The octopus arrived, charred and doused with lemon juice. At once I gulped down half my sangria and gnashed the wine-soaked cranberries. I wanted to talk about the story, but again, Lane had plans. He ordered most of the menu and began his interrogation.

“I’m so curious about how your mind developed,” he said. “Your family’s from LA, right?”

“Right, Los Angeles.”

“What do your parents do?”

“My mother’s retired,” I said. “She taught chemistry at USC.”

“And your father?”

“He passed away.”

Lane frowned, communicating sympathy. The dishes came fast—veal sweetbreads, roast bone marrow, grilled beef tongue. He tucked his napkin into the collar of his shirt. A little loose with drink, I suddenly became ravenous, and when the food hit my stomach, I began to think I was being unfairly reserved. Lane had just spent a whole night helping with my story on top of his regular workload, and so I found myself telling him about my father. I’d been meditating on his death while preparing to profile Dr. Kriss, reminding myself to be on guard in case I started transfusing my own feelings into the story of her father’s death, confusing the two.

Lane refilled my glass. “I have to confess, Whitney, I already knew about your dad.”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t you remember you wrote about him, years ago?” he asked, scraping meat from a mussel. “It was in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, your piece about the igloo.”

“Oh, right.”

I had to take a sip to hide my displeasure. I was sick of being interviewed.

“What about you?” I said. “What got you into the fact-check biz?”

“A talent for truth.” He dabbed his beard with his bib. “It was more impressive before the Internet, but I was always the guy who’d intervene when he heard some spurious fact. My mom thinks I’ll make a fortune on Jeopardy! one day. I’ve become pretty proud of the job over the years. Lies are on the march, like Mort says, and with public education not what it used to be, the citizenry can’t be counted on to do this work itself. There’s an urgency to the job I never felt before.”

We were deep into our second jug. I plunged the ladle in and filtered out the fruit.

“To be honest,” he said, “I’ve always wanted to do what you do.”

“You mean write?”

“I sometimes try, but I can never find the right system. And then I meet people like you, and I realize just how far away I am. You were born to it, Whitney, to write the words that stick in all our minds. By comparison, I’m just a manual laborer with blisters on my hands.”

I knew he was asking me to embolden him, to loan him all my self-esteem, but I had nothing to offer. I just said, “Writers work with their hands too.”

—