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He shoots to his feet and paces the office like a caged animal, tripping over one of the unopened boxes from the hasty move. A deranged laugh—more of a strangled shriek, really—escapes his throat when he remembers the small fortune in sleek designer furniture scheduled for delivery tomorrow. Mid-century modern pieces he’d selected with such confidence, such breathtaking, misguided arrogance. Maybe it was hereditary.

That evening, Alex stands on the front porch of their little starter bungalow for a full three minutes gripping the knob of the front door, bracing himself before he throws it open. When Langston runs down the hallway and launches himself into Alex’s arms, his shitty mood genuinely lifts. In the kitchen he finds Simone in an apron, licking a wooden spoon. There’s a homemade three-layer chocolate cake at the center of the table, along with a chilled bottle of champagne, a vintage Dom they’d been saving, and a homemade card from Langston congratulating him on his first day. With a very creative spelling of “congratulations.”

“Is this all for me?” Alex asks, touched, as he holds his son in his arms.

“Yes, Mommy and I made everything,” Langston says, so pleased with his efforts.

“Langston obviously did most of the work,” Simone says, coming to kiss his cheek. “Welcome home, big shot.”

Ever since Simone began staying home full-time with Langston, she’s thrown herself completely into the role of domestic goddess, something he never expected from the woman whose idea of a home-cooked meal was microwaving leftovers when they’d first gotten together. But when Simone commits to something, she commits all the way, and if she was going to be a stay-at-home mom, she was going to be the best stay-at-home mom in town. He’d lost count of all the cooking classes she’d taken at the culinary school downtown, including cake decorating, judging by the impeccably iced confection before him. But it’s the writing on the top that gets him—MR. CEO. Over the years, Simone has planned elaborate birthday parties and surprise excursions that could have been on the covers of magazines, but when she grabs his hand or leaves a little note on his windshield, that’s what melts him.

“How was it?”

“How was what?”

“Ummm, your first day, silly.”

“Oh, fine, fine.”

He sits at the kitchen table he put together from Ikea. He once thought the kitchen in their 1930s bungalow, the “starter” home they bought just a month after returning from Spain, was quaint and cozy. It currently feels shabby and small—claustrophobic. Or maybe that’s just a reflection of his emotional state.

“I just appreciate all this, Simone, the surprise. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome, of course. No big deal, just a spaghetti bolognese. But hey, didn’t you say you were going to have a surprise for me too today?”

Alex can’t imagine that his stomach has room to sink any further, but there are clearly new lows. He’d totally forgotten he’d alluded to a surprise for her this morning.

“Oh yeah, it’s not quite ready yet, so you’ll have to wait.” Alex’s smile as he says this is an even bigger lie than the words themselves. He’s good at this, actually—at lying—the words come smoothly and he has no tell. But he’s vowed to only use his powers of deception for good. In this case, he makes the split-second decision that Simone doesn’t need to know about the massive pile of shit he’s stepped into.

“Okay, no worries, I’m a patient woman.”

“One of the many things I love about you. Hey, I’ll be right back. I want to get out of this nice shirt before I dig into that pasta. You know I’ll make a mess of it.”

Alex stands and heads to the bathroom in their master bedroom. Simone had painstakingly painted thousands of little blue polka dots on the white walls when they moved in. All those circles are like eyes watching him as Alex hovers over the toilet and vomits his guts out.

CHAPTER THREE KWAME

Kwame glances around the cabin, daring someone to question his right to be in first class. He half hopes someone will, so he can righteously stake his claim to this roomy leather seat in row 3 and prove a point in the process. But everyone around him is minding their business, reading on their Kindles, sipping orange juice, enjoying the warm towels the flight attendant has just passed out like they know they belong here.

No one seems to trip, so Kwame doesn’t either, even though it’s his first time flying in these rarefied rows. It’s hard not to geek out at the generous leg room (a godsend for his lanky limbs) and full meals. You practically have to beg for pretzels back in economy. They’re even nicer to you up here. All, “Can I get you anything else, Mr. Walker?” All, “Are you done with that brie and berry salad, sir?” A dude could get used to this. Kwame is getting used to this. He’s becoming mighty accustomed to his little slice of comfort and privilege. It suits him as he always knew it would.

Though it’s still not like he can afford this on his own. He wouldn’t be up here if the Edward R. Murrow Awards committee wasn’t footing the bill to fly him to New York City for the ceremony. He was actually surprised they offered him first class, but then again, his hit podcast, What’s Done in the Dark, is getting the award for the top narrative podcast series of the year, which is a pretty big deal, especially for a series that he reported and produced almost entirely on his own. He’s been working his ass off since Dean Miller handed him his diploma from Medill, and yet he can still barely make ends meet living in Chicago. It doesn’t seem right or fair, but right and fair are always in short supply. Sipping champagne in the clouds helps take the edge off his bitterness. A little.

