It was up to me now to save it. I still wondered if I had the right. I wasn’t an artist; I was middle class and white from a white state, and I’d never felt the precipice of economic insecurity or the cultural isolation that Brenae might have faced at the college. I’d never been reduced to her position, literally beneath a man who used her. Furthermore, I believed in the slip from attraction to lust in the face of power. I knew it could happen for a woman—even if rationally, politically, and personally she resisted seeing herself in that role. It had happened to me.

NOTHING HAD EVER KINDLED BETWEEN me and my beloved art history TA. But I had been more than an intern to Jay Eastman, the journalist who’d led me to Nikki Bolio and who’d protected me after our source’s death.

It had sneaked up on us slowly. I was an eager, naïve college graduate who still wore wrinkly batik and drank chamomile tea from mason jars. Jay was in his forties, bearded and with a head of wavy gray hair that made him handsomer than he had probably been as a younger man. Distinguished. Always in crisp cotton and polished shoes. He had a New York accent that bored into his words, which were witty and emphatic.

In my first weeks, all I did was show up at Jay’s rented office in Winooski and type up his interview transcripts for the day. I don’t think I struck Jay as anything more than a dutiful rube, but he had no one else to talk to, so gradually we began to bond over our loud next-door office neighbors, a husband-and-wife team who were operating a dying nonprofit and a dying marriage at the same time. Jay was married, too, with one son, and he seemed to get a grim amusement from the couple’s shouting matches. But he never confessed anything personal, and I never pressed him. Instead, our conversations evolved from mutual eyerolls and quips at the couple’s spats into deep probes into the communities he was studying—and I helped him. I know I did. I helped him understand my impoverished rural neighbors and their choices. Jay was from a suburb of New York—to him, the desperation in the country was an abstraction that could be shaped to fit a theory. To me, it was many individuals’ hopes shattered, for different reasons. I challenged him to get to know us better.