The Man Who Can't Let Go novel · Chapter 15 of 24

Chapter 15: Print That

By eight the next morning the video had been watched two million times.

Virginia had seen it forty seconds at a time, on four different phones, in the kitchen over her father's oatmeal.

The woman in it had her face turned to the wall, and the whole city had decided who she was.

Gold digger, said the first comment she read.

Home wrecker, said the second.

"You can't go out there," Harvey said, putting the spoon down. "They'll have people on Fenner Street by noon."

"They'll have people on Fenner Street whether I go out or not," Virginia said. "I'd rather they see me walk."

She took the notebook in a canvas tote and left it zipped.

Tobias was already at the door with his keys.

"I'll drive," he said.

"You'll wait outside. I'm going in alone."

"The Tribune?"

"It ran the video. It can look me in the face."

He didn't argue, and she loved him for it, quietly and with some irritation.

The Tribune building was a grey slab with a revolving door.

The lobby guard took her name.

The editor met her in the newsroom itself, between the desks, because the only office was glass.

He was sixty or so, in shirtsleeves, with a reporter's notepad folded in his back pocket.

"Mrs. VanAlstyne," he said. "I'd have called you."

"No, you wouldn't. You'd have called her."

He didn't smile.

"Where did the video come from?" Virginia asked.

"I can't discuss sources."

"It's forty seconds of a dark room, filmed by a girl who left that party in a cab."

"Nobody sent it to you cold."

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