nuance. We’d gain nothing from stepping into it now.”
“Well, what if I still wrote my profile, like a counter-perspective? You need someone to be the voice of every bad thing everyone’s thinking about The Unity Project—but who changed their mind. That’s me. Like what Monica Lewinsky’s Vanity Fair piece did for her or what I, Tonya did for Tonya Harding. You only need to redeem The Project in the public’s eyes and—”
“I am the Redeemer.” The sharpness of Lev’s voice startles me, makes me flinch. He gives me an apologetic look, softening. “I won’t seek redemption when I have done nothing wrong. I answer to God, Lo, and for that, God will keep us.”
I stare out the window beyond Casey’s desk, the pines eerie silhouettes against the night sky and somewhere beyond them, the lake. I rub my forehead.
“I just don’t understand why someone would do this to you.”
“The op-ed was designed to stigmatize us enough to cease God’s work. Without the work, there is no Project,” Lev says. “This place is a Kingdom … it’s only natural someone would want to claim it for themselves or, failing that, destroy what they cannot claim.”
“We need a retraction,” Casey says. “That’s the only thing that could resolve this.”
Her phone rings. We watch as she picks up and gives clipped answers to whoever is on the other end of the line, at whatever is being said, and then her face loses what little color it had left. She hangs up and stares blankly at nothing.
Lev moves to her. “Casey?”
“Arthur Lewis is suing us,” she says.
Lev excuses himself and leaves her office, slamming the door behind him. I turn back to Casey, as much at a loss as she is. Her face crumples and she buries her head in her hands. She starts to cry. I feel the weight of her anxiety in the pit of my gut and no small amount of my own. Six months ago, I never thought this place could be something good for me, let alone the only good thing—and now …
She lowers her hands and takes a deep breath, reaching for any amount of composure she can grasp. After a long moment, she says, “It shouldn’t surprise me.”
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“That all this finally happened. Whenever there’s anything good in the world, people just want to take it away. When there’s something pure, they want to pervert it.” She wipes at her eyes. “The Project holds up a mirror to the world’s failures and the world’s response is to break the mirror. We exist in spite of the world, Lo, not because of it.”
* * *
Certain things must remain untouched by this.
Emmy’s bedtime is one of those things. I’m part of her ritual now, inserted myself by insisting I needed to say good night because she needed the promise of my being there in the morning—but maybe it’s more that I want that promise from her.
We sit in the chair in the corner of her room and she stands on my lap, running her stubby little fingers along the spines of the picture books on the shelf behind me before picking one and settling in against me. I’m hoping she won’t feel my tension. I hope she won’t hear the waver in my voice as I read to her. I hope she won’t notice my shaking hands.
At first, I was self-conscious about doing this, letting the stories die on my lips in all my awkwardness, but now I try to make them come alive for her the best I can and am rewarded with the funny, strange and unexpected questions each page inspires. She reminds me of me. I used to walk around as a kid brimming with questions my mouth was too afraid to ask. The difference, though, is Emmy isn’t afraid to ask them. That, she gets from Bea. Sometimes I quiz her on what we’re reading. What character is this? What color is that? And she answers and she gets all the answers right because she’s listening to me and every time I stop to consider this, it’s overwhelming. She loves when I tell her she’s right. I love it too. I’m making memories with her, stitching myself into the fabric of her life.
I refuse to let a single shadow infringe on her light.
“Tomorrow,” Emmy says, slipping off my lap, “I’m going to draw.”
“Yeah?” I put the book back. “What are you going to draw?”