Later, several people in that room would reach for the same adjectives to describe me: sad, desperate, trying to preempt pushback at every turn. It was, one said, like I was defending a dissertation. I thought of the meeting weeks before, when Oppenheim had first killed the story. I studied the faces across from me, trying to decide how to convey the stakes. Wickenden, a veteran of decades in the magazine business, said gently, “You’ve been working on this a long time, haven’t you?”
