On those Saturdays I stayed with Momma while Daddy and Ben planted the spring crops. Though she never said it outright, Momma made it clear she expected me to set things right between Daddy and Ben and me, that this burden was mine and mine alone now. What I wanted to say was Why is it me who has to forgive? How can you expect me to do what you couldn’t? But how could I say such things when she lay there dying?

When I wasn’t tending Momma I cleaned the house and made lunch and supper. Sundays after church Aunt Margaret sent Joel over with yellowware filled with fried chicken and snap beans and rice. By then Momma was too weak to sit with us at the table. Daddy would say a short prayer, and that was more words than were said the rest of the meal.

Now my father was dying in the same house.

I made my way to the kitchen. More memories—my mother making fruitcakes at Christmas, my clumsy attempts to cook for her and Daddy and Ben, the Farmer’s Almanac calendar that predicted snow months in advance. And of course what I always thought about when I entered this room: the pot of pole beans on the stove, my brother’s hand reaching for the handle.

The smell of the coffee did not rouse Daddy, so I poured myself a cup and went back to the bedroom. I set up my laptop on the bed and plugged it into the phone jack. I typed in Allen’s name and pulled up about forty thousand listings, then narrowed the search. A number were passing references, others reprints of articles he’d written, but I found several interviews and a Newsweek profile. Pieces that revealed, among other things, that Allen had had extensive assignments in Belfast, Kosovo, and Cambodia as well as Rwanda.

My eye was drawn to a comment he made in an interview in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The subject at hand was the limitations of photography. “There is always more that lies outside the camera’s framed mechanical truth,” he’d said. “A photograph is voiceless. Neither its subject nor its producer can explain the suffering or injustice, give it a context. It’s up to a man or woman using the human tool of language to do that.”

It was an eloquent statement but also rather grandiose, and I wasn’t convinced.

I kept searching for what I was really after, not stopping until Claire Pritchard-Hemphill’s face appeared on the screen. I scanned the article’s caption and understood not only why Kowalsky would cooperate with Allen but also why Allen still wore his wedding band.