She waited. She'd half expected him to call with a little shower of praise, an echo of Kettlewell's note. Jimmy wasn't the most effusive editor she'd had, but it made his little moments of praise more valuable for their rarity. "Suzanne," he said again. "Jimmy," she said. "It's late here. What's up?" "So, it's like this. I love your reports but it's not Silicon Valley news. It's Miami news. McClatchy handed me a thirty percent cut this morning and I'm going to the bone. I am firing a third of the newsroom today. Now, you are a stupendous writer and so I said to myself, 'I can fire her or I can bring her home and have her write about Silicon Valley again,' and I knew what the answer had to be. So I need you to come home, just wrap it up and come home." He finished speaking and she found herself staring at her computer's screen. Her hands were gripping the laptop's edges so tightly it hurt, and the machine made a plasticky squeak as it began to bend. "I can't do that, Jimmy. This is stuff that Silicon Valley needs to know about. This may not be what's happening *in* Silicon Valley, but it sure as shit is what's happening *to* Silicon Valley." She hated that she'd cussed -- she hadn't meant to. "I know you're in a hard spot, but this is the story I need to cover right now." "Suzanne, I'm cutting a third of the newsroom. We're going to be covering stories within driving distance of this office for the foreseeable future, and that's it. I don't disagree with a single thing you just said, but it doesn't matter: if I leave you where you are, I'll have to cut the guy who covers the school boards and the city councils. I can't do that, not if I want to remain a daily newspaper editor." "I see," she said. "Can I think about it?" "Think about what, Suzanne? This has not been the best day for me, I have to tell you, but I don't see what there is to think about. This newspaper no longer has correspondents who work in Miami and London and Paris and New York. As of today, that stuff comes from bloggers, or off the wire, or whatever -- but not from our payroll. You work for this newspaper, so you need to come back here, because the job you're doing does not exist any longer. The job you have with us is here. You've missed the night-flight, but there's a direct flight tomorrow morning that'll have you back by lunchtime tomorrow, and we can sit down together then and talk about it, all right?" "I think --" She felt that oh-shit-oh-shit feeling again, that needing-to-pee feeling, that tension from her toes to her nose. "Jimmy," she said. "I need a leave of absence, OK?" "What? Suzanne, I'm sure we owe you some vacation but now isn't the time --"