For some reason he was very rooted in the local community and had contacted Leo a few days ago to request an interview. He only wanted to do an interview if it was with someone local, and he asked for me by name, since he’d read one of my other pieces. Leo wasted no time in setting up an official interview, since the college newspaper beat us to the first story, and we needed to get a jump on it before our neighboring competitor, the Sun, got ahold of him.

Leo had wanted to do it with me, since we were the only two people who had any experience covering something this big. He came from a busy urban paper in Detroit, where he’d handled the crime section until working his way up to lead editor of the entire Lifestyle department. But his father was dying from a rare form of lung disease and in his final weeks. Leo was preparing to return home to be with him for it. Even with a dying father, the possibility of a big story was hard to turn down. Things just didn’t happen in Arcata. It could be years before anything like this came across our desk again.

My interview with Ray was scheduled for tomorrow. I had researched him all morning but hadn’t been able to find much before he started Love International, and even that material was scant. All I found was his birth record. He was born in Westin, New Jersey, in 1960, which meant he was forty-seven years old, but besides that—nothing. My luck wasn’t much better with Love International. They didn’t have a website and weren’t listed in any business or nonprofit directory. Not any that I could find, anyway. Their only mention was in the comments sections of various religious books on Amazon and a few blog posts written by members. Like most blogs, the first few entries were enthusiastic and gung ho but slowly dwindled over the next few weeks until they expired. None of the blogs had been active for years.

“Doesn’t that make you worried that you know nothing about these people?” Scott asked. He was my first call after I had hung up with Leo. I wasted no time filling him in on the opportunity.

I laughed. “Absolutely not. It only makes it more exciting.”

I didn’t want to admit it to Scott, but it’d been a long time since I’d been this worked up about something. I loved my family. I did, but most of my life was centered on caring for other people’s needs. Becoming a mom felt like I had forfeited all my rights in favor of others. It was my own idealistic view of perfect motherhood that got in my way, but still it felt like I never stopped cleaning or picking up after someone. I longed to do something besides the mundane tasks that made up my to-do list. I never really settled in to the stay-at-home-mom gig, even though I’d never admit it. The pangs of jealousy I’d felt the first day Scott went back to work after Abbi had been born had never left me.