“No. I want you to tell the truth. For once, tell the truth.”
“I am,” Nell shouted into the phone.
“No, you aren’t. This isn’t about preserving history and you know it. Nosce te ipsum. For once in your life, Nell, tell the truth.”
Nell rested the binder on the dumpster’s fat steel lip. Cover open, wind ruffling the plastic-sheathed pages. The truth was right there on the paper, in Alexander Hamilton’s elegant hand.
Once it was burned to ashes, it would only exist in her memories. Where it wouldn’t matter, she thought. Because when it comes to the news, real news, it’s not what you know. It’s what you can prove.
The last piece of evidence. The last strut propping up the story of a lifetime.
And now she was standing in the doorway of her father’s room, watching him slumber in his chair by the window, bathed in sunlight. She could hear his voice. “I almost won a Pulitzer, back in the day, before I had to hang up the ol’ typewriter. Did I ever tell you that? Came this close. Woodward and Bernstein stole my damn thunder that year. Can’t really blame ’em. But I came so close.”
She had spent her life in the old man’s shadow. No. She’d chased his shadow, like the world was a storm and he was an umbrella, a safe harbor. And he ran away from her as fast as he could. He didn’t need a daughter. Didn’t want one. He was too busy for that. He was out there working the beat, chasing the news, filing his stories and writing headlines.
She had convinced herself, somewhere along the line, that this was about revenge. She’d show him. She’d win the prize that he never could, and she’d show him that she was a better reporter than he’d ever been.
But that was a lie, too.
Now she was back with Harrelson, Grand Central Terminal, liminal space and a Spicy Paloma. “You don’t care about anyone. All you care about is the almighty scoop. Chip off the ol’ block. How’d that work out for your old man? Oh, right. He’s dying alone in a nursing home, no friends, and even his own daughter won’t visit him.”
She chased him and chased him. Then she became him. She wanted her father’s love so badly she’d made her own life into an effigy of the man.
She stared at the lighter in her hand. Burning the letters meant burning down a dream. She’d never file the story, never win the Pulitzer, never be famous. Someone, she knew, would eventually uncover the truth about the Loom, break the news to the world, earn the golden laurels. But not her. She wouldn’t even be a footnote in history. She knew what her father would have chosen, in her shoes. The scoop always came first, before friends, before family, before everything.
“But I don’t want to be you,” she whispered, her voice on the edge of breaking.
She flicked the metal wheel. A spark gave birth to a tiny plume of fire.
“I choose my friends,” she said to Leda. “Let them go.”
She touched the flame to the open binder. The fire caught. Spread. Melted the plastic, curled the blackening pages. Devouring heat washed over the careful script, searing away the words, turning the past to ashes. As it swallowed the last few letters, she shook the heavy covers to snuff out the fire. Then she let it go, the smoldering corpse slipping from her fingers, tumbling into the trash.
She let it all go.
And she sank to her knees on the asphalt, tears streaming down her cheeks, her shoulders trembling in silence. The crowds moved by at the mouth of the plaza, and no one gave her a second glance. No one cared at all.
59.
They’d processed Tyler in, taken his fingerprints, his photograph, and then they sat him in a blue plastic chair against a wall in the squad room and told him to wait. So he waited. Then they came and processed him back out again.
“What’s happening here?” he asked, confused.
The woman saddled with him now was a warhorse of a detective named Mathers. She shrugged, looking like there were a million other things she wanted to be doing right now. She handed him everything he’d been carrying when he came in, stuffed into an unsealed manila envelope.
“What’s happening is you’re the only innocent man in New York. Go and sin no more.”
Nell. She had to have done something. Tyler didn’t know what price his partner had paid for