Another voice spoke in her ear. “Hi, this is TalkTalk in New York. We have a lot to get in, a lot to juggle. What do you have?”

Quelling her rising frustration, she went through it again. The mole. The photos. FLOTUS. “No one else has it,” she finished, hoping to instill a sense of urgency.

“Yeah. I think I heard something about that,” the new voice said. “Not sure we’ll need you, but stand by.”

How would they not need the mole? It proved the pictures were fake, that the White House was covering something up, that the First Lady was—

The show’s theme music came on. “Lets all talk, talk, talk, talk! Let’s keep up the talk, talk!”—and they dipped to commercial break.

Natalie was incredulous. Instead of coming to her they had gone to an ad for prescription pain medication, giving someone else and some other network the chance to scoop her.

I could tweet it, she thought. On the monitor an older man in a doctor’s coat was asking if she or anyone she loved suffered from back pain, neck pain, shoulder pain, or any other kind of discomfort.

But if I tweet it and no one else has it, then other networks might pick it up from me before ATN runs it.

Now an oil company was explaining its plans for sustainably powering America, which had something to do with family picnics in racially diverse parks and the migration of monarch butterflies.

On the upside, it could lead to a huge bump in my Twitter followers—

At a chain restaurant that had recently suffered an E. coli outbreak, a family who had been fighting was brought back together by free breadsticks and one large pitcher of either soda or iced tea.

—on the downside, it could incite the wrath of Bibb and ATN and bump me out of the running for the White House, cuing of plagues and locusts, etc.

And then the commercial break was over. The screen went dark, Breaking News music soared, the photo popped up in the video monitor along with a now countless number of pundits shaking their heads in boxes. Nelly, looking especially excited, announced an “exclusive development.”

Someone in Natalie’s ear said, “Stand by to go live on TalkTalk. We have two photos. The doctored one with the mole and one without.”

“Great, I’m ready,” Natalie answered, putting her phone aside.

The rush of excitement surged again. On camera, Nelly said, “These photographs are as new to us as they are to you. We have our experts poring over them and one of our experts has made a discovery. Ryan, tell us, what you’ve found.”

Natalie stared. Had he just said—? Did she hear—?