“Yes, you can,” I interrupted. “If a friend sent you filth like that, you just e-mail him back that it’s not okay. ‘Don’t send me any more kiddie porn’ is what you write him.” I looked around the conference table for support. “You guys know what I mean, right?”

People shifted a little bit in their seats before nodding. Steve was writing down a few notes. “Dani, you know how it is in the Room here, we’re just bouncing ideas back and forth—that’s what the Room is for.”

“I’m not pitching a tired idea about gay porn and the Staircase Murder,” I retorted. “This is about Internet snooping, and a relationship in a sensitive stage. The fiancée has a gut feeling and looks to see if there’s something to her feelings, and she ends up being right. But we make her our victim. When she confronts him with the e-mail, he flies into a rage and she ends up dead. That’s our story.”

“But doesn’t she deserve it?”

We all turned to the far left of the room to find the voice. It was Evil Janet, with a chair pulled into the crowded room against the far wall. From where I was sitting, I could still see Janet’s nails. She’d drawn a single black stripe down the center of each nail to the tip. It looked like she’d used a Sharpie instead of polish.

“She went looking for something where she shouldn’t have been looking. That’s a bad thing to do,” Evil Janet said. “The core belief system of someone who would do something like that is totally out of whack.”

Steve interjected excitedly, “Yes, this is the moral dilemma for the show. We all know that she didn’t have it coming, because no one deserves to be murdered, but she wasn’t an angel.” He turned to me, his face alight. “Dani, this is great, this is fantastic! You should really run with it.”

“Okay, as long as we all recognize that possessing child porn is an illegal offense,” I said, sounding dour. I was glad Steve was jazzed about the idea, but getting a green light felt like a consolation prize. They were all ganging up on the she in the story.

“It’s also an illegal offense to break into someone’s e-mail,” added Evil Janet.

“Enough, we get it!” Steve looked around the room. “I just want to remind you all that a lot of eyes are on the show. Les is looking for ideas to bolster the network’s drama portfolio, so feel challenged.” He gave a mock thumbs up to all of us.

After the meeting I was still annoyed at the other staffers and especially at Evil Janet. As I settled in behind my desk, my phone rang. “It’s Dani,” I said, sounding more irritated than I meant to.