“What do you think happened to your mother?”

The word sounded wrong to Bel when he said it. Mother. Unnatural. Not quite as bad as Mom. That one pushed between her lips, misshapen and mad, like a bloated slug finally breaking free, splatting there on the floor for everyone to stare at. Because everyone would, everyone always did. The word didn’t belong in her mouth, so Bel didn’t say it, not if she could help it. At least there was a coldness to mother, a sense of distance.

“It’s OK, please take your time,” Ramsey said, the vowels clipped and exposed.

Bel looked across at him, avoiding the camera. Lines of concern crisscrossed his black skin, pulling around his eyes as they fixed on Bel’s, because she was already taking her time, too much, more than she had in the pre-interviews the past few days. He reached up to scratch his temple, right where his dark coiled hair faded out above his ears. Ramsey Lee: filmmaker, director, from South London—a whole world away, and yet here he was in Gorham, New Hampshire, sitting across from her.

Ramsey cleared his throat.

“Um . . . ,” Bel began, choking on that slug. “I don’t know.”

Ramsey sat back, his chair creaking, and Bel knew from the flicker of disappointment in his face that she was doing a bad job. Worse. It must have been the camera. The camera changed things, the permanence of it. One day thousands of people would watch this, separated from her only by the glass of their television screens. They would analyze every word she said, every pause she took, and have something to say about it. They’d study her face: her warm white skin and the flush of her cheeks, her sharp chin that sharpened more when she spoke and especially when she smiled, her short honey-blond hair, her round gray-blue eyes. Doesn’t she look just like Rachel did, they’d say, those people beyond the television screen. Bel thought she looked more like her dad, actually. Thanks, though.