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“Then I have to go work on damage control, but I’ll be in touch with your guests for the next few weeks, okay?”
I sigh. “Okay.” She’s right about one thing…I won’t be thanking her now for forcing me to continue working with him.
My other line beeps to let me know I have another incoming call, so I say a quick goodbye and check who it is.
Marcus Dean.
I sigh as I take yet another phone call I don’t want to face.
“Hi, Marcus,” I answer.
“I heard about the accident. You okay?”
“I’m fine, and you should probably know why it happened,” I say dryly.
“I should?” he asks. “Why?”
“Because Rivera let me know what he was planning to publish, and then I confronted Lincoln about it, and I shouldn’t have gotten behind the wheel when I was as emotional as I was, but I did.”
“Jesus,” he mutters. “Well you should know after the article he published, I fired Rivera.”
“That was all it took? An article with his name on the byline? Harassment’s okay, but publish a slanderous article…”
“That’s not what happened and you know it,” he snaps. “We have to follow protocol and run an investigation, and as an aside, it wasn’t slander. Nothing in that article was false.”
“No, but it was sure good timing to use it, wasn’t it? He knew he was on his way out, so he went ahead with it. He didn’t care what it would do to me in the crossfire. He was hoping he could take me down even more, and he as much as admitted that to me at the office.”
“When were you at the office?” he asks.
“Monday night—the night before he published it. I was picking up the rest of Ellie’s recording equipment for the podcast.”
“Right. Well, bring it back when you come back,” he says.
“Pardon?” I say, certain I misheard him.
“We want you back, Bailey. You’re the best sports reporter on our staff, and I can’t run this station without you.”
I grunt out a laugh. “Too little, too late, Marcus.”
“Come on, Jolene,” he begs. “You know you were made for this position.”
“I thought I was, and for a minute, I thought the only thing I needed to hear from you was exactly what you just said—that I should come back. But you know what? I have no idea what’s next for me, but I’ll take the unknown over being betrayed by my boss any day. Goodbye, Marcus.” I cut the call. Maybe I burned a bridge there, or maybe he will finally understand that what Rivera did to me was unacceptable.
I feel good when I hang up, but the truth is I really don’t know what comes next for me. The podcast? Maybe. Or maybe I’ll start up some other sort of venture. I’ve always thought it would be fun to write about traveling. Maybe on Jonah’s breaks we can go different places and I can freelance for a while.
I do know one thing, though. If I’m working for myself, at least I won’t have a boss who would do to me what Marcus did.
CHAPTER 10: LINCOLN
I never hear back from Jolene about the podcast, but a new episode publishes when our new episodes always come through, so somebody worked on it. My guess is that it was her, and my other guess is that people are hanging on every word to try to detect anything between us.
But that’s not where my focus should be.
I have a game on Sunday. I have to prepare for that, which means as the week goes on, we’ll have intense practices followed by lighter practices, and then we’ll travel to Green Bay for our game.
Before Jack left my office, I asked him if he knew any private investigators. He did, in fact, and he shared the information with me.
So I’ve already got a guy looking into Jeremy Landry, and I suspect he’ll find something on him pretty quickly given what I know about the guy.
