First Light Page 4

  But between the one-two punch of recession and the rise of Internet news, ad revenues and subscription numbers across all media platforms had plummeted, and the magazine had been forced to cut its staff to the bone, letting half the newsroom go just as Kerry was crossing the stage in Evanston to collect her expensive degree. When she went back to New York to the magazine’s offices that summer with her résumé in hand, applying for an entry-level position, she was told how sorry everyone was, how much the editors liked her work, but the news business was bad all over and they just couldn’t take on new people when they could barely support the ones they had left. The magazine had gone out of business entirely later that year.

  Faced with a mountain of student-loan debt and unsure what else to do in the meantime, Kerry had come back to Chicago and taken a job answering the phones in the Petrol media-management office, thinking it was just a summer job, thinking that eventually she’d find a better position and get back out into the real-news world when hiring picked up again. No one was more surprised than she was when Bob assigned her a press release on a new spill cleanup project the company had developed to be more environmentally friendly, or when the story had received major press coverage, coverage that got her noticed at the company. Bob told her she was a natural and started giving her more and more responsibility, at first small things like minor press releases about plant upgrades, then she moved on to more important projects like annual earnings reports, announcements of mergers and acquisitions, even international development deals, working her way up and up until she was director of the toughest department in the company—the crisis-management media team.

  It wasn’t an easy job, but she doubted she’d have been happy if it were. What was harder than making the company look good in the middle of a colossal failure, after all? She had a better paycheck than she’d ever have had working in print journalism, which was practically dead anyway (or at least that’s what she told herself). Who wanted to do media management for a breakfast-cereal company, a garbage-bag company, after working at a place like Petrol? How much challenge could there be at a job where she’d be writing press releases hawking the features and benefits of a toothpaste? No—part of her liked the challenge of managing crisis media for a company as public and controversial as Petrol. Bob knew she liked it, and he’d used the possibility of a promotion to vice president—dangling the ultimate in golden handcuffs—to chain her permanently to her desk at corporate headquarters.

  But that didn’t mean there wasn’t still a part of her that would have liked to be on the other side of the equation sometimes. Who knew what would have happened if she’d quit Petrol after six months like she’d originally planned, living on ramen and cheap beer and using all those reporting skills for which she’d paid so dearly for their intended use? She imagined what it would have been like if she’d been the one interviewing Bob on the newscast the night before instead of the one calling the network to issue corrections on the number of spilled gallons. She imagined chucking it all, telling Bob where he could stick his paycheck and his weekend house in Aspen. It was tempting, today more so than ever.

  But no. That ship had sailed long ago. She’d chosen her path and now had only to walk it as well as she could. Plus there was Daniel to think about.

  Before they’d met, Kerry’s personal life was a mess: random blind dates and Internet dates that never led anywhere, even once an ill-advised drunken hookup that ended in a scary stalker situation. She was never in one place long enough to meet someone and develop a real connection, not when the company had her jetting off to Dubai one week and Newfoundland the next, all the corners of the earth where the company’s oil platforms churned up crude from beneath the earth’s crust. She couldn’t even get a dog, much less maintain a relationship with a man, when she was traveling for work nine months of the year and putting in ten-hour days at the office the rest of the time. She liked to joke to Judy that her longest relationship was with the coffeemaker in the break room.

  That had all changed when Daniel was hired. Always the center of attention in every room, the guy with the infectious laugh and the winning personality, Daniel drew people to him like fire to oil. He’d surprised Kerry first by making work fun, then by making her more fun when he was around.

  She remembered the first time she’d spoken to Daniel on a flight of mostly Petrol employees heading to Gulf Shores, Alabama, one fall afternoon nearly two years ago. She’d been lucky enough to score an entire row to herself; she’d been looking forward to stretching out, taking up the whole armrest and reading the newspaper. It was a dreary afternoon in November, the day before Thanksgiving, rain blurring the windows. The mood in the plane was equally gray; no one on the team wanted to be away from home over the holiday. Halfway through the flight, though, she’d looked up from her copy of People to see the new guy, Daniel Albrecht, using the intercom for an impromptu stand-up routine, apparently in an effort to raise the team’s spirits. “Just in case we go down, there are some things you need to know about me,” he’d said. “Mostly that I’ve seen every episode of Gilmore Girls. Twice.”

  Someone yelled out, “That’s it? My teenaged daughter has seen them all at least a dozen times.”

  Daniel grinned, pointed at the responder and said, “You win the prize Thanksgiving turkey!”

  Kerry watched this, bemused, and then called, “All right, then. What else you got?”

  Daniel looked at Kerry with a sheepish expression, then said, “I dominate games of Risk. I’m a big believer in taking up position in southern Europe and winning the whole thing from there. Let’s see, um. . . . I secretly love Renaissance fairs and amusement parks. I once ate an entire anchovy pizza in one sitting. My mother still calls me Danny. What about you, Kerry? Anything you want to tell us about yourself?”

  She shook her head no. Everyone was looking at her.

  “You sure? No skeletons in your closet?”

