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Be noisy. Natalie Savage grew up hearing these words from her beloved father, who admired Walter Cronkite so much he named the family dog after him. Natalie—who spent her twenties missing out on life’s benchmarks—finally sees her efforts pay off when she’s assigned to cover the White House for her network, ATN. The problem? The position is only temporary, a test to see if she has what it takes. She has always relied on her grit, her principles and her news sense to gain success. But now her competition is a twenty-six-year-old spoiled frat boy who got his big television break by eating raw animal parts on a reality show.

Of course, he’s winning.

Natalie, along with her scrappy production team, has to navigate ratings wars, workplace sexual harassment and an international political crisis in order to prove herself. But the closer she gets to achieving her dream job, the more she wonders if it is worth all the compromise.

Timely, funny and smart, this juicy debut is the perfect tonic for readers contending with today’s politics and the #MeToo movement. Natalie Savage will be sure to join the ranks of our favorite fictional heroines as she figures out that having it all doesn’t mean giving up everything she stands for.

Dedication

Sam & Aby, Jon & Mary

For sanctuary

THE EARLYBIRD™/ WEDNESDAY / 5:43 A.M.

THE E-NEWSLETTER TRUSTED BY WASHINGTON'S POLITICAL ELITE

Good morning, EarlyBirders™. Here are the morning’s need-to-know stories:

¡CUIDADO! It’s going to be awkward today when the White House rolls out the red carpet for the presidents of Venezuela and Colombia. Can the feuding Latin leaders put aside their differences? PRO TIP: What’s slick and floats on troubled waters? The theme of this summit.

EARLYPOLL™: AMERICA LOVES THE FIRST LADY.

FLOTUS is more popular than ever. POTUS, not so much. BE SMART: The White House will try to convert her sky-high favorability into support for the president’s energy agenda.

Must See TV: All cable nets will be live at 1:30 p.m. from the White House press room. Who’ll get under the White House’s skin today? Send guesses to [email protected]!

Spotted: Socialite Karima Sahadi and Shakira to plan Dancing with the Enemy gala, healing partisan divides through lyrical contemporary dance.

**EarlySponsor™: GlobalCom™ International Is Proud to Support the President’s PanAmerican Summit. Our Light the Future Coalition Is Working to Unlock the Earth’s Energy Solutions.**

1

The Girl on the Bus

Natalie Savage stepped onto the asphalt driveway ringing the North Lawn, looked up, and felt her breath catch. She was hit with the sense that she was on a Tilt-A-Whirl, unsure which side was up. How many years had she imagined this moment? Her first time walking up the curving path to the White House’s James S. Brady Press Briefing Room, her first time passing the tents where the network news reporters go live from the White House, her first time looping by the marine at the West Wing entrance, mere yards from the Oval Office.

You’ve made it. She smiled to herself, wrapped in an almost giddy delight. You’re here.

What are you doing? her self shot back in a tone Barbara Walters might have used to greet a bright-eyed intern. There’s no time to be awestruck. Get going.

With little warning, the White House had moved up the briefing by an hour and she was about to be tardy her first day on the job. Hurrying up the driveway, she said a silent prayer that she wouldn’t be captured barging into the White House briefing late, excuse-me’ing into her seat, on every cable channel in America.

She reached the white door to the briefing room, pulled on the brass handle, and—

Inside reporters were moving at double speed: barking into cell phones, madly texting or tweeting, bouncing in and out of their chairs.

Thank god, it hadn’t started.

Flooded with relief, Natalie pushed into the scramble of bodies and felt the intensity of a breaking news event in the air: a pupil-dilating flush of oxygen, the heart-pounding thrill of being at the center of an all-eyes-on-this story. She made her way to the American Television Network’s (ATN) seat in the third row and relaxed enough to look around. At the back of the room was a warren of cubicles, each assigned to a network. A row of cameras stood in front of the cubicles like leggy sentries, and in front of those were the seats for the correspondents. She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply.

