On the Record- the Complete Collection by Lee Winter

Author:Lee Winter [Winter, Lee]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783963242243
Publisher: Ylva-Publishing
Published: 2019-05-27T01:25:50+00:00

Chapter 2 –

Evil Twins

Two days later, Lauren put down the phone and dropped her pen to her notepad. She glanced at her work calendar. Damn. Still Thursday. Only one more day and they were officially on vacation. A week and a bit in Iowa. Lauren exhaled. Her usual insecurities floated up and marched a circuit around her brain.

Dying for a distraction, she peered at the surly bear of a man working at the desk facing her. Bob Grimes was stuffed into an old brown suit and typing up his usual two-fingered storm. She could see only his forehead and furry eyebrows above the frosted-glass divider.

“Has it happened?” she asked. “Has the judgment been handed down in the Charlton case?”

He didn’t answer immediately, so she glanced up to one of the twenty-one monitors that encircled the walls above the news hub inside One Franklin Square’s east tower. She paused when she spotted her story on the food-robot abduction. It was still trending strongly, according to the live analytics.

She got a pleased jolt every time she saw it doing well. Even so, Lauren was pretty sure that the hilarious photos of all the curious onlookers had a lot more to do with the story’s viral success than her reporting. Especially Orange Shirt Lady, as she’d come to think of the most hilarious witness.

Her smile faded. Catherine wasn’t entirely wrong. This was barely news. Not exactly the White House beat she’d always dreamed of doing.

Bob Grimes grunted a belated affirmation to her question.

Lauren looked at him. He wasn’t the most talkative colleague, although he wasn’t that much worse than the others.

The truth Catherine didn’t know was that her outing of them had cost Lauren a lot of respect. Catherine had been so delighted that she’d overcome her fear of revealing their relationship that Lauren didn’t have the heart to reveal the downside.

Lauren had returned to work after the awards night to a much chillier newsroom. Not because her colleagues were homophobic—far from it—but they’d looked at Lauren with fresh eyes. And they’d seen someone with a limited news background, whose most immediate reporting beat had been the LA party circuit. Put alongside Catherine’s exhaustive, in-depth CV that stretched back two decades, despite a brief fall from grace, they’d reached a certain conclusion. They clearly assumed Catherine had given Lauren credit on their scoop because she was sleeping with her.

One photographer had even elbowed her the day after her national outing, winked, and said, “It’s not what you know, but who, am I right?”

The fact Lauren hadn’t been pulling out huge scoops since starting at The Washington Post just convinced colleagues like Grimes that their assumptions were right. She glanced back to the analytics monitor. Stories about stolen food robots, no matter how viral or funny, wouldn’t change their view, either. Lauren still had to prove herself.

A familiar despondency settled over her. It had been building for a while. It wasn’t just work. Not just next week’s Iowa trip, either. It was everything.

She chewed her lip and thought back to the call she’d just finished to select an Iowan wedding planner.

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