Timothy leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. “I spoke with some of your sources.”
Elena’s ears rang. “What are you talking about?”
“I broke into your phone.”
Elena was on her feet. So furious, her eyes were red, and she couldn’t see him. “I beg your pardon?” she demanded.
“You heard me. You’re an intelligent woman,” Timothy said. “You know what this means.”
“I know it means you’re a conniving idiot,” Elena said. “I know you know this might have put numerous lives at risk.”
Timothy shrugged and pressed his own cell phone across the table. There, on the screen, was a draft of his newly written article, which cited Noor as a source, along with a few others that Elena had spent months recruiting and nurturing. The betrayal was the worst thing she’d ever experienced.
Suddenly, Elena’s own phone buzzed with a text message from Noor. In it, Noor said: You betrayed me. You gave someone my name and number. How can I ever trust you again? Elena slammed through the apartment, trying and failing to reach Noor. It was clear that Noor thought that Elena had given herup to Timothy. And it was true that Elena had been lazy and thoughtless. She’d allowed this to happen. But she could fix it.
But Noor didn’t answer the phone. Elena fell to her knees and began to sob. She didn’t know what would happen after this, didn’t know how her source had reacted in the wake of this betrayal. But she guessed that it wouldn’t end well.
The next twenty-four hours were the worst in Elena’s life.
First, she tried to contact her editor to tell him what happened. She told him that her source had been compromised and that it was apparent the source no longer trusted her. “There’s no telling what she’s said to her husband,” Elena said. “We can’t publish the article. We don’t know whether it’s filled with lies anymore. We can’t know what will happen next.”
“I don’t understand,” her editor said. “How could your source have been compromised?”
But a few minutes later, another power outage occurred, and another generator broke down. The cell phone towers went down. And in the next three hours, on another server far from the Middle East, Elena’s article was published and sent into the wide world.
Almost immediately—or so Elena learned later—the Syrian army sounded the alarm. Noor’s husband was angry and claimed that the quotes were inaccurate. The war was electrified. A few of Elena’s sources came forward and contradicted everything she had claimed in her article. Out of anger, the Kurdish army threw a few bombs on a village fifteen miles away from Elena, sending mini earthquakes through Elena’s floorboards. Elena was up all night, so upset that she couldn’t cry. She couldn’t breathe. She nearly fainted and vomited twice.
Timothy had done this. But she was responsible, too.
The following morning, her editor knocked and knocked on her apartment door until she opened up. She looked ragged and worse for wear. Her editor came in, slamming the door behindhim and screaming about how she’d betrayed her sources, how her sources had gone against her, how she’d created an awful name for herself within Syria and the greater war correspondent world. “I don’t know how I’ll ever be able to trust you again,” he said meekly, breaking the bonds of a multiyear friendship.
Elena just nodded, unable to fight for herself. She knew that Timothy had betrayed her, that he’d been the reason for Noor turning on her. But if she told her editor that the reason everything fell apart was because of the greatest love she’d ever known, she’d be laughed out of Syria anyway.
He fired her, obviously. But she’d known he would.
In the papers, the next few days were articles about Elena’s failure and the loss of her job. People said that she was the reason that more than fifty people had died in the bombings. Elena wore the weight of this like a boulder on her shoulders. She packed up her things and took a cab to the airport, where she wore a disguise before boarding the plane. When she landed in New York City, she read that she’d been blacklisted and would never again work as a war correspondent. She didn’t hear from Timothy, presumably because he was being celebrated for a recent article that “got all the facts right.”
Timothy is the gold standard when it comes to war correspondence, someone had written on social media. We shouldn’t blame him for what happened to his ex-girlfriend and ex-colleague. It’s clear that jealousy got the better of her, and she tried to leapfrog over Timothy’s career. She couldn’t do it.
During that first week in New York City, Elena half-expected that things would clear up in her favor. She imagined that Timothy would see the light of day, call her editor, and explain what had really happened, that he’d stolen her sources out from under her and changed the game. When that didn’t happen, Elena considered calling her mother for help. But because Carmen read everything there was to read—and probablygoogled her daughter’s name regularly—she knew her mother knew about her “shamefully bad journalism.” She couldn’t face that.
She imagined her mother saying, "What would your Grandma Rosa say?" And Elena wouldn’t know how to respond. She’d never even known Grandma Rosa, and neither had her mother.
One good thing, Elena supposed, was that she’d hardly spent any money over in Syria, which meant that she had enough to live on for a little while as she considered what to do next. She got a studio apartment in Queens and watched television all day, every day: mostly sitcoms that had plotlines that made her brain feel like sludge. She gained weight, then forgot to eat and lost it again. It was hard for her to fathom that she’d ever spent fifteen-plus hours a day chasing stories, interviewing sources, and writing tight little sentences that had a lot of impact on the world.
When she first met the people who ran the bodega down the street—Butros and his father and mother, all from Syria—her heart went out to them. They reminded her of her sources, of the people Timothy and Elena had wronged, of the people who’d been bombed. That first time, she bought more than fifty dollars' worth of supplies at the bodega, then went home and wept into her pillow.
Like that, months went by. When things got dire, she grabbed a freelance gig and made enough money to live on. She turned forty-one, then forty-two. She imagined the rest of her life might go on like that.
And then, one Thanksgiving a year and a half after her life had fallen apart, her mother collapsed at the Christmas tree lighting ceremony—and everything changed again, just like that.
Chapter Eleven
It was late by the time Elena finished telling James the story of her failure back in Syria—a failure that seemed to detract from all the work she’d put into building a life. When she finished, she got up from the kitchen table and filled a glass with water. Her hand shook violently as she tried to drink it, and tears spilled down her cheeks. But she felt strangely renewed, as though she’d needed to translate what had happened to her—somehow, some way—and had finally found the person willing to listen.
“You must think I’m…” But before she could finish, she trailed off. She couldn’t imagine what James thought of her. Probably, he thought she was broken in a way that couldn’t be fixed. But wasn’t James, as well?
When she turned, she found James beside her at the counter, his arms folded. His eyes echoed back her own nerves.