  Kerry shook her head again, but she was smiling—she didn’t realize he’d known her name. She didn’t have the gift of making people laugh, but she’d always admired people who did. Who weren’t afraid of laughing at themselves, most of all. After a succession of boyfriends who’d taken themselves very, very seriously, she was starting to see how charming it might be to be with someone who didn’t.

  Then Daniel started calling people up one by one for their own most embarrassing confessions, keeping them all laughing so hard they were wheezing. When he’d finished and started back to his seat, she’d stopped him. “I didn’t know you were such a comedian,” she’d said. “If you ever get tired of crisis management, you can always find work as the opening act for Louis C.K.”

  “No way,” Daniel said, waving his hand in dismissal, “he can open for me.” Kerry cracked another smile. Despite herself, she couldn’t stop staring. The large brown eyes, a shock of chestnut hair a little longer than strictly necessary, wide cheekbones surrounding a mouth always curling at the edges into humor—how had she never noticed until now how good-looking he was? Had she ever really seen him before?

  Daniel had looked from her face to the empty seat next to her and back. “What’d you do? Scare off your seatmate? Was he easily intimidated?”

  “By what?”

  “You. You always seem to be so . . . intense.”

  Kerry smiled. “I’m not always intense,” she said, though she knew she gave that impression; she sometimes deliberately cultivated that impression. Maybe now was the time to relax a little. She moved her purse off the seat next to her. “Want to join me?”

  He looked surprised, but sat down with a big smile, his arm brushing against hers. They’d talked the entire way to Gulf Shores, trading stories about their childhoods and drinking glass after glass of red wine until, for the first time in a long time, Kerry was sorry to see the flight end. At the gate they’d stood up to deplane, and Daniel had offered to help her with her carry-on. “Let me give you a hand with t
hat,” he’d said, pulling it down for her and pretending to fall over from the weight—Kerry refused to check her bags, and so her carry-ons were a marvel of engineered packing—and she’d laughed so long and hard at the shocked look on his face and his clowning that she’d actually gone too far and hugged him—he was tall and thin, wiry like a basketball player, his skin surprisingly cool. And after throwing propriety to the wind so early in their relationship, she told him later, how could she possibly have refused when he asked her to dinner that night?

  They ate alone at a quaint little place in Gulf Shores with a view of the Gulf. Over crab cakes and more wine, Daniel had confessed that he’d been secretly trying to get Kerry to talk to him for weeks, that he’d noticed her first when he’d come to the department for his job interview a couple of months back—he’d passed her office and caught her eye for just a moment, an event Kerry definitely didn’t remember—and something about the redhead in the pencil skirt and librarian hair just had him riveted. “I thought, That’s the kind of woman I’d like to know better. A lot better.”

  “The kind who’s intense?” she said.

  “Exactly,” he said, pouring her another glass of wine. “To see how intense she might be in other ways.”

  He kissed her for the first time that night, after walking her back to her room and catching her at the door before she could lean down to insert her keycard and say good night. His mouth had been firm and soft, searching but sweet, as he’d reached up and pulled out the pins that held up her hair, letting it fall over her shoulders and into his hands. She’d told Judy the next morning that either it had been too long since she’d kissed anyone or else he was really, really good at it, because they kissed for at least twenty minutes in the hall of the hotel before someone walked by and embarrassed them into stopping.

  Judy had feigned being scandalized. “What would have happened if no one had walked by?”

  “I don’t know,” Kerry had said, feeling her face reddening. “I’ve never dated anyone at work before. I don’t quite understand what the rules are. Is this a mistake? It’s a mistake, isn’t it?”

  “Not when he’s that cute.”

  Trust Judy to not take the whole thing so seriously.

  After that, she stopped worrying about whether dating a co-worker was a bad idea or not. On that first trip, they spent nearly all their free hours together, sitting on the beaches of Gulf Shores, Daniel finding a moment to kiss her in the corridor before lunch, between phone calls in the evening.

  When they got home to Chicago, they immediately ran away together for a long weekend in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where Daniel said he had a cabin. It turned out to be less a cabin in the woods than a high-end log house with a loft and a stone fireplace and a view of Lake Superior. They spent the weekend kayaking and hiking in the woods, ignoring Bob’s constant texts and voicemails and claiming later there’d been no service so far north.

  It was a life Kerry had never really experienced before—so remote, so far from city life and its noise and its messiness—but she was surprised to find she loved it, or at least she did with Daniel, who fancied himself something of an outdoorsman. He had learned to sea-kayak and was taking sailing lessons; he hiked in the Hiawatha National Forest on a few occasions, he told her, with only a sleeping bag and a lighter. His big plan, he said, was to make enough money to retire at forty-five or fifty, move up to the Lake Superior cabin full-time and have a family. Lying next to him with the fire burning down in the fireplace, she could see herself there, too, raising a gaggle of kids, maybe writing that novel she’d always dreamed about, bundled up in heavy wool socks and carrying around enormous cups of tea in mugs she’d made herself. She could have a garden. She could get away from Petrol and city life and the choices she’d fallen into rather than decided upon.

