Evan was inspired.

Of all the Pierce books, he loved this latest one the most, and had his parents read it to him again and again and again. Evan was a bright kid, and when his mother or father wasn’t reading the book to him, he was racing through the pages himself. What fun it would be to see the world as the birds do. Pierce had decided this was something he wanted to do, and by gosh, he did it.

If Pierce could fly, then why couldn’t Evan?

One day when his parents were both at work and his nanny was busy in the kitchen preparing dinner, Evan made himself a set of cardboard wings, taped them to his arms, opened the unlocked balcony door of the tenth-floor apartment on the Upper West Side, pulled a chair over to the railing to stand on, and off he went.

Annie, who was not an iPhone doom scroller or news addict, had no advance warning when Finnegan called to say he was fielding calls from media outlets about the tragedy. Seconds later, she looked out the third-floor window of their Bank Street brownstone and saw the gathering crowd. Two news vans, people with cameras.

She collapsed to the floor of her brownstone studio where she was already at work on what would have been the next Pierce volume. She was sobbing, shaking uncontrollably. She couldn’t get up. John, arriving home with Charlie after picking him up at school, had to fight his way through a cluster of reporters, managing to get a sense of why they were there, that something truly horrible that involved Annie had happened. He found her in a heap on the floor, nearly catatonic.

An ambulance was called.

Three months passed.

Consumed with guilt, Annie descended into a deep depression. It didn’t matter how many times John told her she was not at fault. She could almost understand, at some intellectual level, that she could not be blamed for what had happened. When an artist—author, songwriter, moviemaker, whatever—created something, put it out there for the world to critique, to love it or hate it, it was impossible to control how people would react. There were as many ways to respond to a creative work as there were people who read it or watched it or listened to it.

But rational arguments didn’t help much.

Even in those moments when Annie could accept that she was not directly responsible, she could not shake the fact that she’d had a role to play in Evan’s demise. John did his best to shield her from much of the fallout, good and bad. Emails and letters from fans who still loved her and Pierce. Emails and letters from the lunatic fringe who believed she was an evil sorceress out to poison children’s minds. There were op-eds in the Times and other publications, debates online, about whether the incident would spark a round of self-censorship by creators, particularly those whose audience was made up of children. Would there be a chill factor? Would they second-guess every single thing they produced, wondering whether it would be the spark that made some child, somewhere, do something that might end up hurting them? The Washington Post even ran a front-page story: “Will Fear Kill Creativity?”