“Emma, I know that you have had a personal relationship with him and that's exactly why I wanted to print what happened and what you have found. Our readers are interested in that. No one wants dry nonfiction anymore, especially not in floundering magazines. The story, this trilogy of stories is going to put your name on the map. Have you seen the number of retweets that it has? Everyone is impatiently waiting for the final conclusion. The reveal.”
“There is no reveal,” I say, shaking my head. “The story is that you had no right to print this. He didn't agree to it and neither did I.”
“Of course, I know that this has placed you in a difficult position, but I hope that you continue on with that. He should read it again. We only did minor edits on it. It’s straight from the heart. It doesn't have any of the fluff that you often find in creative nonfiction like this.”
“Yes, because it's not the story. Those are just my notes.”
“I'm not sure what you want me to say or do,” Corrin says after a long pause.
Our eyes meet. Hers are cold and distant, steely.
Anger still bubbles within me. I open my mouth to say something, but then I stop.
What I really want from her is an apology. I want her to retract the story, but I know that is not going to happen. I also know that the story is already out there so there's no point in retracting it.
“Is there anything inaccurate in what you wrote?” Corrin asks.
“That's not the point,” I say, shaking my head and crossing my arms. “You had no right to publish what wasn't done yet.”
“What I did is within my rights,” Corrin says, holding her hands across her desk.
It's entirely made of glass and has only a few folders neatly stacked on one side. There's a large computer screen in front of her and a keyboard, but my eyes scan over the tabletop and wonder how it is that there are hardly any fingerprints on it.
“I'm not going to apologize for doing my job. I gave you a deadline and you came in well below it. I decided to just go with it.”
“I never turned it in,” I say, shaking my head.
I feel like we're going in circles and yet nothing I'm saying is getting through. “I sent this to Shelby in confidence. I wasn't going to write a story about it.”
“That's exactly the problem,” Corrin says, tilting her head.
Her hair is always perfectly styled as if she goes to the Dry Bar every day. Her makeup is flawless, along with her skin, and her nails are just long enough to be intimidating but short enough to do a lot of work on the computer.
“What's the problem?” I ask.
“You're not going to come here and tell me that you don’t have a story.”
“You have no idea what I was going to do. You can't punish me for something that I might have done.”
“Am I punishing you? Why don't you go online and see what's happening. Everyone is celebrating you!”
Realizing that this is a losing battle, I turn toward Shelby and say, “I thought that we were friends.”
“We are,” she pleads, reaching over and touching my arm.
I whisk it away from her and she looks hurt. “I just wanted to share with her because I was so excited by what I read. I just couldn't believe everything you found out. I was really excited for you and I wanted to help.”
I glare at her and she looks back at me with the expression of a puppy who has recently been kicked. She looks genuinely sorry and yet the more apologetic she is, the angrier I become.
Are they both nuts? Have they lost their minds? Why are they making me feel like I'm crazy? Why won't they apologize?
Of course I know why.
I make fists and I stand here glaring at them, keeping my thoughts to myself. If I scream at them and walk out, it doesn't change anything.
Corrin won't unpublish the story. There's no point to that anyway. It's already out. It has been reprinted and discussed by about fifty different news outlets and that's just as of half an hour ago.
It's out there and the only thing that can happen now is that I lose my job.
“You had no right to do this,” I say as calmly as possible, trying to keep my anger at bay.
“No, in fact, I'm your boss and I had every right,” Corrin corrects me.
I open my mouth to say something else, but she interrupts and points to the door with the pen in her hand.
“Listen, Emma, I'd love to talk to you more about this, but I can't at this moment. I have a conference call that's about to start.”
I walk out of her office and Shelby follows closely behind.
“I'm really sorry,” she keeps whispering over and over again, as if she expects me to just forgive her on the spot. She follows me all the way to my cubicle even though hers is clear across the room.
When I kneel down next to my spilled thermos and try to clean up the mess, she grabs a roll of paper towels from the kitchen and helps me soak up some of the liquid.
“Say something, please,” she pleads.
“What do you want me to say?” I ask, muttering.
“I'm just really sorry about everything.”
“I know you are!” I say sternly. “Okay? So, quit saying it.”
“I don't know what else to say.”
I inhale and exhale deeply.
“I don't know what to say either. You really fucked me over and you don't even know it. What happened?” I ask with us both crouched down on the floor. “Why did you do that? I trusted you with it and you just… Betrayed me.”
My voice is no longer angry or rushed. It's calm and even coy, a little too detached even.
“I'm sorry. I didn't mean to do that. I don't know what happened. When I got the email and I read everything, I was just so proud of you. You have so much in there and I wanted to show it to Corrin. It's so stupid, but since she was so appreciative of your first article, I thought that she would be excited.”
“What about what I said about not showing it to her?”
“It was too late by then,” she says, biting her lip. She shakes her head and her eyes refuse to meet mine.
“It got away from me. She made the decision so quickly. As soon as I sent her the story, instead of just talking to me and making suggestions for how to improve it or the right angle to go with, she just edited it herself and printed it an hour later.”
“No.” I shake my head.
“She didn't want to wait until the print edition,” she continues. “It's like she knew that you wouldn’t want it out there and she did it so that she didn't have to ask your permission.”
“She knew that they were just notes,” I say quietly. “I had all the stuff about our relationship. All that personal stuff that no journalist wants out there.”
“It matches the tone of the story though,” she says. “The first one was about you trying to find him and the second had all those details about your relationship with him. Sexual details.”
“That's exactly why they were just for your eyes. In fact, I should've just kept them for my eyes or maybe not written them down at all.”
“Don't say that. You have a real voice. You can't silence yourself.”