“Really? That’d be amazing. Gracie will be excited, and so will her class. You’re the man.”

“It’s my pleasure. Anything that exposes young kids to science is a good thing.”

As I make my way toward the elevator with a renewed sense of purpose, ready to tackle my plan, another voice calls my name. It’s a little gravelly, like it was roughened over the years by too many cigarettes.

When I turn, I see a woman with flaming red hair and too many bracelets. “Yoo-hoo! Sabrina told me to come see you.”

32

Sabrina

Even though his face is bedraggled, the suit Bob Galloway wears looks like it cost a mint. The stitching aligns so elegantly across his shoulders that it must have been custom-made.

“Sabrina,” he says, extending his hand and shaking mine. “Thanks for coming by. I need to give you a kill fee.”

I flinch then swallow hard. “A kill fee?” I ask, in case there’s a chance I heard him wrong.

“It was a brilliant piece. One of the best stories I’ve read in years.” He gestures to the disheveled offices, sighing heavily. “But the publication is shutting down.”

Swaying, I brace myself against the wall. It’s as if the ground has fallen out from under me. “You’re shutting down?” I ask, because this makes zero sense.

“Like many other print publications, we don’t have enough ad dollars to survive.”

“But you had all those fat magazines full of ad pages.”

“Those were from last year.”

“What about the website?” I ask, grasping for the bow of a sinking boat.

“We didn’t move quickly enough to establish a presence, so others have beaten us there.” He clears his throat, looking around sheepishly at the emptying offices. “And we might have overspent in a few areas.”

In an instant, everything snaps into view. I see where the money went. It went to parties, to his suits, to these opulent offices they didn’t need. It went to paying exorbitant fees for articles.

“The story isn’t going to run anywhere?” I choke out.

“That’s why I wanted to call you in today.”

“You could have emailed me,” I point out gently.

Genteel till the end, he removes his wallet from his back pocket. “No. I couldn’t. I’m paying you the kill fee from my own pocket.”

Snapping open his billfold, he fishes out two crisp hundred-dollar bills, less than 5 percent of the finished fee, and hands them to me. “The piece was amazing. Brilliant. Fair. Thoughtful. Entertaining. Beautifully written. Everything I could want,” he says, and I beam, a ray of sunshine peeking through a cloudy sky. “I’m sorry we won’t have a home for it. But it’s yours to do what you want with. You could publish it on your own website. Maybe turn it into a book,” he suggests, and both ideas border on outlandish.

One, I don’t publish articles on my website, since I don’t have one. Two, it’s not a book.

Still, I did the work, so I take the money and thank him. “What are you going to do, sir?”