Chapter 17: The Angle

The coffee shop was in Los Feliz, neutral territory. Not Sloane's world. Not Dani's anymore, either, but Meg didn't know that yet. Meg was sitting at a corner table with two lattes already ordered, laptop open, the expression of someone who had already won half the argument before the other person sat down.

"You look different," Meg said, not looking up from her screen.

Dani slid into the chair across from her. "Rested, probably. I actually slept."

"That's not what I meant. You look like someone who made a choice."

Dani picked up the coffee. It was still hot, which meant Meg had called ahead or had timed this perfectly or had just absorbed enough of LA culture to know that precision was how you managed chaos. "Is that a problem?"

"Depends on what the choice was." Meg closed her laptop and finally looked at Dani directly. "The Sloane Rivers profile published four days ago. You disappeared for two of those days. You're answering my calls like someone checking in on obligations, not like someone who just won the professional lottery. So either you're having a breakdown or you did something you're going to have to explain."

Dani had known Meg for six years. She'd known Meg through three relationships, two career changes, one period when Dani had seriously considered abandoning journalism to teach high school. Meg was the kind of editor who could read you like a text you'd written in your own blood. Which meant there was no point in lying.

"I didn't write the profile Meg wanted," Dani said. "I wrote a different one."

"A better one. Traffic's up forty percent since publication. The think pieces alone are worth—"

"It's not about traffic." Dani set the coffee down very carefully. "It's about the fact that I wrote a profile of someone I have a conflict of interest with, and I did it anyway."

Meg was quiet for a moment. Then, very slowly, she said: "You did what."

"I have a conflict of interest. It started at some point during the reporting and I didn't stop it because I didn't know how to stop it."

"With Sloane Rivers."

"Yes."

"What kind of conflict."

Dani didn't answer. She didn't need to. Meg was smart enough to read the silence, and what she'd said was already explicit enough.

Meg set down her coffee. She sat back in her chair. She did that thing where she took off her glasses and pinched the bridge of her nose, which meant she was thinking very hard about something she didn't want to say.

"Okay," Meg said finally. "Okay. First: the piece ran. It ran with a decent margin. Legally we're fine. Ethically—" She paused. "Ethically is more complicated. Did you disclose the conflict to the publication?"

"No."

"Does Sloane know you wrote something else with a conflict of interest in place?"

"She knows everything. She read the profile before it published. She knew what I was planning to do and she didn't ask me to change it."

"That's not actually what determines whether you have a conflict, Dani. That's what determines whether Sloane had a conflict." Meg put her glasses back on. "The question is what you're going to do now."

The coffee shop was full of the kind of people Meg liked—creative types with their laptops, their three-drink coffee orders, their air of perpetual possibility. Nobody was paying attention to the woman in the corner having a professional reckoning.

"I'm going to take a break from profiles," Dani said. "I'm going to tell you I need to step back from that kind of assignment work for a while."

"For how long."

"I don't know yet."

Meg laughed. Actually laughed, which was worse than if she'd gotten angry. "Dani. You built your entire career on knowing what story you were chasing before you started chasing it. You don't do 'I don't know yet.' That's not how you operate."

"I didn't know I was going to fall in love with a subject during a profile, but that happened too. Apparently I'm capable of surprising myself."

"So you're in love with her."

"Yes."

"And you want to take a break from reporting on people while you figure out how to actually be in a relationship with one."

"Yes."

Meg stirred her coffee. She was thinking. Dani could see the calculation happening behind her eyes—the math of what Dani represented as a writer, what Dani was worth as a byline, what Dani was willing to do or not do.

"I have two projects," Meg said finally. "One is a profile of a tech CEO who's been credibly accused of harassment. The other is a follow-up to the Sloane piece—not about Sloane, about the court case, about what's happening to the industry after this verdict."

"I can't do either of those."

"You can't do the follow-up because of Sloane. But the tech CEO—"

"I can't do any profiles right now, Meg. I need to not be the person who reports on other people for a while. I need to see if I'm capable of being the person who just lives her own life."

Meg set down her coffee very carefully. "You know what this sounds like. This sounds like you're going to walk away. This sounds like you're going to become the woman who was a serious journalist for a while and then fell in love and quit."

"Maybe."

"Do you want that?"

Dani thought about it. She thought about Sloane on the terrace this morning, about the way she'd asked the hard question. She thought about the profile that had published, about the fact that she'd written something true about a woman she loved and it had mattered. She thought about what she'd be doing if Meg gave her a different assignment—if Meg sent her to profile someone new, some new story, some new angle.

She couldn't imagine it. Or rather, she could imagine it too clearly: her doing the work, asking the questions, taking the notes, finding the thread, and all of it feeling like performance. Like she was practicing being a journalist instead of actually being one.

"I don't know what I want," Dani said. "But what I don't want is to keep building a career by finding the interesting thing about other people and then leaving."

Meg was quiet for a long time. Then she said: "Take a month. Don't come in to the office. Don't answer assignments. Just figure out if this is a break or if this is a pivot."

"And if it's a pivot?"

"Then we'll talk about what comes next. But Dani—don't just disappear. Even if you leave journalism, there's a version of that where you tell me about it. You don't just vanish into somebody else's life and pretend the last six years didn't happen."

Dani nodded. "I won't."

"Also," Meg said, "for what it's worth—the piece was good. You didn't lie to publish it, even if you had a conflict of interest. You still wrote her as a person, not a verdict. That matters."

"Does it?"

"It does to me." Meg closed her laptop. "Go figure out your life. Come back when you know what it is."

Dani walked out of the coffee shop into the Los Feliz afternoon. The sun was bright in that way that made everything look like it was still deciding whether it was going to be real. Her phone was off. Sloane didn't know she was taking a month. Sloane didn't know Dani had just told her editor that she might be walking away from everything she'd built.

She drove back to the Bel-Air estate with the windows down and the radio off. By the time she pulled through the gates, she still didn't know if she'd made the right choice. But she knew she'd made a choice, and that was something.

Sloane was in the kitchen when she came in—the real kitchen, not the one dressed for interviews. She was making something that smelled like it had taken actual consideration, not the quick efficiency of someone sustaining themselves on habit.

"Hi," Sloane said, looking up. "Good meeting with your editor?"

"We talked about taking a break."

Sloane set down the spoon. "From journalism?"

"From profiles. From reporting on people. From knowing everything about everyone except myself."

Sloane came around the counter. She didn't touch Dani immediately—she just stood there, waiting to see what Dani was doing with the information she'd just articulated.

"I told Meg I need a month," Dani said. "To figure out if this is what I actually want or if I'm just caught up in something."

"And is it? What you want?"

"I don't know yet. But I know I can't keep reporting on other people while I'm trying to figure out how to be in a real relationship. Those things are incompatible for me. One of them had to give."

Sloane reached for her hand then. "You gave up your career."

"I gave up a version of my career. There might be others."

"And if there aren't? If reporting on people is the only thing you know how to do?"

Dani squeezed her hand. "Then I'll figure out how to do something else. But first I have to not be working so hard at understanding everyone except you."

Sloane pulled her closer. "A month?"

"At least a month."

"Okay," Sloane said. "That's something."

And it was. It was enough.