Please Forgive Me Read Online Free PDF Page A

tourist).
    It was the kind of compelling, dramatic and often heart-warming news piece that Today by the Bay specialised in, and if Sylvester Knowles, the senior producer at the station didn’t run this, Alex would eat her hat.
    Sylvester had a very strict brief for Today by The Bay and this was right up his street. When Alex sometimes tried to veer off in other more interesting and newsworthy directions, she was quickly shot down. ‘Come on, all that green stuff is totally snoozeworthy,’ he’d protested, when she’d once pitched a piece about an airline who were using so-called environmental policies to sneak in new charges. The company were almost deliriously happy to be green if it meant extracting something even greener from their long-suffering passengers and had wanted to bring in a fee for toilet flushing under the ‘water conservation’ banner. Alex was sure such a story would interest the public but as always, Sylvester ran a mile.
    As much as she loved her little two-minute news slot, and the variety it afforded her, sometimes she yearned to do a ‘real’ story, not necessarily about politics or current affairs, but something meaty that really got the average American fired up. She guessed she’d inherited this from her dad, who’d been a print journalist back in the day when stories, real stories, mattered.
    ‘We’re done now?’ Cyndi said, in a tone that very much implied a statement rather than a question.
    ‘Sure,’ Alex replied easily. ‘Do you need a lift back to the station? Dave and I are heading that way now.’ Next it was straight into the editing suite to get the story ready for a slot on the evening news, and no doubt Sylvester would want a five second teaser to run before all commercial breaks until then.
    ‘I’ve got to be somewhere else actually,’ the other girl said, making it sound like she was due a meeting with the President.
    ‘OK, well I’ll give you a call if we need you for filming tomorrow. I think a voiceover might be enough though, I’m not sure.’ Tomorrow’s piece would be an interview with a sixty-nine year old guy who was the oldest cable car grip man in the city and shortly due to retire. Because (unlike most members of the public) the man had proven a lively and entertaining interviewee with lots of great anecdotes from his years on the job, they wouldn’t need Cyndi’s pretty face to hold viewer interest or fill screen time.
    ‘Whatever,’ Cyndi was already elsewhere and Alex made a mental note to ask Sylvester why he kept foisting these precious princesses onto her. She knew he’d counter the argument by insisting that she should get in front of the camera herself but Alex wasn’t interested. With her big brown eyes, high cheekbones and looks that people often described as ‘exotic’ (mostly down to her Mediterranean heritage), she suspected she could probably get away with looking the part, but she’d always felt much more comfortable behind a camera than in front of one. And, she mused, fiddling with a strand of long, dark hair, it meant she’d have to lose ten pounds and wear a shed load of makeup every day, which just wasn’t going to happen.
    She made it back to her desk at the SFTV offices just before lunchtime, and upon checking her messages, saw that mixed in with some other work-related stuff was a note to call her lawyer. Alex’s heart automatically sped up.
    It couldn’t be, could it?
    Her hands suddenly clammy, she wiped them on her jeans before picking up the phone to call him back.
    ‘Doug, it’s Alex,’ she said trying to keep her voice even. ‘You called?’
    ‘Not good news I’m afraid,’ Doug said without preamble. ‘Same old story.’
    ‘What?’ Alex wasn’t quite sure how to feel. She’d expected the news to be different this time. ‘You didn’t get him?’
    ‘Well, according to our guy you were right; he was there at one time, but not any more.’
    She honestly didn’t know whether to feel relieved or