“That superior attitude doesn’t serve you at all.”

I sounded desperate. “All I mean is—”

“You might think you’re smarter than other people, Whitney, but you’re not.”

“I’m sorry, really, what I meant—”

“You’re missing something, that’s what I’m saying, and it gives me the fucking creeps.”

“Annette!”

A woman came stomping across the floor, arms outstretched. Annette exclaimed, went to greet her sister, and I was out the doors and running for a cab.

2.

I didn’t want to face the blank page. I was at the Bystander office, looking over my research, but Annette’s words kept cutting through my focus. I felt restless, strangely desirous of getting back in the air, off to some new location, transported out of myself.

The temptation for a journalist is to research forever. There’s always something else to learn, and it’s easy to worry that the very thing you don’t know will prove the most important. But the truth is, you’ll never get the whole story, there is no end, you only have the story you’re going to tell. That’s what I had, buried somewhere in the notes on my desk, if I could just focus long enough to find it.

First I had to string everything together on a strong through line. A magazine piece needs a spine, at once hard and flexible, so the reader never feels lost, never asks why they’re taking all this time to read it. But the wealth of material was overwhelming, far more than I’d ever amassed for an article. Annette’s voice in my head said I couldn’t do it justice. Trying to capture real human suffering, I was bound to hit that wall.

The fucking creeps—

I set about cutting down the notes, trying to sort out which details the reader needed. Once I’d determined what to include, I began creating an outline, beat by beat. It took hours to produce this mess of points, with notes cramped in the margins, arrows connecting ideas, whole swaths X’d out, and as I worked, fully formed sentences kept emerging from nothing in my mind, and I preserved them on a separate sheet.

When at last I got to the end, I looked up to find most of the staff had gone home. There was silence at the Bystander. I realized with gratitude that Annette’s voice had faded.

3.

I’d been dreading seeing Lane Porter. The thought of that night at his apartment still filled me with revulsion. Would he find a way to normalize relations, or would he keep coming on? There’s nothing worse than a man who’s learned persistence.