So maybe she wasn’t sick for Mitch. Maybe she was queasy thinking about the pilot story. From Stanley’s first assigning it to her, she hadn’t been too jumped up about it. She had vague ideas how to go about it, but not many. This minute she felt failure coming for her. Look at Mitch—with decades in service, a reporter with sources as deep as earth’s core; he was lost. Stanley would pish that observation. He’d say she didn’t have much in the way of visible signs to prove Mitch was sinking. That gut of hers, though, it told all of her all she needed to know about Mitch’s state of mind. You couldn’t put that in a story though, could you? I could feel the desperation of Mitch because my stomach was flipping. Stanley would hit delete. He liked concrete writing. Tell it clear, like glass, he said to her once.

It was simple when you had a dead body—dissect the corpse. But here, in the fields, how to get at secrets? How to put your hand into the dirt and pull out the root? It could be twenty feet down, or twenty miles at a diagonal. And this thing that had confounded Mitch—it was a report! It was fourth-hand, fifth-hand, ten-hands, and more. A way to defer a decision. A study to make a recommendation to craft a proposal to consider a conclusion.

Before this day, Vera would have disdained getting a report. Getting a report someone else got first—like tap dancing a talent show. But she saw from watching Mitch that he would be considered less-than for this failure. She wondered how the other paper had gotten this report. Why would someone leak to one paper and not the other? If she had more experience, she might understand this government curlicue.

The number I flashed on Mitch’s screen, announcing a new message. Vera felt woozy. Mitch pushed enter, but slowly, Vera thought, as if a gentler touch might bring a kinder message.

Any luck?

It was from the executive editor. At first she didn’t recognize it as him. SANGER was his sign-on. He was, after all, just a person with a last name, like any of them. Though he was hired so long ago, only his last name was used. Did they even have computers then? Today, new hires had their first name’s initial automatically attached to their last name. Vera was HASTINGSV.

Mitch pushed n and o, then enter. Vera would have put her head in her hands. Mitch remained upright.

He suppressed a burp. So he was aware he was not alone. She balked at this. He had seemed so unaware of the Room. She watched him reach for a can of Diet Coke that had to be warm by now. He was taking a sip—