Paulina Cole wrote long into the night.
She wrote until the other offices at the Dispatch were dark, until her colleagues had long ago gone home and surrendered to the comfort of a glass of wine and their inviting beds.
She sewed together the interview like a trained surgeon, connecting arteries, nerves and capillaries together to create one body of work that would pump blood and live just the way she wanted it to. Read the way she wanted it to.
She could picture Mya Loverne's face, that poor, destroyed face, the shell of a girl whose life's flame had been snuffed out long before its time. So many factors had driven Mya to the brink. Thanks to her father's chummy relationship with most gossip columnists, the majority of his philandering never made it to the printed page. That didn't mean it didn't ruin many a dinner conversation, estrange a daughter in the midst of the most difficult time of her life. Now it was time to collect on that debt. Mya had suffered terribly. But through pain she would regain her life. She was the victim. And the culprit was not only her lech of a father, but Henry Parker, as well.
Henry had fractured Mya, literally and figuratively. All her troubles since the dissolution of their relationship had applied leverage to that emotional fracture, spreading it until she cracked open fully.
Paulina had dozens of pages scattered about her desk, three empty cups of coffee strewn about. She picked up the pages, plucked a sentence from different ones, felt her collar begin to burn when she read over all the stories about Henry she'd written last year. Henry, who came to New York as Jack O'Donnell and Wallace Langston's golden boy. Who was accused of murder and embarrassed the profession she'd devoted her life to. If payback was a bitch, Paulina was its mother.
And just like Henry struck the flint that burned Mya, this story was the spark that would burn down the New York
Gazette. The kindling was there, David Loverne a juicy log, and she was going to blast that place apart.
Fuck Wallace.
Fuck Harvey Hillerman.
Fuck Jack O'Donnell.
Fuck Henry Parker and everything he was.
But for now, she had to keep working. Soon the paper would be printed. Soon enough, she would burn their whole house to the ground.
Just several blocks away, at a desk cracked and worn with age, an old man sat typing. The desk was covered in coffee stains and pencil markings, its owner never bothering to clean them, believing they added personality. The corkboard above his computer was adorned with pictures, awards, plaques, books with his name printed on the spine, and a life dedicated to his craft. It was here that Jack O'Donnell put the finishing touches on his story for the next day's Gazette.
When the story was done, after he'd saved it on his word processor, made sure he'd written enough inches, and combed through to minimize any errors that would drive his editors crazy, Jack O'Donnell sat back in his chair. He pulled a flask of Jack Daniel's from his leather briefcase and took a sip. It was a good story, one that dropped a potential bombshell on the Paradis investigation. No other paper had this. It was a
Gazette exclusive.
After fifty years in news, his body still tingled at the thrill of a good story.
Before sending it off, Jack put the final touch on the article.
Underneath the byline Jack added: With additional reporting by Henry Parker.
And come morning, the sparks would fly.