It smelled of mold and sweat.

Why does success always smell like a men’s locker room? she wondered.

Objectively, it was a crap hole. Despite the administration’s claims to have no money for infrastructure projects, Natalie suspected that the shabbiness of the tiny press room was by choice, not necessity, like an aging duchess who uses chipped Limoges not because she can’t afford better but because she likes it and relishes the discomfort of her judgmental guests.

She heard the crackle of static and a young man’s voice came through an overhead speaker. “Sorry for the change folks. The White House briefing will now be delayed by fifteen minutes.”

All around Natalie reporters collapsed back into their chairs, shaking their heads and murmuring as they began angry-texting on their phones. Everyone had rushed here and now this delay would throw live shots and lunch plans into chaos. But for Natalie it was a relief. Fifteen minutes to get used to breathing the air of a White House correspondent.

One of Natalie’s phones buzzed and she pulled it out to watch it fill with messages from her mother, Noreen.

MOM: Why haven’t you been answering my texts?

MOM: You’re being very selfish.

MOM: This is about my special day. My wedding. My chance at happiness. Are you trying to destroy it?

The temptation to write back, Yes! Yes I am! was almost overwhelming but she was saved by a text from her sister.

SARAH: So, you’re trying to ruin Mom’s wedding.

NATALIE: Either that or it’s my first day at the White House.

SARAH: Excuses excuses. Are you excited? Nervous?

Natalie hesitated for a moment and then typed: I miss Dad.

SARAH: Well, you know what he’d say right now?

Natalie smiled as she remembered their dad’s favorite advice. I didn’t raise my girls to be shrinking violets. Silence helps no one. Be noisy!

NATALIE: Be noisy?

SARAH: Or maybe that he’s really proud of you. You’re going to be great.

NATALIE: Thanks for saying that. But I could easily land on my face.

SARAH: When have you ever failed at anything?

NATALIE: I call your attention to the eighth grade high dive. Hives at prom. The scorched earth that is my dating life.

SARAH: Character building moments. On the topic of scorched earth, will you please pick a bridesmaid dress so our mother will stop looking like a boiled owl and torturing your little sister? Her wedding is in less than two weeks. I’ll re-send you the pics right now.

NATALIE: Gotcha. As they say in DC I’ll make it priority No. 1.

SARAH: God bless. A grateful nation thanks you. Can’t wait to see you live from the North Lawn!

Not if I face-plant first, Natalie thought.

Putting down the phone and looking around the press room, Natalie was struck by how little it had changed since she used to watch the briefings on TV with her dad years ago. How many hours had she and her father spent sitting on the couch in his study watching what happened in this space? The memories came back to her now with a painful clarity, how grown up she’d felt sitting next to him, the smell of books and furniture polish, the sound of ice cubes clinking in his big crystal tumbler of bourbon.

“That’s history being made, right in front of our eyes,” he’d say, gesturing at the TV with his glass. Sitting on that couch, with their basset hound Murrow between them, her dad had imbued the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room with a kind of enchantment that still held her in its sway despite the coffee-stained institutional blue carpet and balled-up newspapers on the floor.

He’d died sixteen months ago and she thought she’d done her grieving. But being here now brought back an unexpected flood of missing him that had tears pricking at her eyes.

At that moment, one of her phones vibrated again, saving her from an unforgivable lapse that might have risked ruining the fake eyelashes and mask of professional makeup she’d applied that morning. She had gotten used to torturing her hair into silky straightness and wearing one percent of her body weight in foundation and eye shadow, but the lashes were now a compulsory, and already itchy, new addition applied at the insistence of ATN’s head of talent. “Everyone at the White House has lashes. They are a must. Otherwise viewers won’t see you!”

When Natalie had protested, “But I can’t see so well when I wear them,” the head of talent had given her a pained look and said, “Many people can’t see at all, dear,” as though Natalie had been brazenly taking sight for granted up to that point.

