Chapter 13

This chapter comes to you with grateful thanks for beta services from Mettespo...

Since Mac had seen Will with Nina in the early hours of Sunday morning, she has neither slept nor eaten. She can't force anything between her lips. She feels so totally overwhelmed that tears have not come. Instead her heart is racing, her body trembles and her tongue sticks to the top of her continually dry mouth, even with Xanax. And she feels cold, really cold.

Fuelled by coffee and adrenaline, Mac forces herself to reorganise her life without Will McAvoy. Seeing her future with Will disappear inside a few hours, and herself replaced by Nina, she knows she cannot return to just a professional association with Will and clearly he feels the same. It hurts too much when his hatred and distrust is heaped upon her shoulders especially in contrast to their idyllic engagement phase.

Even though she feels mortally wounded ( and she remembers how that feels) , Mac doesn't shy away from hard tasks. So, first thing Sunday morning, Mac starts making calls to her family and her staff along with the other wedding guests, apologising for the abrupt text and taking their surprise and concern on the chin. She covers for Will when she can by maintaining they had come to a mutual decision and she parries when most of them express complete disbelief at the finality of their split. She warns the staff to be sensitive to Will's feelings when he arrives on Monday- he stills has to go on air.

"Oh my God Mackie" her mother wails when Mac dials home as her first duty "What happened? Are you Ok? Can you come here or shall we visit you there?"

"I'm really sorry for messing you and daddy about, mummy…I'm fine" she lies as Mac is wont to do when she is hurting. "And I'm incredibly busy job hunting but a separation now is far better than once we are married. Right?" her tone begging her mother to understand. And Mac is so grateful that she is not saying 'I told you so' or insisting on answers she's not ready or able to give.

By 1am Monday she falls into bed but sleep evades her as she turns and tosses, thinking about Will's hurtful words, his texted finish to their wedding plans and his hatred. She's particularly distressed because she hadn't seen any warning signs to his change of heart. Had Nina and Will planned this? She could hardly think so but….still? Did she do something wrong? Her thoughts whir without resolution.

And it seems she can't settle on any emotion above a minute; miserable, distraught, bereft, relieved and angry, oh so angry at herself, at Will at Nina and at her own stupid, stupid choices.

When her alarm sounds at 5.45 am, she pulls herself out of bed and showers, dresses and exits the apartment in record time. She has to see Charlie and get ahead on today.

As she travels to work by cab, Mac gets an automated text alert from her agent….Mackenzie McHale mentioned in People Magazine. She hops from the cab outside the office and detours to a news stand beside the road to see what nonsense is in print about her this time. It takes her 90 seconds to speed read the relevant paragraphs.

Shit!

What lies has Nina (yes she knows Nina's pen name for People Magazine ) made up now? Did she sell this idea to Will? Make up some evidence? Damn Nina, anything to make a headline and a few bucks. She must have got wind of….wait Nina can't have written this before late Saturday, it contains the wedding text and she is clearly defending Will.

Mac puts it together really fast- Could this be why Will has finished with her? Does he believe that she has been seeing Brian behind his back? How can he think that?

It's like a punch to the stomach! She feels sick.

She heads for Charlie's office to get her resignation underway.

Brian's appearance in the Newsroom that morning and his admission to having a Mac-twin girl friend clarifies the whole situation for Mackenzie. The more she thinks about Will believing she has been seeing Brian, the angrier she becomes. How can he even think that? Does he not know her at all? He does not trust her certainly. Why didn't he just ask her if she'd seen Brian?

Scott comes in mid-morning to see Will, and there are some raised voices but Mac is too busy and exhausted to take notice.

Just shy of 11.00 am, Scott's head shows round her office door. "Hello Mac" he says nervously "have you a minute?" he asks

"Barely but for you, Scotty, I'll stretch it a bit, I guess" Mac answers with a tiny smile. She's always liked Will's agent.

"I have a confession" he says meekly "My assistant's intern was asked to develop a plan to advise your guests that the wedding was off and she prepared several options plus this silly joke text one which she accidentally sent out."

"Who told you the occasion would have to be cancelled, Scott?" she queries carefully

"Will and I spoke around 6 on Saturday" he said.

"Right, I see" is all Mac can manage, suddenly over powered by emotion and starting to cry silently. Now she knows Will started all this and Nina was only a secondary if significant player.

Eventually, Mac finishes up her plans for the show for the week, collects together paperwork and appraisals to complete at home and runs two pitch meetings during which Charlie occupies Will. Then shortly before 7pm, true to her word, Mac goes to seek Will in his office.

Prepared but anxious, she knows she has followed his demands from Saturday as far as she can. Never seeing him again when they work together was not going to happen - but tomorrow she'll be out of sight and gone by week's end.

"I'm sorry I had to come here today against your expressed wishes" she states quietly when she enters his office, determined not to cry.

"Jim's in your ear tonight Will and I'll be working from home to support your guys till the end of the week. Then I'll be out of your hair" she informs Will crisply.

She makes no mention of personal stuff: their breakup, the manner of their parting, her early morning visit to his apartment or of the wedding that is lying in ruins between them.

