better than this.”
“Yeah. You should get on the winning team, like me. Because the news isn’t the news anymore. We don’t peddle truth. We sell products and curated points of view. These people don’t want the truth. Oh, they say they do. Nine out of ten will swear on the Holy Bible that they want the unvarnished truth. But they don’t. They want an easy-to-digest meal that goes down smooth and tells them how right and pure they are. You’re trying to make ’em eat their vegetables, and I’m the chocolate-cake-for-breakfast guy. Now, who do you think makes people happier? Who do you think they love?”
About to turn away, Nell paused. She looked at him. Really looked at him this time. There was something in his sullen, glassy eyes, the way he slouched in the rich man’s chair, that skewed his entire body. It wasn’t just the alcohol. He was buzzed, no question about it, but there was something else. Like he’d been broken into pieces and put back together again by sloppy, careless hands.
“What happened to you?”
“Had to eat my vegetables,” he muttered. “Now I get chocolate cake for life.”
She started to leave. There wasn’t anything else to say.
“One thing,” he called out.
She glanced back over her shoulder.
“Just some food for thought. You’re assuming we planted that story. We put that pedo up to confessing the laptop was his and that Sellers was an innocent man. And if you take the deal, we’ll make sure the truth comes out.”
“That’s right.”
“Has it occurred to you,” he said, “that you might have it all backward?”
She studied him. Her eyes narrowed. “Meaning?”
“Has it occurred to you that the pedo is telling the truth”—he scooped up the envelope and gave it a wave—“but Weaver can bribe him into lying and taking the story back? Has it occurred to you that maybe Noah Sellers was truly blameless and you hounded an innocent man into committing suicide?”
“Is that what happened?” she asked.
He locked eyes with her.
“Would you really want to know?”
Her response died on the tip of her tongue. She had nothing but uncertain silence to answer him with.
“Nobody really wants the truth,” he told her. “And you’ve always been reckless with other people’s lives. Anything to get the story, right? Let’s see how your tune changes when you and your friends are the ones in the barrel.”
Outside the lounge, the Grand Central concourse was a human zoo, crowds of commuters milling across the vast floor under the turquoise mural of constellations high above, tourists lining up along the staircase railings and snapping photographs. Nell drifted through it all like a ghost. She’d chosen her future, pushed away her golden ticket, and now she had to figure out what to do while the pillars of her life came crashing down all around her.
“Would you really want to know?”
Harrelson’s question wouldn’t haunt her. Her silence would.
34.
Tyler followed the money. The line between the Weaver Group and the lawyers at Latham and White wasn’t hard to uncover: they had represented Weaver in a copyright-infringement suit in Texas, back in the company’s early days, and last year one of Weaver’s own corporate lawyers had joined the firm as a partner. That proved a connection but not a conspiracy. He kept digging.
He circled back to the morning’s news and the man standing on the Sellerses’ porch. He didn’t look like a lawyer to Tyler. More like a hired thug, the kind of person more inclined to crack skulls than books; it was something in his panther-prowl body language, the narrow shift of his eyes. After coming up empty on Latham and White’s website, Tyler found the man at Weaver. He was smiling in his biography pic in the corporate gallery, but his eyes were cold marbles of slate. He couldn’t even fake being happy for the camera.
“Jai Sahni, director of software engineering,” Tyler murmured to the screen. “What were you doing at the Sellerses’ place?”
Best guess, he was acting as a liaison between Noah’s widow and the legal team they’d hired to back her up, but that wasn’t a job for a computer programmer. Tyler buckled down and cracked into Sahni’s life, chasing leads in one window and tapping out notes in another. He tumbled into a rabbit hole, losing track of time. Every twist in the warren piled one bit of oddness on top of another.
His desk phone rang. Lost in thought, Tyler scooped up the receiver.
“Tyler Graham, city desk.”
“Hello, Mr. Graham. We haven’t been formally introduced. My