  Before six months were up, they’d moved in together, arguing over decorating choices and whether or not they should get a cat, spending their free weekends canoeing the Wisconsin River or going apple picking in Door County. Daniel never let her take her job, or herself, so seriously that she couldn’t get out of the office once in a while, have a life of her own. He fought for private space for the two of them, not just with her but with Bob, too. “We work to live,” he always said, “not the other way around.”

  They were perfectly happy. Kerry was thirty-four and knew who she was, finally, and what she needed to make a life for herself. She had the company by day and Daniel by night, and she’d always thought she’d have been quite content to go on that way forever.

  But now, standing in the snowy Alaska street looking through the window at Bob screaming abuse down the phone, knowing her fiancé—who’d been out in the dangerous cold all night—was likely on the receiving end of his tirade, Kerry was starting to think the time for a lifestyle change might be coming sooner than she’d anticipated. Bob was putting Daniel in danger this time, and the people who worked for Daniel. Bob had risked people’s lives before, but what if this was the moment he pushed everyone just a bit too far? If his insistence on having his way really did cost additional lives? She could spin lots of things, but if Bob caused a crisis that didn’t need to happen—Kerry wouldn’t be able to spin that. She wouldn’t want to.

  She watched through the window as Bob regained control of himself, his face turning from purple to red to a shiny pink, hanging up the phone with one meaty thumb. Then the old man disappeared back into the warmth of the diner, where Phil was already waiting at a corner table for the two women to arrive. Kerry could see him tapping out something on his phone with a stylus, then set it down.

  In a moment her phone beeped: Phil had sent her a text. Are you on your way? it said, and Kerry felt her annoyance level leap into the red. I don’t need you checking in on me, she typed, her finger hovering over the Send button. Then she changed her mind and deleted the text.

  The director of human resources had long been a source of irritation to Kerry, though she couldn’t always put her finger on why. Enormously secretive about his personal life, with a dry, uneven sense of humor that could flare up or die off unexpectedly, Phil was an enigma to everyone around the office, sometimes personable and funny, sometimes unexpectedly cold and aloof, especially to Kerry. Even Bob had noticed and remarked on it from time to time. Fortyish, with thick dark-brown hair and small brown eyes framed by a pair of square no-rim glasses, Phil had a way of never quite looking her in the eye when he was speaking to her, as if something about the sight of her caused him pain. There were times when she’d catch him staring at her when she was in the middle of a presentation or asking a question, and then he’d look away, his mouth turned down. Or he’d brush past her in the hallway at Petrol without even saying so much as hello or nodding his head.

  The truth was that Phil had made it clear, from the first day he’d met her, that he didn’t think much of someone her age and experience leading the media-relations team; it had literally been the first thing he’d said to her, that she didn’t look old enough for her position. She’d been shocked and hurt, especially when Bob had felt the need to defend Kerry’s record, but she’d made up her mind to try to win Phil over on her own. For the first few months they’d worked together, she’d done everything she could to at least earn his respect. She’d gone out of her way to highlight his projects to the media, to get his buy-in on important projects. She’d been her most charming, her most hardworking and impressive. None of it mattered—Phil Velez never warmed up to her, no matter what she did. Eventually she stopped trying.

  “Give Phil a break,” Judy always said whenever Kerry complained that he had all the personality of a wet herring. “The guy’s got it bad.”

  This was Judy’s favorite theory—that Phil was awful to Kerry because it made it easier for him to dismiss his feelings for her—but Kerry knew her friend was wrong. “Not for me, he doesn’t. Anyway, he’s married.”

  “You don’t know that.”

&
nbsp; “The man wears a gold wedding band. I don’t need a detective agency to tell me what that means.”

  Judy wouldn’t be swayed, but Kerry knew better. From their very first meeting, Phil had made it clear he thought Kerry wasn’t good enough: Not for her job. Not for the company. Not for him.

  Fine by me, she’d thought, and written Phil off as a hopeless case. They were co-workers, but they didn’t have to be friends.

  Now she could see Phil at the table, scribbling on his tablet with the stylus again, frowning down at it. He was wearing a jacket and tie even here, despite the crazy temperatures and blowing snow, making him look like a substitute teacher on a bad day. Kerry had a momentary image of herself turning around and walking straight back out, returning to the hotel, packing her bags, gathering her fiancé, and catching the first flight back to Chicago.

  Kerry squared her shoulders. “Come on,” she said to Judy, “let’s get this over with. Afterward, if we survive, I’ll buy you a drink.”

  “Deal,” Judy said, her voice still muffled by her scarf. “At least there’s plenty of ice.”

  4

  As the two women came into the restaurant—stamping their feet and stripping off their hats, gloves and scarves—Phil Velez could see Kerry was upset or maybe irritated about something, her eyebrows pinched together, mouth turned down just slightly as she looked at him, as if she’d smelled something bad. Then she caught sight of Bob and composed herself, her brow smoothing, her mouth turning up again at the corners, and by the time she and Judy sat down across from Phil at the table, Kerry appeared herself again—self-possessed, alert, polite—although just barely. Somewhere underneath that calm exterior, he could sense a hidden irritation. Something had set her off, but what?

  “Good morning,” she said, shrugging out of her parka and letting it fall on the back of her chair. “We made it.”