But she loved what she did. Journalism was in her blood. It was the one good thing her father gave her, and her spirit sank as she thought about him.
But that wasn’t the only thought that crossed her mind, and her face soured when she remembered her good-for-nothing ex-husband, Josh Winden.
“I don’t know how you do this every morning,” he would always tell her.
“Easy. I pretend it’s someone I’m trying to convict.”
“Very funny,” he would say. “I thought you’d have gone on to some more respectable form of journalism.”
“You mean like being in the middle of a war zone reporting on casualties and prisoners of war and extreme political policies?” Nikki asked and rolled her eyes as she often did. Josh had never liked the type of journalism she did, but it was what she loved. She didn’t like seeing him deal with criminals all day long, but that was the life they chose. “You sound as if you didn’t know what I did? I’ve been doing it for twenty years.”
She blinked back the memories and tried to regain focus on her article.
Nikki gathered her documents, stuck them in a binder she kept for her current stories, and returned upstairs to get ready for work.
She made her way downtown to the office of theThe Arlington Times, her home away from home for the past two decades. It was a busy morning as she navigated the traffic that was already picking up.
The air was cool, and the sun's early morning rays warmed the store awnings and pavement. Her office was located on the eighteenth floor of one of the skyscrapers in the metropolitan region of Arlington.
“Good morning, Miss Murphy,” the security guard in the lobby called to her. His broad grin rivaled the sun.
“Hi, Gerry,” she beamed in return. “Good day for a swim, huh?”
“Tell me about it.” He laughed. “But someone’s gotta look out for you.”
“I appreciate it,” she replied and hurried to the elevator. She wasn’t late, but a story was brewing in her mind, and she didn’t want to lose the creative spark.
She breezed past Holly, the receptionist who barely managed to throw a good morning her way. She tossed her bag onto the visitor’s chair and started her laptop.
She was itching to start her story and hoped it would make the evening paper.
“What do we have?” Veronica asked as she appeared over Nikki’s shoulder.
Nikki wheeled her chair excitedly and made a sweeping gesture in the air as she stated her headline:Judge Caught with his Pants Down!
Veronica squealed and rubbed her palms together as if she’d never heard a piece of gossip before. “I love it!”
“Now shoo, so I can write it.” Nikki motioned with her hand for Veronica to leave and returned to her computer screen.
“You’ve got it,” Veronica replied, walking off, her red hair rubbing her shoulders as she returned to her office.
She was going over the story of a local judge who had aspirations of making it to the Supreme Court when his dreams were dashed by an unsuspecting maid who caught him cheating. He literally had his pants down, and the political spin-offs were just too juicy not to record.
She was typing what felt like a hundred words per minute when her phone rang. She ignored it. If she lost her train of thought, she’d lose her angle and forget something.
That was one of the reasons she tried to write in the early mornings when everything was quiet.
Nikki was halfway through the story when the phone rang again. “Come on,” she wailed. Who could it be at that time of the morning? It was barely nine.
She kept tapping away, but when the phone rang for the third time, she lost it. She grabbed it, not even noticing the number or the name on the screen.
“Hello!” she said with great annoyance.
“Hello? Is this Nikki Murphy? Or Nikki Winden?”
Nikki paused and pulled the phone back to check who the caller was. It read: Frank Lynch. Suddenly, her whole world paused, and her story was forgotten.
“Mr. Lynch?” she asked timidly. He was the lawyer her parents had retained when she was growing up, and the last time he’d called her, eight years ago, was to tell her that her parents had been in an accident in Mexico while they’d been on vacation. They’d been out snorkeling and had gotten caught in a riptide that pulled them under. The vast amount of money and possessions that Nikki and Trish had inherited didn’t do much to stay that measure of grief, and Nikki felt the familiar lump form in her throat all over again.
