Chapter 55 THE ETHICS BOARD RULES

Chapter 55 THE ETHICS BOARD RULES

POV: Reese Calloway

The ruling came through at eight forty-three in the morning as a PDF attachment in an email from the ethics board's formal correspondence address.

Cole was at the counter making coffee. I heard the specific sounds of it, the cabinet opening, the water running, the particular rhythm of someone who had learned where things were in a kitchen not their own and had stopped hesitating before reaching for them. I didn't look up from my laptop when the email notification came in. I opened it and clicked the attachment and the PDF loaded on my screen.

Four pages. The board's formal letterhead at the top. My name in the first paragraph and Marcus's name in the second.

I read it through once.

The ruling didn't say Marcus stole my work. It was careful in the way formal rulings were careful, each word chosen to say the true thing within the boundaries of what could be proven and documented and defended if challenged. It said the photographic credit on the 2021 award submission could not be verified as solely belonging to the named recipient. It said the attribution standards in place at the time of submission had not been met. It said the award should not have been accepted on that basis and was being formally stripped from the record.

Three years of filing and dismissal and counter-complaints and documentation assembled across six weeks of a documentary production and it came down to four pages of careful formal language that said, in the specific words that formal rulings used, that what Marcus had done had happened.

Cole put a coffee cup on the table beside my laptop.

He sat down across from me.

I turned the laptop toward him without saying anything.

He read it the way he read everything, from the beginning and all the way through, not skipping to the conclusion. When he finished he put the laptop back in front of me and picked up his coffee.

"What do you need right now," he said.

I looked at the ruling on the screen. Four pages. The board's letterhead. My name in the first paragraph.

"I need to call Dana," I said.

Cole nodded. He picked up his coffee and stood up from the table and moved to the couch across the room and sat down and opened his phone and looked at it, giving me the table and the kitchen and the space between without making a thing of the giving.

I called Dana.

She picked up on the first ring.

I started to tell her and my voice did something in the first sentence that it hadn't done when I read the ruling or when Cole put the coffee down or when I'd sat with it landing for the past four minutes. Something in my chest moved up into my throat and the sentence didn't come out the way I'd planned it.

Dana said my name once.

I put my hand flat on the kitchen table and pressed it there and let the thing that had been sitting in my chest for three years come out in whatever form it needed to come out in, which turned out to be quieter than I expected and longer than I expected and completely outside my control in the way that things were when they'd been held in one position for too long and finally got to move.

Dana talked and I listened and she said the things that Dana said when she was being exactly who she was, no performance in it, just her voice on the phone telling me the true things in the plain way she told true things.

When I hung up I sat at the table for a moment.

Cole was still on the couch. He'd put his phone down and was looking at the wall where the documentary photographs were pinned. I'd rearranged them after the first print session, the best ones up where the Cole-investigation printouts used to be, and the one he was looking at was the first real photograph I'd developed from the shoot.

Cole at ice level on day one. Kneeling beside the seven-year-old who'd fallen. Laughing with his whole face. Completely unaware of the camera.

He looked at it for a moment after he heard me put the phone down.

"This is how you saw me from the beginning," he said.

"Yes," I said.

He kept looking at the photograph. His hands were loose on his knees and his coffee cup was on the cushion beside him and the apartment was quiet around both of us with the ruling still open on my laptop screen at the kitchen table.

"Thank you," he said.

He said it the way he said things that cost him something, plainly and without building up to it or softening what came after.

Then he looked at me from the couch.

"What's next for you," he said. "After all this settles."