Chapter One

September 2003

Phillip

Out of nowhere, blurred vision and pain that throbbed with every heartbeat forced him to his knees on the coffee-stained carpet in the editing room. He fought to keep the nausea in his belly from erupting and lay on the floor even after the newscast had gone off the air. Standing over him, the nerdy meteorologist who for a brief moment had toyed with the idea of going to medical school, pronounced his diagnosis. Thinking back on it now, Phillip was certain that his first migraine headache had appeared just as he’d begun to suspect that he no longer had the heart for any of it.

Recovery was slow. In the days that followed, sitting at his desk in a robotic trance in the middle of an ordinary week, he stacked folders into neat piles and spent several minutes re-arranging paperweights on top. Beside the familiar chipped mug filled with sharpened pencils, he placed a photograph mounted in a ceramic frame his daughter had made in art class. Leaning back in his chair, he closed his eyes and concentrated on rhythmically breathing in and out. The flashing button on his desk phone announced messages he hadn’t bothered to pick up. He tried to remember the last time there hadn’t been any messages and wondered if anyone ever got to the end of the queue.

Can’t do it, he sighed.Not today.

Summoning energy he didn’t feel, he pushed his chair away from his desk and swiveled 180 degrees to take in the bustling newsroom. He hoisted himself up and made his way over to the window, where for at least ten minutes he stood and witnessed the trees beginning to shed their autumn leaves.

Phillip Lynch could think of little before him that he looked forward to and nothing behind him worth remembering, and it was in that moment that he started to imagine an assortment of scenarios. After that, the juggling of different possibilities became an addictive mental pastime, one that he couldn’t seem to stop. Trapped in editorial meetings about what was and wasn’t newsworthy, or at Gracie’s piano recital where girls in ruffled dresses plodded through tunes fromThe Little Mermaid, or feigning interest as Susan recounted her sister’s latest calamity, Phillip began to make a plan.

Eight years after he had started working at the TV station, the board of directors rewrote its original mission statement, and a new program director arrived on the scene to remap the entire broadcast direction. Phillip had been working on several projects, and every one of them, in various stages of development, was now unsuited to the station’s new direction. Management encouraged him to come up with fresh ideas on the double, or to start pounding the pavement with his resume in hand.

On the home front, his fourteen-year-old son had just begun a college prep high school with a price tag that exceeded what they could afford, and his eight-year-old daughter was midway through years of shiny metal braces guaranteed to produce a picture-perfect smile.