Billy, it’s a simple yes-or-no question. Do I still have a job or not?” Dale asked.
“Dale, you have been through so much. Why don’t you focus on getting well, and we’ll figure out the work piece down the road—when you’re ready to come back?”
“Billy, please don’t bullshit me. I’m going to be well enough to start working again in a month or so. I want to know if I have a job at the network,” Dale insisted.
“I don’t know exactly where, but yes, you will always have a job here.”
“You don’t know where? What in the world does that mean?” Dale practically shrieked.
Peter stood up and walked toward her.
“Dale, let’s talk when you’re released. I’d like to come see you next week, either at Bethesda or at home.”
“Fine. That’s fine. I’ll see you next week,” Dale said, placing the phone in its cradle.
“What did he say?” Peter asked.
“Nothing. He said nothing. How did this happen? I left here with an exclusive interview with the president, and somehow I’ve returned without a job,” she said bitterly.
Peter put his hands over hers, which were still gripping the phone. “You’re forgetting something,” he said.
“What?” she asked.
“You’re stuck with me now, too,” he said, smiling.
She tried to smile back at him, but having their relationship out in the open was turning out to be more difficult than she’d imagined.
He sat on the edge of her bed. “I’m sorry for all of this,” he said.
“It’s not your fault.”
“Of course it is. You’re getting hate mail from all the right-wing nuts, and your face has been plastered all over the tabloids. And your big crime is being with me. I’m so sorry for all the ways this is going to change your life.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“You can’t blame Billy for not wanting to put you back at the White House. Charlotte is going to be dealing with the fallout from the crash every day until the election, and it’s not like you can cover that story with a reporter’s objectivity, Dale.”
She didn’t say anything.
“And from Billy’s perspective, there’s the fact that you’ve been engaged in a secret affair with the president’s husband,” Peter said. “I’m sure there are viewers who want to see you get fired.”
Dale remained silent. Slowly, it was sinking in. Her career as a network correspondent and anchor was probably over. Of course, they couldn’t stand her in front of the White House and ask her to report on the president’s day or sit her at the anchor desk and expect the viewers to take her seriously. She was the first husband’s secret mistress, and she’d played a role in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan that could result in the president being impeached. Tears slid from the corners of her eyes down to her pillowcase. Peter pushed her hair away from her eyes and sat with her while she cried. The tears kept coming. She cried for what she’d lost, but she also cried tears of shame. If she’d been given a choice between being with Peter and never working again as a correspondent and giving up Peter to keep her job, she wasn’t sure what she’d choose. And fueling her tears was the fact that she hadn’t been given a choice at all.
While Peter seemed to fall naturally into the new public phase of their relationship, Dale cringed every time someone described her as Peter’s girlfriend. She was starting to remember things from the day of the crash. One of the thoughts she’d had that day was to request a rotation in the Mideast bureau to hone her skills as a foreign correspondent. She remembered thinking, as she flew low over the Afghan mountains, that it just might give her the upper hand in the competition for weeknight anchor. None of that mattered now. She was on the outside looking in at the world she’d worked so hard to penetrate.