Natalie angled the screen so it was easier to read through the forest of lash and watched it fill with the dress pictures from her sister, providing vivid evidence that their mother was going through an unfortunate hippie phase. The dresses looked like they’d been designed by someone who hated women or eyeballs or both. She tried to come up with a criteria for evaluating them—“Well, at least I can wear a bra with that one” versus “Well, at least that one doesn’t look like Janis Joplin’s burial shroud”—when a smug male voice over her shoulder said, “The one on the left.”

“I beg your pardon?” Natalie twisted toward the guy speaking. Her first impression was one of doughy plumpness. He looked about her age and wore a dark suit and a rumpled blue button-down shirt that she would have bet was chosen by a woman who told him it brought out his eyes. Probably his mother.

“The dress on the left,” he repeated, looking not at her but her phone. “Absolutely. A classic of the ‘I hate my bridesmaids’ genre. You can’t go wrong. When’s your wedding?”

He unbent and Natalie saw that he was tall, taller than she’d realized. His brown hair was a little too long and his mouth a little too small for his face, giving him the look of a naughty toddler. His lips were pressed together in a tight smile but he looked like he’d be more at ease with a smirk.

“It’s not my wedding,” she said. “It’s my mother’s. The dress is for me.”

“And therein lies a story,” he said, folding himself into the seat next to hers and immediately taking out his phone. “Don’t worry, I’m not asking to hear it unless it’s scandalous and on the record.”

Natalie stared at him.

He glanced up from his screen and held out hand. “Matt Walsh. Beltway dot com. Uh-oh. I see the nickel dropping. Now you’re thinking, ‘Ah, that explains the smell of sulphur in the air.’”

Natalie laughed but her guard shot up. Beltway. The website was the gossipy mean girl of the political set, bringing the same cannibalistic enthusiasm Us Weekly brought to uncovering affairs and baby bumps to its coverage of the Bubble. The Bubble being what Washington Insiders—the types who read Beltway—called themselves, as opposed to everyone else, whom they referred to with subtle condescension as “regular” or “real” Americans. That sorry-not-sorry superiority suffused Beltway. Written in the key of snark with an undertone of kissed-it-fucked-it-over disdain, the posts glorified the most banal aspects of politics, sucking any whiff of substance from a story with the efficiency of a college student taking a bong hit.

She was shocked when her first news boss had told her every important political reporter reads Beltway and if she cared to be one, she’d better start. The last Beltway story Natalie had read covered a White House meeting about the president’s energy goals as “Kiss My Fat Ass? Elizabeth Warren Eats a Cookie for the First Time in Six Weeks While Talking Solar in the Oval Office!”

What kind of reporter would do that, she’d wondered.

Well, now the answer was sitting right next to her. The man who had, in fact, written that very story. She was wary but fascinated, as if she’d found herself dining with someone who’d asked the waiter to remove his steak knife, explaining, “I don’t trust myself around weapons.”

She aimed for a warm but not too friendly tone and shook his hand. “Natalie Savage, ATN.”

Matt appeared impressed. “Any relation to the esteemed First Lady of News?”

“You mean Jessica Savitch?” Natalie asked, trying to keep the sound of her mental eye roll out of her voice. “No, we’re not related.”

Natalie was baffled by the way news people always asked with unbridled excitement if she was perhaps a niece or cousin of the trailblazing news anchor Jessica Savitch. True, as one of the first women to anchor network news, Savitch had been a talented pioneer. But she’d also led a slightly tragic life that included a string of broken relationships, an on-air meltdown, and an early death by drowning in a car that flipped into a canal. Natalie hoped she would have a slightly different trajectory. She was fairly sure that Savitch, with her clear-eyed view of the world, would have wished that for her successors as well.

“Our names are spelled differently,” Natalie explained.

