Rogue Affair by Adriana Anders

Author:Adriana Anders [Anders, Adriana]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pronoun
Published: 2017-11-07T16:00:00+00:00

Brynn Allen’s brain could no longer hold a thought. No, she had to deal with fifty-three at once. She’d read once about string theory, the idea the entire universe was made out of vibrating strings. She hadn’t believed it until this president had reduced her to an oscillating rubber band.

“Right,” she said to Grace Kim, her editor who was cajoling her over the phone. “I don’t think the story is going to be ready today.”

“Are you sure?” Grace was ever breathless, ever demanding. “Because—”

“No, we don’t have it yet. We have a quote, but no confirmation, and I don’t know what it means.”

“But you’ve got calls out?” Grace asked.

“Twenty-five of them.” More than that, probably. But what Grace was really asking was whether Brynn had a call out to her, to Brynn’s main source, the one Grace and everyone else in DC wanted to know the identity of.

Brynn didn’t message or call Lee; she waited to be summoned. But she wasn’t going to tell Grace that, not over the phone, not in public, and probably not ever.

“Okay,” Grace acquiesced.

Hell yes it was okay.

Brynn hung up and sent a text message—Sorry, distracted—to her best friend, Corey, with whom she was supposedly planning a baby shower gift for another friend. Then she took a gulp of her coffee. She was drinking enough of it to support a measurable slice of Brazil’s GDP.

All her days now started before six, when she’d roll over and check the encrypted app she used to message with sources, then she’d skim the foreign headlines and take a speedy shower. She’d munch on a piece of toast while walking to the Metro, and when she hit the mostly empty newsroom, she’d start her daily check-ins.

She might call the scheduler to the Senate Majority Leader who’d once shared a house with a close friend of Brynn’s. Or a guy from the White House Legislative Affair’s Office she’d met at a New Year’s Eve party. She had fifty or sixty active contacts now, all over the District and at every level.

So much of being a reporter was saying tell me, and then shutting your mouth. If she hadn’t known it prior to this year, she did now: listening was just about the hardest thing in the world. Everything, everyone, was clamoring for her attention, and she had to pay it out like shiny quarters at an arcade. Because if she wasn’t focused, she might not hear what was important. The sources themselves rarely knew what they had until Brynn put the pieces together.

The more she wrote, the more information fell into her lap and the more she had to listen. She was the District’s favorite confessor. She couldn’t grant absolution—though an increasing number of people needed it—but she could trade more bits of herself for the truth. Since January, she hadn’t see her friends or her family much, she’d worked fifteen-hour days seven days a week, and she’d become a stress-addled mess.

As if to prove her point, she tossed her cup back to slam the rest of her coffee, and several tablespoons dribbled down her blouse.

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