We Could Be So Good


 
 
 
 
 
 
 Contents
 
 Cover
 Title Page
 Dedication
 Contents
 Part I: Nick
 March 1958
 
 
 Part II: Andy
 Chapter One
 Chapter Two
 Chapter Three
 Chapter Four
 Chapter Five
 Chapter Six
 Chapter Seven
 
 
 Part III: Nick
 Chapter Eight
 Chapter Nine
 Chapter Ten
 Chapter Eleven
 Chapter Twelve
 Chapter Thirteen
 Chapter Fourteen
 Chapter Fifteen
 
 
 Part IV: Andy
 Chapter Sixteen
 Chapter Seventeen
 Chapter Eighteen
 Chapter Nineteen
 Chapter Twenty
 Chapter Twenty-One
 Chapter Twenty-Two
 Chapter Twenty-Three
 
 
 Part V: Nick
 Chapter Twenty-Four
 Chapter Twenty-Five
 Chapter Twenty-Six
 Chapter Twenty-Seven
 
 
 Epilogue
 Author’s Note
 Acknowledgments
 About the Author
 Praise for Cat Sebastian
 Also by Cat Sebastian
 Copyright
 About the Publisher
 
 
 
 
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 Dedication
 
 
 For S, a well in the desert
 
 
 
 
 
 Part INick
 
 
 
 
 
 March 1958
 
 
 March 1958
 
 Nick Russo could fill the Sunday paper with reasons why he shouldn’t be able to stand Andy Fleming. Not only is he the boss’s
 son, but rumor has it he’s only slumming it at the New York Chronicle city desk—a job Nick has been hungry for ever since he first held a newspaper in his hands—because his father threatened
 to cut off his allowance. He can’t type. He roots for the Red Sox. He has no idea how to buy subway tokens. He has this stupid
 habit of biting his nails and then, realizing what he’s doing, abruptly stopping and looking around furtively to check if
 anyone saw him. He blushes approximately five hundred times a day. He has a cluster of tiny freckles at the corner of his
 mouth shaped like a copy editor’s caret and, since Nick can’t stop looking at them, those freckles are going to ruin his career.
 
 
 With covert glances across the newsroom, Nick catalogs all the things he doesn’t like about Andy and stores them up like a misanthropic squirrel. He’s Nick’s age, twenty-five or so, but has definitely never done an honest day’s work in his life, probably not even a dishonest day’s. He’s gangly, not short, but maybe a buck thirty soaking wet. His hair is that in-between color that on women gets called dishwater blond and on men isn’t called anything at all because it usually looks brown after being slicked back or combed smooth. But Andy doesn’t slick his hair back. He parts it on the side like a six-year-old. Nick doesn’t bother with any of that garbage, either, but that’s only because his hair is curly and has ideas of its own. Nick’s hair laughs in the face of pomade. 
 
 It’s offensive, is what it is, that the boss’s son thinks he’s going to play at being a cub reporter. It’s possibly even more
 offensive than the story behind how Nick got the job, which owes more to the old city desk editor going senile than anything
 else, but Nick isn’t going to think about that right now.
 
 
 The point is, Nick knows how to hate people. He’s no stranger to a grudge. He ought to spend the rest of his career resenting
 the ever-living daylights out of Andy.
 
 
 Instead he lasts less than a week. Less than a day, even. About forty-five minutes, to be exact, and that’s Andy’s fault,
 too.
 
 
 * * *
 Nick meets his doom in the Chronicle morgue, a godforsaken maze of filing cabinets on the third floor where seventy years of clippings are stored in some loose
 approximation of alphabetical order. When he sees Andy there, he supposes he