Our dialogues became heated, flirtatious, and though we stayed on opposite sides of the room, seated at our cruddy rented desks, I could feel us connecting in ways I had never connected with anyone, not even the two-year boyfriend I’d just broken up with. I felt larger, expanded and buoyed by Jay’s attention, and when he left the room, I missed who I was when he’d been in it. I began to think about Jay all the time, to joke with him in my head, to wonder what he’d thought of my last remark. He thought of me, too. When I left on a family vacation for a week, I returned to my apartment mailbox stuffed with a copy of his most recent book, just published, a postcard inside. “Maggie: I miss you inordinately,” he wrote. “Please come home soon.” I never said anything about the postcard, and I don’t think he wanted me to, but I told him later that I loved the book. It was true. That summer, even Jay’s sentences had a sensual effect on me—they were so exact, so introspective. Jay was no hack; he was a reporter who could make you feel like you were there.

Bit by bit, Jay also worked on me to push a source, another young woman, to open up. Nikki was a dealer’s ex-girlfriend, a bashful, acne-pitted blonde with a dancer’s body. I knew her from a restaurant where we both worked. (Jay didn’t pay me enough to live on, so I supplemented with a few dinner shifts.) I had heard Nikki brag about her leather jacket’s expensive price tag, then watched her sell it cheap to another waitress a few months later.

“Tell her how important she is,” Jay counseled me, pacing our office with long strides. “Has she got a younger sibling?”

Nikki had two nieces and a nephew.

“Tell her she’s making their future better. Ask her to remember how Vermont was when she was a kid.”

In fact, Nikki’s childhood with a single mother had been poor and hard, but that’s how we hooked her eventually. Nikki loved her mother, was intensely loyal to her. And her mother had begun taking pain pills, then selling a few, then taking more.

I told Jay that I didn’t want to keep pestering Nikki, in case what she said would incriminate her mom.

“Come on, Maggie. What kind of mother is she on drugs? She’s killing herself,” Jay said impatiently. “This book could get help for people like her. We’re sounding the alarm in a national way. Funding and programs will follow.”