It never got to that. They wrote five stories, total. He kept saying that to himself. Five. Five. Five. For weeks he waited. Soon it got to be possible that they, the writers, were done.

Mabel,” Adam was saying. “Mabel.” Stanley couldn’t decide whether to tell Adam of their snip of a talk, of Mabel gracing Stanley with a visit. He decided to say nothing yet. It had meant too much to him.

Adam smoothed a pew with his hand. They were meeting in the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church. As they had for years, they met in the last pew around four in the afternoon. Church people, few at that hour, assumed they were involved in government work. The back of the Russian Embassy abutted the church’s crepe-myrtle courtyard. Other white men over the years had spent unexplained time at Metropolitan AME. This pair at least nodded to religious belief. One or two times they looked to be praying together. They spoke softly. They bothered no one. Stanley and Adam had become as welcome and unnoticed as the smells that lingered from Sunday worship—wood polish, hymnals, carnations.

With his aqua eyes, Stanley was considered white by just about everyone except Adam, who knew from their starting days at the paper that Stanley’s father, Reverend Henry Payne, was a son of one of the founding AME bishops. Kay Belson met Henry Payne during the Depression. He was husband to a gifted pianist, and father to four girls. Kay was a reader of biographies and had finished one on Clara Barton. Barton propelled her—to the thought of battlefields, or some accessible sacrifice, and the nearest of either in her protected conscience were soup kitchens. Oddly, for a woman of her fold, it worried her that she’d never seen a dark face in any of them. Who was taking care of the colored? For a while, she imagined they had no havens. When she learned otherwise, she began searching for a way to volunteer somewhere on the other side of Rock Creek Park, but no one seemed to know how to do this uncommon, strange thing. Finally, she was sent to Reverend Payne, who informed her that soup kitchens did exist for his race, but funding, not ladling, was needed. A philanthropic partnership began, its efforts furthered by the best of LeDroit Park, many of whom disliked this woman, with her overexposed magnanimity, but endured her for the greater good. At Henry’s urging, Kay gave enough to restore the True Reformers Hall, created the Home for Friendless Colored Girls, kept doctors on staff at the Old Folks Home for Aged and Infirm Colored People, ensured the continuation of the Howard University Mandolin and Glee Club, and other causes necessary, but to the wider Washington, the one that figured in history, immaterial.