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Despite Brian's warning not to, I was seriously considering walking into the publisher's office, asking her if this was what she really wanted, that if we had to abandon our principles to save the paper, was the paper really worth saving?
    In the end, I did nothing.
    Maybe this was how it was going to be. You came in, you churned out enough copy to fill the space, didn't matter what it was, you took your paycheck, you went home. I'd worked at a paper like that--in Pennsylvania--before coming back to the hometown rag. There'd always been papers like that. I'd been naive enough to think the Standard would never turn into one of them.
    But we were hardly unique. What was happening to us was happening to countless other papers across the country. What might buy us some time was the Russell family's ace in the hole--a huge tract of land it hoped to sell to one of the country's biggest private prison conglomerates.
    If things didn't work out here, maybe I could get a job as a bull. Wasn't that what inmates called guards?
    I picked up the phone, hit the speed dial for Bertram Heating and Cooling. If I couldn't save the state of journalism, maybe I could put a bit of effort into my marriage, which had been showing signs of wear lately.
    A voice that was not Jan's said, "Bertram's." It was Leanne Kowalski. She had the perfect voice for someone working at an air-conditioning firm. Icy.
    "Hey, Leanne," I said. "It's David. Jan there?"
    "Hang on." Leanne wasn't big on small talk.
    The line seemed to go dead, then Jan picked up and said, "Hey."
    "Leanne seems cheery today."
    "No kidding."
    "Why don't we see if my parents can hang on to Ethan for a couple of extra hours, we'll go out for a bite to eat. Just the two of us. Rent a movie for later." I paused. "I could get into Body Heat." Jan's favorite film. And I never got tired of the steamy love scenes between William Hurt and Kathleen Turner.
    "I guess," she said.
    "You don't sound very excited."
    "Actually, yeah," said Jan, warming to the idea. "Where were you thinking for dinner?"
    "I don't know. Preston's?" A steakhouse. "Or the Clover?" A bit on the pricey side, but if the newspaper business was going into the dumper, maybe we should go while we could still afford it.
    "What about Gina's?" Jan asked.
    Our favorite Italian place. "Perfect. If we go around six, we probably won't need a reservation, but I'll check just to be sure."
    "Okay."
    "I could pick you up at work, we'll go back for your car later."
    "What if you get me drunk so you can take advantage of me?"
    That sounded more like the Jan I knew.
    "Then I'll drive you to work in the morning."
    Taking a shortcut through the pressroom on the way to the parking lot, I spotted Madeline Plimpton.
    It was the pressroom that most made this building feel like a real newspaper. It was the engine room of a battleship. And if the Standard ever ceased to be a paper, these monstrous presses--which moved newsprint through at roughly fifty feet per second and could pump out sixty thousand copies in an hour--would be the last thing standing, the final thing to be moved out of here. We'd already lost the composing room, where the paper's pages had been, literally, pasted up. It had vanished once editors started laying out their own pages on a computer screen.
    I saw Madeline up on the "boards," which was pressman-speak for the catwalks that ran along the sides, and through, the presses, which were not actually massive rollers, but dozens upon dozens of smaller ones that led the never-ending sheets of newsprint on a circuitous route up and down and over and under until they miraculously appeared at the end of the line as a perfectly collated newspaper. The machinery had been undergoing some maintenance, and a coverall-clad pressman was directing Madeline's attention to the guts of one part of the presses, which ran from one end of the hundred-foot room to the other.
    I didn't want to pass up this opportunity to speak to her directly, but I knew