Chapter Three

He sat at his desk for eleven minutes without moving. He was aware, distantly, of Priya glancing over once, and of Grant’s office door opening and then, after a moment’s evident reconsideration, closing again without anyone coming out of it. He looked at the archived front page still glowing on his second monitor, at his own name under the headline, and thought about the specific arrogance it had taken to believe, even for two weeks, that a story could ever be finished — that you could dig up thirty-seven years of buried harm, lay it out in eleven thousand words, and expect the ground underneath it to simply stop shifting because you had, at last, run out of column inches.