The View from the Top

The trophy was heavier than Maya expected.

She stood alone in the hotel ballroom, everyone else having filtered out to the after-party three floors up. The bass line throbbed through the ceiling. Someone laughed a champagne-soaked shriek of celebration she’d imagined making herself.

Maya set the award on the white tablecloth. Journalist of the Year. The engraving caught the light from the chandeliers, throwing her name across the empty chairs in fractured gold.

She thought of Theresa Vance.

Sixty-three. Worked at the chemical plant for forty-one years before the cancer diagnosis. Maya had interviewed her six times, watched her hands shake as she signed the release forms, seen her cry when she described finding her granddaughter’s drawings in a box, the ones she’d never get to see become real art.

The story had gone viral. The plant was under investigation. And Theresa Vance had died two weeks ago, while Maya was being flown to New York for a television interview.

Maya had sent flowers.

Her phone buzzed. The editor, probably. There were people upstairs she should be networking with, opportunities she should be manufacturing. That’s what you did when you made it.

She thought about Theresa’s hands again. Then about her own, dry from hotel soap, a chip missing in her thumbnail polish.

Maya left the trophy on the table and walked out.

###

The September air tasted like rain and exhaust. Her heels clicked unevenly on the pavement; one of them was starting to wear down, and she made a mental note to get them fixed, knowing she wouldn’t.

Her phone kept buzzing with congratulations from people whose names she barely recognized, contacts she’d collected like trading cards.

She found a bench in Madison Square Park and sat. The slats dug into her back. A man was teaching his daughter to ride a bike. The girl couldn’t have been more than six, helmet crooked, training wheels wobbling. Every few feet she’d panic and brake hard, and the father would jog up beside her. “You’re doing it,” he kept saying. “You’re really doing it.”

For no reason at all, Maya thought about the time she burned microwave popcorn in her dorm freshman year, how the smell had clung for days, even in her clothes.

She pulled out her phone. Scrolled past the messages until she found her mother’s number.

Eight months since they’d last spoken. The morning after Maya’s hometown piece published, her mother had left a voicemail. Maya had listened to it once, standing in her kitchen with cold coffee: You made Mrs. Patterson sound like a criminal. She taught you in Sunday school, Maya. She held you when your goldfish died.

Maya had deleted it. Told herself that personal connections couldn’t interfere with the truth, that her mother didn’t understand what real journalism required.

But now she thought about Mrs. Patterson’s face in the photograph she’d chosen. The one where she looked hardest, most guilty. Maya had three other photos from that day. In one, Mrs. Patterson was laughing, eyes crinkled, a little toothpaste on her sweater. Maya had picked the one that served the story.

Her mother had sent a text three days later: Your father says we raised you better than this.

Maya had never responded. What could she say? That she’d learned to see people as content. That she’d pared down her empathy until there was nothing left but ambition.

The phone rang. Jake.

“Hey, you really left.”

“Yeah.”

“That housing project we did in Brooklyn,” he said. “You remember the mom with the two kids in that basement apartment?”

Maya closed her eyes. “Angela.”

“You bought them groceries. Didn’t tell anyone.”

“That was unprofessional.”

“You didn’t take notes for ten minutes after that interview. Just sat there. I don’t see you do that anymore.”

After he hung up, Maya sat with what Jake said. She thought about Angela — how she’d smelled like cigarettes and vanilla, how her youngest had asthma, how Maya had gone back the next week with an air purifier she’d bought at Target. The story had won a regional award. Back then, she’d felt like the work mattered because she’d mattered to the people in it.

When had that changed?

She could pinpoint it, actually. Two years ago. A profile she’d written about a recovering addict who’d relapsed. Maya had blamed herself, had spent nights wondering if the attention had been too much pressure. Her editor had taken her to lunch and said: You can’t save everyone. Your job is to tell the story, not live it. Care less or you’ll burn out.

She’d thought it was wisdom. Maybe it was just permission to stop feeling.

The little girl on the bike finally got it, pedaling ten whole feet before her father caught up. He scooped her up, spun her around, both of them laughing.

Maya felt something crack in her chest.

She opened her notes app. Dear Theresa’s family, she typed, then stopped. What could she possibly say? I’m sorry I built my success on your tragedy? Sorry I missed the funeral because I was on television talking about the importance of storytelling?

