“My associate will have a word with you now.”

I laughed in disbelief. “This is ridiculous. Don’t you realize how this interview will look?”

His associate slowly reached across the table and stopped my tape recorder.

“There is no interview,” Sloan said, quietly and evenly. “You were never here.”

“But the tape.”

“Goodbye, Whitney.”

The door clicked shut behind him. I was alone with the associate.

I didn’t set the tape running again, but even if I had, what happened next would’ve remained obscure, off the record, a space for anyone’s conjecture.

The associate did not spare a word for me. In the hum of central air, he said nothing at all. He only withdrew a manila envelope from the briefcase, slid it across the table, and exited the boardroom.

A Post-it Note was stuck to the envelope: COPIES. I shook out the photographs. I felt like I’d leaned over an edge.

It was Whitney Chase, staff writer at the Bystander. Her face was clearly discernible, incontrovertible, eyes checking first to one side and then, in the next photo, to the other. Rain drooled off the awning above her. She hugged a file folder. That’s my face on the night of the storm, my face when I fled Lane’s apartment.

I was no danger, no journalist. It didn’t matter what I knew. Rainer, the ghost, had followed me that night, and that’s why Dr. Kriss could spare me on the mountain. She knew she had me, forever, in photographs. She knew I’d never say a word.

6.

After all these months, I had to tell Mort the story had fallen through. I could see the disappointment flicker on his face, though I was pretty sure it was more about the money I’d wasted.

“What happened?” he said.

I invented a story about how the doctor discovered complications during the trial and had withdrawn participation until they could be solved. I was careful to make the excuse not interesting enough in itself to write about.

“So it’s still ongoing,” he said.

“In a way.”

“Maybe it’s something you can write about later.”

My eyes ranged over the mementos on his bookshelf—the Nixon caricature, the photo of the Black and White Ball. They struck me now as the keepsakes of an old fool, relics of an empire that would never rise again.

“Maybe, yeah,” I said.

“Well, keep your notes, okay?”

I’d already destroyed everything, fed my work to the city in shreds, like Lane’s files.

“I will.” I turned from him. “Thanks, Mort.”

“Don’t be so glum,” he told me. “These things happen, Whitney. Just be patient. The time will come when you can tell it.”

—