She printed the photographs and thumbtacked them to the cork on her side of the cubicle. Whenever she was put on hold, whenever she couldn’t think of a lede on the many Metro cops stories she worked most nights, whenever she was tired, her eye rested on the black ground, the sod, the sign, and the tree. Her early attentions drifted to the tree. She got a book about the forests of North America and started putting thumbnails of various tree trunks against the photo. Then she realized the leaf was the obvious easy thing to match, not the bark—why hadn’t she thought of it sooner?—and immediately she learned that the pilot had fallen into an oak tree. She had a small rush from this, a private triumphant attitude that she carried around with her into the ladies’ and down to the cafeteria for some coffee and back to her desk, where, before she quite sat down, she saw her deskmate, Marcus, talking to an attentive and respectful Adam Sanger, until Adam walked into a meeting and a National reporter stopped to talk to Marcus. The National reporter, named Graham Matthews, didn’t even know Vera’s name and would have no reason to talk to her about anything, and so, as her phone rang and she picked it up, she hoped by the end of the call she could once again learn from the example of Mitch and hide, even from herself, her nonstatus.

Not too long after that, one day on the phone—giving her number to a cop in the Seventh District, looking idly at the sign, her least favorite of her quartet of photographs—she saw it. There, on the bottom of the sign, so small she couldn’t read it, were some letters. It looked like three, four, maybe five letters.

She took the tack out of the picture and walked over to the Photo Desk. The Photo editor was a seriously friendly person with nothing but good mood and good energy all the day through, even though it was getting near crunch time, five or so, but that never stopped him from saying, “Miss Veraciously Vera Hastings!” So he said that, and she asked if she could look at his magnifier, and he put the photo on the light box and, like a jeweler, Vera put her eye to it.

And looked. Her eye just went deep down into it, couldn’t acclimate right off, but then there was the sign, the top—no, the bottom—no the top edge, over here, there, to the right on the bottom; before she even got to it she prayed her eye would be able to see it. M something. There was an S at the end. It shook and blurred. Her eye was tearing. She lifted her head up.