She deleted it.

Her phone buzzed. Her editor: Where are you? Marcus from the Times wants to talk. This is important.

Maya stared at the message. Felt the familiar pull, the habit of always saying yes, always prioritizing the next opportunity. The voice in her head that sounded like ambition, like survival, like the person she’d constructed over five years of careful self-optimization.

She typed back: I’ll call you tomorrow.

Then she turned off her phone.

The park was getting darker. The father and daughter packed up the bike, headed home to dinner and homework and bedtime stories and all the ordinary intimacies Maya had cut out of her own life because they didn’t advance her career.

She thought about Theresa again. Not as a source or a subject or a stepping stone, but as a woman who’d been brave enough to tell her story, who’d trusted Maya to handle it with care. Theresa hadn’t talked to her so Maya could win trophies. She’d talked because she thought Maya gave a damn.

And somewhere along the way, Maya had stopped.

She’d told herself detachment was professionalism. That caring too much made you weak. That success meant not looking back.

But sitting on that bench, she realized her teenage self would have hated the person she’d become. The kind of journalist who saw people as paragraphs, suffering as material. Who could hold a trophy but not a hand.

The question was whether it was too late to change.

Maya stood up, joints stiff from sitting. She started walking again past restaurants where people laughed over dinner, past a bookstore with its lights still on, past a corner where two teenagers argued about sneakers loud enough for everyone to hear.

She thought about going back to the newsroom tomorrow. Her desk with its three monitors and cold coffee. The morning meeting where her editor pitched stories, and everyone would congratulate her, and she’d feel nothing.

Or maybe, maybe she’d feel something else.

It wouldn’t be easy. The industry didn’t reward softness. Her editor would push back. She’d win fewer awards, make fewer connections, climb the ladder more slowly.

But at least when she looked in the mirror, she might not flinch.

Maya pulled out her phone, turned it back on. Found her mother’s number.

The call rang three times. Four. Maya almost hung up.

“Maya?” Her mother’s voice was cautious. Tired.

“Hi, Mom.” Maya’s throat felt tight. “I know it’s late. I just, I wanted to say I’m sorry. About the article. About Mrs. Patterson. About not calling back.”

Silence. Then: “Where are you?”

“New York. I won an award tonight.”

“Oh.” A pause. “Congratulations.”

“I left it at the hotel.”

Another pause. “What?”

“The award. I don’t want it.”

Her mother didn’t say anything for a long moment. Maya heard her father in the background, her mother shushing him.

“What do you want then?” her mother finally asked.

Maya looked up at the New York sky, hazy with light pollution, no stars visible. “I don’t know. Just… someone you’d be proud of. Someone I’d be proud of.”

“Oh, honey.” Her mother’s voice cracked. “I’ve always been proud of you. I just missed you.”

Maya closed her eyes. When was the last time someone had missed her? Not needed her for a story, not wanted her for her connections. Just missed her.

“I miss you too,” Maya said, and meant it.

They talked for twenty minutes. Small things like her father’s garden, her mother’s book club, the Johnsons’ new dog. She almost told them about the worn-down heel of her shoe, then laughed at herself and didn’t.

When Maya finally hung up, the city looked different. Still the same buildings, same lights, same noise. But softer somehow. Less backdrop, more place.

Her mind slipped somewhere she hadn’t gone in years. Back to the desk in her childhood bedroom, the one with pencil grooves and doodles carved into it. She used to sit there with a cheap spiral notebook, writing stories about the neighbors’ cats or made-up detectives who solved mysteries in their backyards. No audience, no editor, no awards. Just the scratch of pen on paper and the strange thrill of putting a thought into words. She remembered the first time she showed her father a paragraph she was proud of, and how he’d said, “You sound like yourself here.”

She thought about the trophy again, still sitting on that table. Someone would find it, maybe send it to her, maybe throw it away.

She realized she didn’t care.

She didn’t know what came next. Only that tonight she would walk home through the city, feeling the cool air, hearing the sounds of other people’s lives moving around her.

She slipped the phone into her pocket and kept walking. A delivery bike rattled past, brakes squealing, a smell of fried chicken drifting in its wake. Neon spilled across puddles like melted popsicles. For the first time in years, she walked without needing to be anywhere at all.