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She had fervently feared this. Just as fervently, she had denied that it could actually happen. While dealing with the more immediate repercussions of her blunder, she’d managed to hold off her dread of dismissal. Now, she was forced to confront the reality of it.

“I’m fired?”

“You have one hour to clear out your desk and leave the building.”

“Please reconsider, Mr. Jenkins. I’ve learned my lesson. From now on, I’ll be scrupulously careful. I’ll check out every fact.”

“It’s too late, Ms. Travis. Nothing you say will change my mind.”

She threw herself on his mercy. “You know about my townhouse.”

“Yes. Bad timing.”

“I need my job.”

“I’m sorry. The decision has been made.”

Her mind in chaos, she began grasping at straws. “Okay, take me off the street and keep me in the newsroom.”

“Ms. Travis—”

“I’ll write copy. I’ll edit scripts. I’ll answer the telephone, run the teleprompter, deliver the mail, go for sandwiches. It’ll be like probation. Then in a few months you can reevaluate me.”

“Please, don’t embarrass y

ourself further,” he said in the firm but kindly voice one reserves for the hopelessly doomed. “You no longer fit in with our program.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that your standards don’t meet ours. It means that you haven’t lived up to our expectations of you. It means that I’m terminating you for an accumulation of offenses, not just for this one in particular.”

“Bullshit.”

Howie winced.

Jenkins looked rather taken aback himself. “I beg your pardon?”

“Why don’t you try being a man about it, Jenkins? Admit the real reason you’re firing me—because Armbruster demanded my head on a platter.”

Jenkins’s face turned red, letting her know she’d hit the nail on the head. She stood up and pulled herself to her full height. “You’ve got it backward, Jenkins. This piddling TV station with its second-rate reputation and chickenshit management no longer fits in with my program.”

* * *

“Want fries with that?”

Barrie considered the fat and calorie content of the french fries against her craving for them. “Sure. Why not? Large.”

She paid for the take-out cheeseburger and fries and returned to her car. She was dining alone tonight. After months of encouraging Daily to get out more, he had chosen tonight to heed her advice, and had accepted the invitation of an old newsroom crony to go to a Brigitte Bardot film festival.

“Is he driving you?” Anytime he went out alone, especially after dark, she worried about him.

“Yes, Mother. He’s picking me up and bringing me home. And before you ask, I’ll check my oxygen tank and make sure it’s full, although if I pant over the young Bardot as much as I hope to, I might run out of air before I get home. And if I jerk off, I’ll die gasping, but happy.”

He’d added that last just to irritate her. She hadn’t told him that she’d been fired, because she knew he would insist on staying home to console her. No sense in both of them being miserable.

Following the meeting in Jenkins’s office, one of the station’s rent-a-cops had escorted her back to her cubicle and hovered over her as she cleaned out her desk. She was so infuriated at being treated like a criminal that she said snidely to the guard, “What does this dump have that I could possibly want to steal?”

“Nothing personal, Ms. Travis. Company policy.”