“Too bad. Always good to have a famous relative. Anyway,” Matt said, gesturing grandly to the podium at the front of the room, “welcome to the Big Show. First day at the White House?” he went on. “Nervous?”

“No.”

“Liar?”

“Yes.”

He snickered. “Good, we have something in common.” Typing on his phone, he continued, “If you’ll take a bit of advice from someone who got here before you, there’s no reason to be nervous. You’re thinking it’s the White House, the big top. Screw up here and it’s available for viewing on YouTube for the rest of your life! Worse, YouTube is the only place you’ll ever be seen. But the truth is, it doesn’t matter what you say at this briefing. Nobody listens or cares.”

Natalie gave him a look of wide-eyed admiration. “Are you a doctor? I feel so much better now.”

He laughed again but didn’t look up. “It’s not just you, it’s everyone. The Reals think there’s news at the White House briefing, but inside the Bubble we know it’s just theater. Everyone plays a part. It doesn’t matter what you say, only how you say it. Nothing worth reporting gets said here.”

Natalie performed a mental eye roll (a physical one was counter-indicated by the fake lashes) at the posture of bland unconcern that he was working so hard to effect. As if not caring about the issues or the state of democracy was proof of his objectivity and superior reporting. She wasn’t buying it; if he was as blasé as he pretended, he’d have a different job and not be frantically glued to his phone.

Matt went back to his phone, which was quivering in his hand spasmodically like a heart waiting to be transplanted. Natalie stared at her lifeless device. He had to be getting a dozen messages and updates to every one of hers.

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.

On the bright side, having no roots meant it was easy for Natalie to jump when she’d gotten the call two days ago. She’d put her New York life in storage, and found a temporary corporate apartment in DC, all in time to have a meet-and-greet with the management of the DC bureau.

Matt chuckled. Unable to resist her curiosity, Natalie glanced over at his phone. “What’s happening?” she asked impatiently.

“BamBam brought his son, the rape-y one,” Matt said, grinning as he typed furiously. Then he looked up and declared, “Henceforth we shall call this the Regrettable Sex Summit.”

Until this moment, the biggest news of the day had been the start of the PanAmerican Summit, a White House gathering of the leaders from seven Latin American countries. The president had ruffled some official Washington feathers by inviting the undemocratically elected, human-rights abusing president of Colombia, Carlos Lystra, aka BamBam, who derived his nickname both from his preferred method of silencing critics and his adoration of the TV show The Flintstones.

Matt’s news about BamBam’s son, Rigo, was certain to light up tout l’DC.

Twenty-one-year-old Rigo Lystra was a gossip column gold mine. He’d cut a name for himself on Page Six and the Daily Mail for his frequent visits to New York nightclubs on his G5, his late-night drives through Bogotá brandishing an AK-47 while shouting slogans for his father, and as of last week, a rape accusation lodged against him by the most famous ex-child actress in Latin America, Sonia Barbaro. Sonia was Venezuela’s beloved twenty-one-year-old star of stage and screen who had accused Rigo of violently attacking her in a hotel room after some celebrity wedding in Caracas. Venezuelan politicians, already at odds with the Lystra family, were taking this as an assault on their national identity. Rigo had dismissed the encounter as a night of “unfortunate sex” with a girl who was too “flat chested to be memorable,” and had spent the last week in Bali swimming with the sharks and a number of scantily clad models. Celebrity gossip sites had been saturated with the Rigo photos, while speculating that Sonia Barbaro was pushing the rape accusation as part of a publicity campaign around her soon-to-be released film Trafficked. Now with Rigo in attendance at the president’s summit, any fireworks between Venezuela and Colombia were liable to erupt into a four-alarm blaze.

“Can we work some puns into the story?” Matt was barking into his cell phone. “Summit Without Consent.” He paused. “Or is that too insensitive?”

“That’s not insensitive. That’s neuropathy,” Natalie mumbled as she looked down at the list of priority questions she’d painstakingly prepared for the briefing.

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