I called Weiss’s secretary, Peggy Moran, to make an appointment. It was her job to keep the blowhards and whiners of the newsroom—who always needed to see the executive editor right now—from wasting Weiss’s time. “What’s it about?” she asked dubiously. I couldn’t give her the honest answer, so I said, “My career. It’s sort of urgent.” Did that mean I had a job offer from another paper, she wanted to know, and I said it was something like that, and I needed to see Weiss right away—the next day, if possible. She stuck her head in Weiss’s office and came back on the phone twenty seconds later. “Tomorrow, ten-thirty. And don’t be late, because I’m bumping someone else to get you in.”

I didn’t sleep much that night. I lay in bed worrying about so many different things. My career, Bowman’s career, Rupert Cohen’s bizarre behavior, the future of the paper, right and wrong. After a while it all melded into a nameless drone of anxiety—like the white noise that some people use to go to sleep, except that this was black noise keeping me awake. I felt as if I were suspended upside down in my bed, while the minutes and hours ticked off—1:48; 2:23; 4:12—each time I looked at the clock, I would get more upset about how tired I would be the next day. I finally fell asleep around 5:00 and woke up two hours later. I went to the mirror and saw what I feared: I looked horrible. The circles under my eyes were so deep they formed little crevasses. Look on the bright side, I reminded myself as I shaved: When I tell Weiss how worried I’ve been, he’ll believe me.

I almost missed the 8:30 shuttle, thanks to a traffic jam caused by some lunatic janitors who thought the way to get better working conditions was to piss off all the commuters in Washington. The plane was full, and I had to take a middle seat between a pushy male executive and a pushy female executive, who both acted as if I had taken their space. They planted their elbows firmly on either armrest, so I was scrunched into the seat with my arms pressed against me as if I were in a coffin. I tried to sleep, but I was too tired.

Nothing really clicked until the cab rounded the corner from Broadway and pulled in front of the Mirror’s headquarters building. At that point I felt a surge of adrenaline, and I knew that it was all going to work out, because I was at the headquarters of the world’s greatest newspaper, and I had come to do the right thing.