About the Boy Read Online Free PDF Page B

some women got positively giddy over the prospect of an end-of-the-season clothing or shoe sale, for Katie, there was nothing that made her happier than being in a newspaper office.
    As a child, she’d spent many happy afternoons at the newspaper, absorbing everything from the reporters transcribing their stories, to the copy editors proofing them, to running the final blue lines—the proofed and copy-edited pages—around the block to the printer on her bicycle.
    When her dad was alive, he used to tease that she had newspaper ink running through her veins, not blood. She’d been ten when a heart attack had claimed her dad’s life, so the newspaper had passed to his only brother, Cyrus—a lifelong bachelor—who’d given up hope of passing the newspaper on to his children.
    So it was only natural for Katie’s Uncle Cyrus to turn the paper over to her now. They’d agreed to ease in to the transition; he’d work part-time for the first month of her tenure, making certain he was available to answer any and all questions, while she slowly took over all the responsibilities that running a newspaper entailed.
    Not wanting to crowd her, her Uncle Cyrus had decided to do his work from his cabin at Cooper’s Cove Lake. It would not only give Katie time and space to find her own way, but would also give him an opportunity to take his first real vacation in years.
    Katie knew her uncle was only a phone call or a twenty-minute ride away if she needed him, and after practically growing up in the newspaper office, she was pretty well-versed on how everything ran.
    On this, her first morning as managing editor, with the warm autumn sun beating down on her, Katie stood just outside the plateglass windows of the newspaper office grinning like a loon.
    She’d worked so hard and so long to get here, to belong here, to be qualified and capable of taking over the family newspaper, and now that the day had arrived, she wanted to take just a moment to savor what it had cost her to get here.
    It had all been worth it, she thought with a smile. The work and the worry, the long hours and the strained budget, the sacrifices and the tears—because if she hadn’t gone through all of that, she wouldn’t have ended up here. And there was nowhere else in the world she’d rather be.
    “You’re running late,” Lindsey blurted before Katie had even gotten through the front door. With her arms full, Katie stopped and stared at the woman.
    “Late?” Katie blinked at her. “How can I be late? It’s my first day and I just got here.”
    “I know.” With a pen stuck in her hair bun and a steno pad in her hand, Lindsey smiled, shoving her thick glasses up her nose. “But I already set up your appointments for this week and I need to brief you.”
    Katie laughed. “Lindsey, sometimes your efficiency scares me. But just for this morning, do you think I could get in my office and put my stuff down before you brief me?”
    Lindsey glanced at her watch again, then tapped it with a frown. “Well, okay, but you’ll have to hurry because you have a luncheon meeting with the mayor and the town council at eleven thirty.”
    Katie came to an abrupt halt just outside her office door. Again. “I have a luncheon meeting? Today? ” She already had a million things to do today and lunch hadn’t been one of them.
    She glanced down at herself, hoping the crisp, pressed jeans and white blouse were suitable for a luncheon meeting. She’d have worn a suit if she’d known about the meeting, but since the movers were coming this afternoon, she decided on comfort over style.
    “You look fine,” Lindsey assured her with a wave of her hand as if reading Katie’s mind, and then she pushed her thick glasses up again.
    Resigned, Katie dropped everything in her arms on her already cluttered desk and dug for her day planner, snatching it free from under a pile of edits she needed to go over this morning. If she didn’t do this now, she was afraid she’d get