It’s not like he’s a journalist because of the money. It helps to remember that. He didn’t get into this business to get rich. And he takes great pains to make that clear to Devon. The last thing Kwame wants is for his boy to think he’s exploited his tragedy for some financial windfall. Even though, if it weren’t for Kwame and the podcast he made about what happened to Devon, his friend would still be in prison right now, serving out the rest of his sentence. But Devon might not care if Kwame did stack some paper in the process—his freedom is worth way more than any zeros added to a paycheck. It’s still a sensitive point for Kwame, though.

The guilt never lets up. First, for being the one who got to go to college, and then for getting to live out his dreams as a reporter while his best friend lived in a six-by-eight prison cell. Every birthday, every sunny day, every Christmas, locked away behind bars for a crime he didn’t commit. Kwame couldn’t even imagine.

Ironically, it was his efforts to do just that—make sense of Devon’s new life—that sent Kwame down the path that landed him on this plane. Good journalism starts with a good question, and Kwame was haunted by one since he was sixteen years old: How did this happen? How did he end up living the upwardly mobile life of their ancestors’ dreams, while his boyhood friend, with whom he grew up building elaborate Lego worlds and hanging outside 7-Eleven trying to get up the nerve to talk to girls, landed in prison.

Kwame started on this story the very same day he decided to resign from Distinguished before they inevitably fired him after the next round of layoffs. After four years working at the prestigious men’s magazine, making barely enough to live on and trying to claw his way onto the masthead, he could read the tea leaves—a steaming brew of downsizing coming to a boil again. Before they could unceremoniously call him to the bland conference room with a wilted ficus, Kwame was going to bet on himself as a freelancer. And bet on finally tackling the epic piece that had been nagging at him for years—a deeply personal but also well-researched account of Devon’s story, a chronicle of their friendship and fates and what it said about race and America. Kwame had no doubt it would be compelling to readers and be destined for a premier outlet—his debut cover feature and calling card. When he started sending the pitch out to editors, though, he got a lot of side-eye. “This isn’t one of those ‘the guy didn’t commit this crime and let me get him released’ stories, is it? Because this isn’t the Innocence Project.” He kept hearing variations of that same fucked-up statement.

Through gritted teeth, Kwame explained that no, it wasn’t one of “those” stories—it wasn’t about innocence (though Kwame would have bet his left arm, and hell, thrown in the right one, that Devon was innocent), it was about guilt, survivor’s guilt… Kwame’s. It was about how that drove him to make the trip to visit Devon once a month for over a decade because he knew he was a singular lifeline to his friend, and he would maintain that connection no matter what. It was the least he could do. Friendship shouldn’t have a balance sheet, but Kwame has always kept one, and it accounts for all the ways Devon was there for him growing up; he would even say Devon was the one to save him, rather than the other way around, if he was feeling dramatic about it. The boys in their Chicago Heights neighborhood were ruthless. Kwame was a little too nerdy, a little too soft, a little too self-conscious, and the other boys sniffed it out. Devon, one of those guys everyone respected without all that much effort on his part, was the wall that stood in the way of Kwame being relentlessly tormented.

But yeah, of course it was also a story about innocence. No way Devon would ever be stupid enough to rob that jewelry store, and he sure as hell wasn’t gonna shoot anyone in broad daylight—or ever. They weren’t some thugged-out, gun-toting stereotypes—they’d never even seen a gun growing up, much less used one. Devon was innocent, full stop, but when has that ever mattered?

Kwame had planned on, and budgeted for, getting an advance on the piece to float him as he devoted himself to the reporting, but with no initial interest from all the outlets he’d tried, he’d ended up living off his savings and shrimp ramen (ironically the same meal Devon liked to make in his cell) while researching and writing the whole piece on his own—a true passion project. Only after he’d discovered the bombshells he did about Devon’s case was every editor salivating to get it in their pages. Kwame finally accepted an offer from Esquire because they were willing to help him launch a companion podcast. Podcasting was where it was at these days, and forward-thinking Kwame had invested in a grand’s worth of high-end recording gear when he began digging into the story, starting with recording all of his calls with Devon from prison.

Writing the story—four thousand words of pure grit and emotion—was challenging enough, but also single-handedly creating six episodes of a podcast while learning on the fly became an odyssey that would suck up years of his life and test every last nerve.