Page 23 of Child of Mine

“I think it’s best if I call you Henry.”

“Oh, well, okay. Anyway, it was a shock to see you, but—” Filing away the warm feeling I get when she calls me by my old nickname, I press on. “I just want to tell you what happened. I’m not the kind of guy to walk out like that.”

Her expression is guarded, but she nods.

After blowing out a breath, I lead off with, “That day was a life changer.”

Her face pales. “What do you mean?”

“I think I told you I was celebrating a promotion. Well, it was huge. It would’ve put me on the fast track to producing network news.”

“Would have?”

I stop and face her in the shade of one of the trees lining the sidewalk. “When I left that dressing room to go back and find my overcoat, I ran into a coworker who’d been looking for me for an hour trying to get a message to me. My dad had collapsed at work and was in the hospital.” Her expression shifts like lightning, from walls-up to shock to sympathy. The last has my throat clenching as tight as the fists in my pockets, but I keep going, the need for her to understand greater than the need to avoid the memories. “I went straight to the airport and got on the first flight home, but he’d had a brain aneurysm and they couldn’t save him.”

Her hand lands on my forearm. “Oh my god. I’m so sorry.”

“Thanks.” When she lets go, my arm feels bereft. “Um, anyway, that’s why I disappeared. Do you forgive me?”

“Of course.” She opens her mouth, seems suspended for a beat, then closes it. After shaking her head slightly, like she’s erasing an Etch-a-Sketch, she asks, “So, you didn’t go back to the job in New York? You’ve been in Raleigh all this time?”

“Yeah, I needed my family, and they needed me. I ended up getting work as a cameraman at a local station and worked my way up. But I was off the fast track, and there was no way of getting back on.”

“So why did you come to Boston?”

“Long story short: I’ve got some ideas, and I think this is the place to implement them.”

“OnBoom?”

I huff out a grunt. Since I’m baring my soul here, I may as well go all the way. “Honestly, this was the best job I could get with my résumé. I hope to pitch and produce my own shows before too long. Of course, that’ll never happen if this show fails. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t come here to resuscitate a tired format of a show only to watch it die a slow death because it can’t keep up with the competition.”

“I don’t know.” She winces. “I’m really just here for the paycheck.”

“That paycheck won’t last long if the show gets canceled after just one season.”

Sighing, she glances back at the building. “True.”

Sensing that my time here is limited, I press on. “But you’re with me, right? We need to innovate more to get kids’ attention these days.”

She nods, but in that way where you’re half shaking itno. “And to hold kids’ attention, I guess.”

“I mean, filming the boot camp or whatever this”—I make air quotes—“‘retreat’ is? That’s a great idea.”

“Well, we can’t just shove cameras in their faces.” Folding her arms over her chest, she looks back at the building again. “Bonding as a team should be the priority, but we could pitch it as a way to gradually get them used to being in front of the camera. It takes time. My group jelled as we created the opening sequence, but it took longer than those few sessions to let go of self-consciousness when that red light would go on.” She glances back to me. “At least for me it did.”

“It’s too bad that the show’s already cast. Shooting the auditions would’ve been great.”

“Hm. I could see… Well, this might be dumb.”

“What?”

She wrinkles her nose.

“Come on. There are no dumb ideas. Just ideas that might not work.”

“I don’t know about that but… Okay. What if, for the opening sequence, we literally show how they’re a regular kid—just like the viewers—walking on a street or coming out of a school on their way to the studio?”

“I like it. We could show iconic parts of Boston. Harvard, the State House, Paul Revere stuff.”

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