing Rich Hendricks, an investment banker specializing in Asian markets. He was good looking in a Christian Bale kind of way, smart and ambitious, but he couldn’t get through dinner without taking at least three calls on his cell phone. I should say he couldn’t get through dinner without shouting through at least three calls. If he had been shouting in Italian or French, I might have found it a little sexy. But there’s very little to find appealing about a white guy shouting in Japanese all the way through a three-course dinner.
That night, as I picked at my grilled salmon and listened to Rich’s end of yet another conference call with the Japanese, someone tapped me on the shoulder.
I turned to look into a tanned face framed by a corona of unruly ash brown curls. “Excuse me, ma’am,” he said, laying on a gusher of a southern drawl. “Aren’t you Kate Bradley from Channel Eleven?” He extended a strong hand. “I’m Jack Hansen. I’ve wanted to meet you ever since Rich brought you to the company picnic in July.”
Turned out we had more in common than I’d expected, because as the son of former treasury secretary William Hansen, Jack also knew firsthand the perks and the pitfalls of growing up in a family of politicians and politics. I also was charmed by a man who knew how to hold up his end of the conversation without a cell phone glued to his ear, but I kept wondering why Rich didn’t object, why he didn’t ask his coworker to leave his date alone.
Rich covered the mouthpiece of his cell phone and whispered, “This call is going to take a while. Why don’t you two order dessert?”
“I think Kate is ready to go,” Jack said.
Under ordinary circumstances, I would have been irritated if a man spoke for me. But Jack said it with a good ol’ boy finesse that made it sound playful and casual.
“Catch up with you later, Kate.” Rich rose, his cell phone still pressed to his ear, planted a quick kiss on my cheek, and sent me on my way.
His comfort with the situation perplexed me. At a French bistro around the corner, everything became clear.
“So you and Rich work together?” I asked Jack.
“You could say that,” he said. “I’m Rich’s boss. Actually, his boss’s boss’s boss. My father and I started the firm five years ago.”
Rich had been so consumed with impressing the owner with how hard he was working that he hadn’t realized the guy had horned in on his date. Then again, maybe he didn’t care.
Our waitress, a sliver of a woman with fine gray hair spun into a tall bun that defied gravity, stopped by again. “Have you decided what you’d like yet?” The key word was yet, as we’d been sitting there for nearly half an hour and hadn’t ordered anything.
“Nothing for me,” I said.
“Oh, come on,” Jack prodded. “Live a little.”
“Really, I’m full.”
“If you weren’t full,” he asked, a twinkle in his eye, “what would be your favorite food of all time?”
I hesitated for a moment, but there was no real contest in my mind. “Cinnamon toast.”
“Not on the menu,” the waitress snapped.
“I’m sure your chef back there knows how to make cinnamon toast,” Jack said, all southern gentleman charm. And when Jack turns on the charm, I swear he could buy and sell the diamonds off the back of a rattlesnake. “Would you ask him to make us both a piece, please? We sure do appreciate your kindness.”
The receptionist brought me back to the moment. “Would you like me to call Mr. Hansen back and let him know you can’t make it?”
“Yes, please tell him I’m unavailable,” I said, louder than I had intended. I wasn’t going to meet Jack for cinnamon toast tonight. It would stir up too many memories. Things I didn’t want to feel.
I met my friend Teri for dinner instead.
“I loved your story about Good Sam,” she said over hot french dip sandwiches at a café around the corner from the station. “It made me cry.”
“You cry over greeting card commercials.”
I’d known Teri ever since we’d yawned through American history class together at Columbia University, and she was the sentimental type even then. If she didn’t have her nose in an Emily Brontë novel, she was watching classic weeper movies like Terms of Endearment and A Walk to Remember. She even looked like a romance-novel leading lady, with glossy, honey-streaked curls and high cheekbones. After college, Teri applied for a creative position at the Hallmark Channel and was offered the job just seven minutes into her interview. She suspected they hadn’t made their decision on the basis of her degree in English literature or her minor in French literature, but had simply chosen her because of her resemblance to a heroine from a Jane Austen novel. “Your story proves there’s good in the world,” she said. “People are out there doing selfless acts of kindness.”
