“You have no idea how hard my job is,” Bibb sighed. She sank into the chair behind her desk and grabbed one of the six remote controls arrayed on top of it, stabbing the volume to high. Natalie momentarily turned around in her chair to take in the wall of monitors. Every channel was replaying the Rigo “abduction” with pundits doing live play-by-play analysis. The ATN monitor now had the words Breaking News in shouty all-caps in the bottom crawl along with the banner “PanAmerican Summit Mayhem.” At least they’d dropped the abduction line.

“Thank god, they got it fixed,” Bibb said with relief, punching the volume to low. Then her eyes shifted to Natalie and her voice got stern. “So. You,” she said and Natalie felt dread rise in her chest. “Today,” Bibb said, tilting her head with either sympathy or contempt, Natalie couldn’t tell which. “The briefing.”

Natalie swallowed. “In retrospect I realize I should have cleared it with you before asking but at that moment I thought—”

Bibb frowned. “Cleared what? I don’t know what you are talking about.”

“My question?” Natalie said. “About the First Lady?”

A shadow of a line appeared between Bibb’s brows. “Oh that was fine. That’s not the issue.” She sighed. “Natalie, dear, I want you to succeed. Do you want to succeed?”

“Yes,” Natalie said breathlessly. “Yes, I do.”

“Well, if that’s the case, let’s talk about the hard things.” She pushed a stack of glossy magazines across the desk toward Natalie.

Reaching for them, Natalie saw they were copies of Hamptons magazine, Greenwich Style, and the Washingtonian open to at-home profiles of women news anchors. The spreads showed perfectly groomed TV ladies posed in their decorator-perfect homes, making breakfast for their three—always three—handsomely scruffy children, hard at work in their immaculate offices filled with a row of designer dresses on hangers and boxes of carefully stacked eight-hundred-dollar shoes, captioned with sentiments like, “I love getting up at 3 a.m. for the morning show because I get off work at noon, and that gives me a full nine hours to be wife and mom.” And “On my days off, I like to whip up homemade butter, do triathlons, and make mosaics with the children.”

“This is what I need you to shoot for,” Bibb said.

Natalie almost choked, trying to swallow back her laughter as she imagined a photo shoot at the shabby breakfast bar of the UnComfort Inn where she was currently staying. “This is where I eat processed turkey out of the package alone for dinner after work,” she would say with a comely smile.

“I—I don’t have kids,” Natalie said when she realized Bibb was waiting for a response. “Or a place.”

“What?” Bibb asked tersely, jamming a finger at one woman’s head. “Their hair. It’s the hair you should be looking at.”