I STOPPED IN MIDDLEBURG before driving into Washington and got sandwiches at the deli—pastrami and cheese on rye with extra pickles for Kit, a veggie wrap for me. I also bought cow puddles, her favorite cookies, from The Upper Crust. I very nearly brought a bottle of our wine because it seemed as if she could use a drink, but figured it probably wasn’t the best idea if we were dining in the newsroom. So I bought two waters instead.

I paid a usurious fee to park in a garage half a block from the Trib headquarters on Farragut Square and walked to the imposing granite building with its huge glass entrance and THE WASHINGTON TRIBUNE in enormous Gothic brass letters above the door. At night the Trib’s Art Deco tower, a well-known feature on the Washington skyline, was lit up—usually the lights were white, but on the Fourth of July, they were red, white, and blue, green on St. Patrick’s Day, and so on. I’d heard that the year the Redskins went to the Super Bowl the lights were burgundy and gold. No one I knew expected to see those colors again during their lifetime, though, as they say, hope springs eternal.

The Trib’s Loudoun bureau, on the other hand, was a sweet little house on Harrison Street in Leesburg with a white picket fence out front, a front porch where Kit and her staff ate lunch in warm weather, and a graceful magnolia tree that shaded the front yard. I wondered if anyone from D.C. had been out to Leesburg to see the bureau in the hinterlands. Night and day.

I pulled open the heavy front door, which had another Tribune logo in Gothic gold lettering stenciled on it, and entered the lobby. More granite, at least an acre of it, and highly polished teak walls. Framed photographs of iconic moments in history when a Trib reporter—or an Avery—was in the thick of it. A long, sleek guard’s desk, a metal detector, two no-nonsense well-armed security guards who eyed me as I came in, and an enormous screen with the Trib’s website displayed, all of which looked a lot more formidable than the motherly lady who sat at the front desk in Leesburg answering phones and calling visitors “dear” or “sugar.”

I had to show my license, have my photo taken, and Kit had to come to the lobby to escort me upstairs. I put our lunch and my purse through the security machine and waited for them to emerge. She leaned over and swiped the badge hanging around her neck on a lanyard on a security pad at an entrance gate. It opened and we walked to a bank of elevators.

The Metro desk was at the back of the newsroom on the third floor.

“I didn’t expect it to be so big,” I said.

“You’ve been here before,” Kit said.