I shook my head. “I’m not sure he’s selfless. I mean, why does someone give away large sums of money?”
“Because they want to help people.”
“Because they want something in return.”
Her dark brown eyes lit up. “What would that be?”
“Attention.”
“It’s not a crime to get attention for helping people, is it?”
I fiddled with my ring. “No, but he’ll use the attention to get something else he wants.”
She poured herself some more wine and I motioned to fill my glass too. “To be honest, I think viewers would prefer to think this is the work of a Good Samaritan, not some kind of marketing gimmick.”
“Unfortunately, this is the news I’m doing. Not story time. We don’t tell viewers what they’d like to hear. We try to uncover the truth.”
She paused, tilted her head. “Seems like ever since you and Jack broke up, you’re becoming more cynical,” she said softly.
I considered this for a moment. There was some truth to it, of course. But it wasn’t the breakup that was making me look at things with a skeptic’s eye. The world was changing. Mass shootings, bombings, multibillion-dollar Ponzi schemes, sex trafficking, long lists of politicians taking bribes, and investment bankers convicted of massive fraud. The list was endless. Even though I only covered a fraction of these stories, there was no doubt the world felt more troubled—less good—with every new headline.
Teri drove a fork into dessert, a rosy baked apple scented with cinnamon. “He was quoted again in the Wall Street Journal yesterday. Did you see the article?”
“Nope,” I said. I knew which “he” she was talking about.
“He was named Investmentline’s Fund Manager of the Year. His company’s doing well too.”
I wanted to change the subject to something other than Jack Hansen. But how? “Sounds like a puff piece.”
“Not entirely. They said his tough management style attracts clients and gets results but leaves behind a trail of people who don’t trust him.”
“No surprise there.”
“Is he still calling you?” she asked gently.
“He still calls and leaves messages. Send flowers every few weeks.” I slid my fingertips along the rim of my glass, comforted by the smooth, repetitive motion. “He’s in town and asked to meet me for dinner tonight.”
Teri frowned. “You should have gone. Honestly I don’t understand why you two don’t just get back together already.”
We were silent then, both of us gazing into our drinks. The first time Teri had met Jack, she had instantly fallen under his spell. On the surface I could see why. He was everything many women look for—good-looking but not overly so, intelligent, successful, and charming. He had the brash manner of someone who had been born into privilege and connections and politics, yet he didn’t flaunt it.
But if you chipped away at the veneer, Jack was a liar, plain and simple. “Shading the truth” was an essential part of his job in the investment-banking business, but it didn’t stop there. He lied about the mundane and the inconsequential too. He’d tell me he was going to the office, but he’d spend the morning on the golf course instead. He’d say he was working late to crunch numbers, but he was really taking clients out to dinner and drinks.
You can overlook lies like that if you want to. Other lies hit you square in the face, knock you off your feet, and suck the life breath out of you. One night after finishing work early, I decided to surprise Jack at his downtown office. I had come bearing chorizo and olive paella takeout from Ciudad, but when the elevator doors opened, there was Jack kissing Ashley Holloway, another investment banker in the firm.
“It’s not what it looked like,” Jack said. Then he went on to say that Ashley had been distraught about a fight with her fiancé, and when he gave her a hug to comfort her, she was the one who had initiated the kiss.
I might have forgiven him if he hadn’t concocted such an elaborate lie. It was only a kiss after all. But if he thought I was dumb enough to buy his story then, there was no telling what other whoppers he would tell later on.
“The way I see it,” Teri said. “Jack apologized for what he did. And he swore it would never happen again, right?”
I glanced at my lap and realized I had twisted my napkin into a tight knot. “I just don’t trust him.”
“There isn’t any guy out there who’s truly good all the time,” Teri said with a sigh. “Unless you’re looking to marry Gandhi.”
“He’s dead.”
“See what I mean?”