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Dedication

For Rachel Maddow, who points to the past when searching for answers to the present and future.

And for all journalists who refuse to stop asking questions.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Books by Joelle Charbonneau

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Copyright

About the Publisher

One

My stool creaks in the slate-gray silence. I stretch, then turn once again to stare at the partially finished canvas.

A single desk lamp bathes the picture in a soft light. Shadows dance outside of the light’s glow as I attempt to imagine what my mother was creating when she placed the geometric lines on the canvas over an ash-black background. Some of them, around the edge of the canvas, are thick and strong. Others move at a diagonal and seem to fade into the empty white area in the center of the work, as if disappearing into some mysterious place that only an artist could understand. Some lines at the edge are silver. The ones in the center are a burnished gold. Small red stars in the corners of the image make me believe there would have been more color had Mom had more time.

Now it is up to me to take the next step.

Looking down at the screen in my hand, I pick up my stylus and begin to draw on the copy I made of my mother’s work, just as I have done every single day of the last eleven weeks and six days. I extend the lines—add detail. Match the color of red she used with one from my palette and begin once again to draw.

Sunlight creeps through the windows of my mother’s studio, telling me that the time to get ready for school is approaching. But I don’t move. Not yet. I stay seated on the rickety stool my mother had set up for me years ago when I begged to be allowed to watch her wield her brushes against canvas—a medium no longer used by artists but one my mother refused to completely abandon for electronic screens and the high-tech accessories that could do everything the tools on her desk did.

They can’t do everything, I remember her telling me as she frowned into my eyes. The things on the screen aren’t real. What we can touch—that’s real.

Maybe I should have asked what she meant. Or maybe she should have just told me why she was spending so many late nights in this room using tools the rest of the country had discarded to create images that are impossible to understand. If she had been clearer, maybe I wouldn’t be here right now trying to finish this painting for her.

I push a strand of hair that has escaped my ponytail out of my eyes and return to my sketch, working from the edges inward. I add a door in the empty space my mother left in the center of the work. The door is partially opened, as if waiting for someone to push it and walk through.