The fact is, she can't think about THEM at all or she will implode. She is in shock for the loss of her whole life as she knows it, once again, and she can't decide what she feels about that right now, she can't afford to feel at all.

Will is non-plussed! He's expecting Mac to challenge the article and the text message, to berate his distrust and mostly to scream at him about Nina's presence in his bed. He's braced himself for a loud heated debate and is ready with full explanations, to apologise and beg her forgiveness. But he has not prepared for her silent acceptance of this situation that's totally of his making.

So, with no other plan, Will tries once more to apologise as he lists his mistakes and the basis for his misjudgements.

But Mac is unreceptive. She knows most of it anyway. When she looks at Will, she's immediately reminded of him in bed, sprawled across Nina and she forgets to breathe. She shakes her head. She needs to go. She's a liability to NewsNight since the article anyway.

And immediately she's said her piece, her internal dialogue overwhelms her, blotting out the content of Will's diatribe.

I should have realised I was never going to survive this and I'm a prize idiot to ever think otherwise she thinks as she becomes really angry at her own stupidity.

It's all my fault anyway, I thought Will would need to finish with me once he realised he wanted Nina but it was probably his lack of trust in my loyalty that I should have been preparing for.

Damn Will !

But thoughts of Nina remind Mac of the People article. She knows instinctively that it is Nina's spiteful contribution to her predicament even though it was written after Will's text had been distributed.

She is furious and embarrassed by the false charges against her…and the harm that is already done to her personal reputation. She knows she'll get a retraction, in 0.5 point text, at the bottom of page76, next month even if only because Brian will threaten legal action. Indeed, Will will probably try to get a more effective retraction now he knows the truth. After all he is the source so he might get it. But Nina has all the power…and Will!

A small part of her brain starts to take in some of what Will's saying. It seems, he now wants her to stay because Brian has a new girlfriend or something. She isn't in the mood to get her brain around all this. She can't think straight right now.

Will continues about Scott's assistant's intern whose accident has got her fired..

And he explains how Nina hacked his phone while he slept, deleted the text and wrote a hasty article to make him look less unpleasant using the false information he had supplied about how Mac was cheating again.

He confessed his belief that she'd been seeing Brian and wound himself into a state so that he didn't actually ask her about it but accused her. And being essentially good and pure Mac had answered in the affirmative.

And ashamed he admits how he'd asked Nina to dinner, drunk more than a bottle of Scotch and bedded her in a drunken haze which he assures her, he has not repeated.

None of the things which were apparently important to Will, articles and texts that were mistakes or lies or errors made the slightest impact on her. She barely followed Will's reasoning. She knew how to do her job but she was not able to concentrate when Will talked about THEM. She could only see the image of Will asleep with Nina, his fingers loosely gripping her hip, a pose so familiar to Mac that she could not move on to think about anything else where Will's personal life was concerned. It is like PTSD. It is PTSD. She would need time to manage this and she needs sleep.

Well, she'd known that he would return to Nina in some way or other and here we are in Memphis! She thinks to herself.

Time to move along!

Will becomes distraught when Mac doesn't agree with his desire to expunge the previous weekend and reboot to last Friday. He apologises profusely about the mess his choices had made of their lives in such a short time. He begs that she at least stay on at work.

Mac responds to his more extreme distress by trying harder to focus on what he is saying but she can't engage in any debate.

And she's confused by his references to reuniting with Nina as a mistake and his anger at Nina wanting to protect him when it hurt her.

"She did what I'd have done to protect you" Mac eventually says when he talks of his fury at the article

"But you would find a way that didn't hurt someone else" he says gently, pleased that she is talking to him at all "You are not Nina and you never could be. And she hacked my phone" his voice turns indignant.

"As she did mine if you recall Will. But you still fell in love with her" and her eyes met his with a faint return to their old expression.

She didn't rub in the fact that she had been irreparably hurt by the hacking, that her life would have been so, so different without it and that Will's subsequent selection of Nina as his partner was an incredibly cruel action.

But Will knew.

Instead, Mac reiterated that she would be giving phone support to the staff until Friday and that next week there might be a replacement if Jim was not managing or if he, Will, wanted it. She reminded him he had final approval over his EP in his contract again.

"Then I approve you" he stutters

"I'm leaving New York and my apartment is being leased" she continues, ignoring his comment "So please deliver my stuff to Jim who will send it on when I've an address."

"Mac, please don't go." Will was now in full panic mode and grasping at any straws. "I'll send your stuff, but stay and work with m…us here."

"Will I'm really tired now and I need to get home if I'm going to do everything and get my place ready to rent. Please don't come to see me. I've done as you asked. Please let me move in peace. I'm sure you and Nina can patch things up once I'm gone. Or you'll meet another Nina. You've plenty of possibilities."

Her exhausted, defeated expression, so familiar last year, when he had been hurting her on a daily basis, spreads across her face. He can't make her beg any more…..he can't hurt her further, so he does as she askes. He stares at her silently for several seconds, committing her lovely sad face to memory, before nodding acquiescence.

As she turns to leave,Will realises that he's ripped their whole world apart without warning and she's not coming back this may never see her again! He can't breathe. Finally Mackenzie is rejecting him. Who could blame her.

Love can't survive that!

Fuck!