There is a rule she learned in her first year at the Ledger, from a senior reporter named Frank Okafor who had covered crime in Philadelphia for thirty years and who said it to her over terrible coffee in the break room without particular ceremony, the way people say important things:
"The story does not care about you. You care about the story. If you ever mix those up, stop writing."
She has thought about Frank's rule many times in six years. She has tested it. She has told it to younger journalists. She has used it as a check on herself in situations where the personal and professional have come close to one another.
She is testing it now.
The personal: a man she thinks about more than she planned to. The specific quality of his attention when she talks, the way he listens with his whole body, the warmth that lives underneath the precision — the warmth that he has to choose to turn toward you, which makes it feel like the gift it is.
The professional: his name at the center of a board. The fourteen deaths. The prints on the coffee cup. The three months of building a case that she has not yet written but could, with the sources she has and the circumstantial weight of the evidence, probably write.
These are not compatible things.
She sits at her desk with Frank's rule in her head and she is honest with herself in the way she forces herself to be honest when she would prefer not to.
She has not reported the story because she cannot prove it. That is true. But underneath that truth is another one she has been avoiding: she has not reported the story because she does not want to.
Not because of what it would do to him. She is a journalist — she has reported stories that damaged people she respected, people she liked, people who were innocent of malicious intent and guilty of harmful action. She does not decide what to write based on who it hurts.
But this one is different.
This one is different because she is not sure — with the particular moral seriousness she brings to the question — whether the story she would write is true in the way that matters. True legally: yes. True factually: almost certainly. True in the way that carries the weight of justice being done and the public interest being served — she is not sure. She is not sure that writing the story serves the kind of truth that journalism is supposed to carry.
She thinks about Clara Williams. She thinks about Janet.
She thinks about Frank's rule.
She writes in her notebook, in the margin: What does the story serve?
She does not have the answer.
She goes back to the other story — the Kensington piece — and she writes for three hours and she is good at it because she knows, with that one, what the truth is for.