gazed around the little room and nodded. “It is a special building, isn’t it?” he said, grinning. “It’s actually kind of shocking that someone didn’t gut the place and turn it into a Starbucks.”
I smiled, glancing at my watch. “Well,” I said, “look at me, keeping you like this. I better get back out there and brave the weather. I have an editor who needs a story.”
“Where are you headed?”
“To the Herald building on Alaskan Way,” I said. “If I can get there.”
“Let me walk you,” he offered, a little self-consciously. “At least until you find a cab.”
“I’d love that,” I said, and together we made our way out to the snowy streets.
Despite the blizzard churning outside, the newsroom bustled as if the thermometer registered a balmy seventy degrees. It didn’t surprise me, though. Newspaper reporters rarely play hooky. Dedication is in their blood, which is why I wondered if I was really cut out for the job. So much had changed since last May, since…I wondered if I still had what it took.
“There you are!” I turned to find Abby approaching my cubicle. The paper’s research editor, she had a sense of humor I’d warmed to immediately. On my very first day at the Herald, she had walked up to my desk after my first staff meeting, looked me in the eye, and said, “I like you. You don’t wear pointy shoes.” She then inhaled the air around my desk. “But do you smoke?”
“No,” I said, a little stunned.
“Good,” she replied. Her face told me I passed her friendship test. “I’m Abby.” At that moment, I knew we’d be instant friends.
Abby had a knack for finding obscure facts about anything or anyone. The color of the former mayor’s daughter’s hair, for instance, or the soup served at a now-defunct restaurant on Marion Street in 1983—you name it, she could find it. She had come to my rescue more than a few times in the past few months when I was on deadline but lacked the material I needed to pull together a decent story. “Frank’s looking for you,” she said with a knowing smile.
I rubbed my forehead. “Is he chewing on his pencil?”
“Yes,” Abby replied. “Sound the alarms. I believe I saw pencil chewing.”
“Great,” I said, shrinking lower into my chair to avoid being seen above my cubicle walls. Abby and I both knew not to cross Frank when he chewed his pencil. It signaled a fire-breathing editor on the loose.
“Do you know what he wants?” Abby asked, sinking into my guest chair.
I turned on my computer and watched as my monitor slowly lit up, illuminating a photo of Ethan and me in Mexico three years earlier. How happy we looked. I sighed and turned back to Abby. “Frank wants me to write about the storm.”
She shrugged. “So? Doesn’t seem like such a big deal to me.”
“That’s just it,” I said. “There’s nothing big about it. You can’t write a story about weather—a good one, anyway.” I collected some loose papers on my desk and straightened them into a neat stack, shaking my head. “I don’t know, Abs. Maybe it’s me. I can’t seem to get excited about any story these days.”
“Honey, then take yourself off the piece,” she said. “Do you want me to talk to Frank about giving you some days off? You know, you never really stopped to rest after”—she paused to search my face, for permission, perhaps to say what came next—“after your hospital stay. Besides, unlike me, you, my dear, have job security. You’re a Kensington, after all. You can call the shots.”
I wadded up a press release on my desk and tossed it in Abby’s direction with a grin. “Very cute,” I said. “I may have married a Kensington, but I am not a Kensington.”
Ethan’s family owned the newspaper, one of the last family-owned dailies in the country. I’d been writing under my given name, Claire Aldridge, before I met him, so it didn’t make sense professionally to change it. Besides, I rather liked the statement it made to his very traditional parents, Glenda and Edward Kensington. Both shareholders in the newspaper, they managed the business from afar, leaving Ethan to run the day-to-day affairs, since his sister, Leslie, had no interest in holding down a real job, with her schedule studded with society events and salon appointments. His grandfather, Warren, the paper’s patriarchal editor in chief, checked in less now that he was in his eighties and in ailing health, but his