Never Look Away Read Online Free

know what really gets me?"
    "What's that, Mr. Reeves?"
    "This high-and-mighty attitude from someone like you, working for a newspaper that's turned into a fucking joke. You and those eggheads from Thackeray and anyone else you got on your side getting your shorts in a knot because someone might outsource running a prison, when you outsource fucking reporting. I remember when the Promise Falls Standard was actually a paper people had some respect for. Of course, that was before its circulation started going to shit, when it actually had journalists reporting on local events, before the Russell family started farming out some of its reporting duties to offshore help, getting reporters in goddamn India for Christ's sake to watch committee meetings over the Internet and then write up what happened at them for a fraction of what it would cost to pay reporters here to do the job. Any paper that does something like that and still thinks it can call itself a newspaper is living in a fool's paradise, my friend."
    He hung up.
    I put down my pen, took off my headset, hit the stop button on my digital recorder. I was feeling pretty proud of myself, right up until the end there.
    The phone had only been on the receiver for ten seconds when it rang.
    I put the headset to my ear without hooking it on. "Standard . Harwood."
    "Hey." It was Jan.
    "Hey," I said. "How's it going?"
    "Okay."
    "You at work?"
    "Yeah."
    "What's going on?"
    "Nothing." Jan paused. "I was just thinking of that movie. You know the one? With Jack Nicholson?"
    "I need more," I said.
    "Where he's a germaphobe, always takes plastic cutlery to the restaurant?"
    "Okay, I know the one," I said. "You were thinking about that?"
    "Remember that scene, where he goes to the shrink's office? And all those people are sitting there? And he says the line, the one from the title? He says, 'What if this is as good as it gets?'"
    "Yeah," I said quietly. "I remember. That's what you're thinking about?"
    She shifted gears. "So what about you? What's the scoop, Woodward?"

TWO
    Maybe there were clues earlier that something was wrong and I'd just been too dumb to notice them. It's not like I'd be the first journalist who fancied himself a keen observer of current events, but didn't have a clue when it came to the home front. But still, it seemed as though Jan's mood had changed almost overnight.
    She was tense, short-tempered. Minor irritants that would not have fazed her in the past now were major burdens. One evening, while we were getting ready to make up some lunches for the next day, she burst into tears upon discovering we were out of bread.
    "It's all too much," she said to me that night. "I feel like I'm at the bottom of this well and I can't climb out."
    At first, because I'm a man and don't really know--and don't really want to know--what the hell's going on with women in a physiological sense, I thought maybe it was some kind of hormonal thing. But I realized soon enough it was more than that. Jan was, and I realize this is not what you'd call a clinical diagnosis, down in the dumps. Depressed. But depressed did not necessarily mean depression.
    "Is it work?" I asked her one night in bed, running my hand on her back. Jan, with one other woman, managed the office for Bertram's Heating and Cooling. "Has something happened there?" The latest economic slowdown meant fewer people were buying new air conditioners or furnaces, but that actually meant more repair work for Ernie Bertram. And sometimes, she and Leanne Kowalski, that other woman, didn't always see eye to eye.
    "Work's fine," she said.
    "Have I done something?" I asked. "If I have, tell me."
    "You haven't done anything," she said. "It's just ... I don't know. Sometimes I wish I could make it all go away."
    "Make what all go away?"
    "Nothing," she said. "Go to sleep."
    A couple of days later, I suggested maybe she should talk to someone. Starting with our family doctor.
    "Maybe there's a prescription or something," I said.
    "I