It wasn’t just Matt, she realized. Everyone there was crouched self-importantly over their phones. It was a room full of fucking transplant surgeons all waiting for the go signal, ready to jump in and save a life, while her patient was going limp and cold on the slab because she wasn’t important to anyone. She found herself half wishing for a text from her mother.

It’s only your first day, the sane part of her thought. And this is not heart surgery.

You could have married a surgeon, the part of her that did an excellent imitation of her mother’s voice said. Remember that nice boy you dated sophomore year? Joey Arburson? I hear he has a very successful practice in Baltimore, lots of important patients.

Natalie had received this assignment, unexpectedly, the week before. Nelly Jones, the previous occupant of the ATN seat, had been abruptly removed by network brass after she tweeted that the female secretary of defense had dressed for a White House dinner as though she was auditioning to join the president’s fantasy bordello team. This triggered a firestorm of criticism, which ATN fanned into a weeklong cable news food fight, landing Nelly an exclusive with the secretary of defense and an anchor job on ATN’s 10 p.m. show TalkTalk Live. Since TalkTalk taped out of New York, Nelly had abruptly left DC, and Natalie had gotten the call to take her spot at the White House.

Temporarily, the DC bureau chief, Bibb Connaught, had stressed when she’d met Natalie the previous Friday. “I don’t want you to be disappointed,” Bibb had said. “Management is looking for someone else to take the job long-term.”

After twelve years in TV news, five of them at ATN, Natalie spoke fluent Network Politics and did the translation in her head. I’m a seat warmer until someone younger and more connected comes along.

But Natalie hadn’t spent more than a decade swimming in those shark-infested waters without developing at least a slight taste for blood. Even though Bibb saw her as a fill-in, she knew that she had to treat this gig as an audition. In the parlance of mixed sports metaphors so beloved by network executives, here was an opportunity to take the bull by the horns and knock it out of the ballpark. She was not going to fumble this ball.

Getting here was the reason she’d sacrificed her twenties working local news in Bakersfield, Phoenix, and Orlando, then doing the overnight shift in New York, before making it to Daybreak at ATN. It was the reason she’d covered quintuple murders, house-devouring sinkholes, and lung-clogging wildfires; going to sleep—alone—before sunset in parts of the country she’d never known existed so she could be fresh for the morning shows while her old college pals were hooking up, getting married, and having kids in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago.