“The first two plus phone.”

She’d never risk losing the ability to make calls. This month I’ll have to push off my own credit card bills. “I’ll transfer funds into your account. Please don’t let your health insurance lapse, okay?”

“Okay. I’m sorry . . .”

The elevator arrives and I step onto the empty car, push the button for the fourth floor. “It’s fine.”

“I spoke with a new one. I’m getting closer—he promised. We have another appointment next week.”

There’s a tug-of-war between my head and heart whenever I talk to my mom. It’s not a fair fight. My head always wins—it’s hard to love someone who makes you a means to an end. “Okay. Gotta go.”

The elevator doors slide open and I step off, take a left, and enter a vast maze of cubicles and desks. This late, there are only a few stragglers. I head down a beige-carpeted corridor past awards and articles framed in black. At the end of the hallway, my boss waves me into her corner office, where floor-to-ceiling windows look out on a cluster of palm trees that edge a busy road. Annie’s chair is reclined as she finishes a call, her face and torso only partially visible behind her laptop, two monitors, a mess of files, and empty take-out containers from Pok Pok.

“Gotcha,” she says into the phone. “Go get ’em.”

Annie hangs up, slides her red sneakers off the desk, opens a gap between her monitors so we can have a face-to-face, then rests a pointed chin on folded hands. Clad in jeans and a navy New England Patriots football jersey, she looks like an overgrown kid playing grown-up behind her dad’s desk.

“How’s it going, Thomas?”

Annie is one of the youngest editors at the L.A. Times. She has a strong résumé. Editor of the Brown Daily Herald from sophomore to senior year, journalist at the Washington Post right out of college, and three years into her career she was part of a Pulitzer Prize–winning trio. She’s also written two New York Times bestsellers on politics. Despite all her accomplishments, Annie is still young enough to play my wife in the photos on Facebook I posted of Katy and me. Her shoulder-length auburn hair was hidden beneath a scarf for most of the pictures, though she balked at letting me shave her eyebrows.

My nerves buzz. Despite the fact that my boss is a team player, she’s still intimidating. Probably because I worked for only one newspaper before I was hired by the L.A. Times, went to a middle-of-the-road college in Oregon, didn’t stand out among the journalists who wrote for my university paper, and after my relatively successful article on the judge, had two big missteps. The first was a story about ice skaters and their abusive choreographer that seemed like it had legs but fizzled after a few months—my fault for ignoring red flags. The second one was a huge exposé that blew up in my face.