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The pain of having to go back and relive the events in order to recount them almost crushed Kwame. Trying to record his first voice-over, huddled over a mike in the bedroom closet that he’d tricked out into a makeshift studio, he broke out into ugly tears describing the moment he’d had to watch his friend, handcuffed and terrified, being led by two cops out of the house he was born in. It took him three takes just to get through that intro, using the sleeve of one of the button-ups hanging above him to dry his tears. Just when he’d collected himself, the emotions came for him again, remembering the way Devon’s mother threw herself in front of the front door to try to stop the officers from taking her son away. Kwame can still hear Mama Rhodes begging and wailing. How many times did Devon hear those same cries in his dark, quiet cell?

The community raised a fairly substantial amount of money for Devon’s defense fund. Everyone liked Devon, and Mama Rhodes was a beacon of light in the neighborhood—she never locked her door, and all were welcome to slip in and help themselves to a slice of the homemade pound cake she always had on the counter wrapped in thick foil.

The crowdfunding effort meant Devon got a quality lawyer—a slick cat from Watkins and Mill who represented rich white dudes—and that was supposed to make a difference. It didn’t. The police insisted it was Devon on the store’s security camera video, even though the footage was grainy as hell and the figure was gloved and wearing a ski mask. The prosecutor’s case was built on the fact that Devon had been in Sterling Jewelers the day before the crime; he’d been looking for another charm for Mama Rhodes. Every holiday, every birthday and Mother’s Day, he got her a trinket to add to the bracelet she always wore on her left wrist, so you could always hear her coming a mile away with all those charms clashing and dangling.

When an armed intruder robbed the shop the next day and Grant Sterling got shot in the back, Devon became the prime suspect so fast, he was locked up before Grant was out of the surgery that narrowly saved him from being paraplegic. The entire case was based on Grant’s conviction that it had to be Devon, that “the boy had just been in, casing the place.” Somehow that was enough for the lead detective and prosecution. The powerlessness teenage Kwame experienced was so mind-blowing it was hard to process. Make that impossible. Instead, he swallowed his anger until it compacted inside him like a car crusher smashing old junkers flat. He wasn’t sure how Devon coped with his own rage, other than his friend turning deeply inward. A light went out inside him, and he got quiet—like the act of speaking itself cost him something. Kwame missed the old Devon, who was always talking smack, who was always talking, period, but he didn’t begrudge Devon doing whatever he needed to do to keep his peace. What are words, when all you want to do is release the deepest, most primal scream that would crack the world wide open?

Kwame channeled the pilot light of rage that burned so hot he sometimes felt a literal fire in his belly into fuel for his reporting; nothing motivates him like injustice, and time was of the essence. Devon got a whopping twenty-year sentence. He spent a year in a juvenile facility before he was transferred to an actual adult correctional facility at eighteen. As fate would have it, after Kwame began his reporting, Illinois passed a law to give youthful offenders who had received “heavy” sentences (ten years or more) the chance to get their cases reopened, which gave the story even more of a timely hook. Thanks to Kwame’s efforts to publicize every step of the reopened investigation, Devon became the public face of this new law.

Ironclad rule of journalism: be objective. When Kwame began the podcast, he knew that would be a stretch, but he never anticipated becoming so much a part of the story. The fourth wall crumbled around him as he started documenting his efforts to find out the truth of what had happened to Devon. It was like he became a guest star on CSI, chasing new evidence and leads to present to the court like his own life depended on it, which took him, and eventually his listeners, down a rabbit hole of corruption as he pieced together what had happened. And then came the day when he finally, finally, landed on a connection that would blow the story and the case wide open—Devon’s commissary receipts.

Every month a mysterious contribution of seventy-five dollars appeared in Devon’s commissary. No one thought much about it—maybe it was a generous neighbor—but Kwame would leave no stone unturned. He wanted to know who this “Sheila Anderson” was and why she had so reliably given Devon, a total stranger, money for almost a decade. But there was no Sheila Anderson he could find who had any connection to Devon whatsoever. On a hunch, Kwame looked up the marriage certificate for Mike Brooks, the officer who had led the charge in Devon’s downfall. His bride’s maiden name? Anderson. Sarah Sheila Anderson—she’d used her middle name too. He called her the very afternoon that his research led him to her, recording every word, and asked her point-blank if she was the person donating to Devon. It reminded Kwame of the local gonzo journalism segments he loved watching as a kid. Where a reporter jumped out from behind the bushes and thrust a camera in some unsuspecting schlep’s face, asking if they were defrauding their laundromat customers or soliciting donations for a fake illness.

Sheila’s stumbling and sputtering when Kwame caught her off guard told him what he needed to know. The rest of the dominoes fell pretty fast from there. Kwame got hold of Brooks’s (less-than-stellar) police file and researched every single person in their family, including a wayward, junkie nephew who’d been in and out of juvie.

A nephew dumb enough to have bragged to one of the people at the halfway house he was living in about getting away with robbing the store thanks to “his Unc who had juice.” This delinquent didn’t feel an iota of remorse, but his Aunt Sheila apparently had, thus her guilt money that allowed the whole thing to unravel. No good deed, as they say.

Sometimes Kwame gets caught up thinking about the amount. How she’d decided that seventy-five dollars a month was what Devon’s freedom was worth. He wonders if it helped her sleep at night. He wonders how on earth the Brookses thought they would get away with this, until he remembers they basically did, for a full decade, and that this shit happens all the time. Cops lying was nothing new, it was catching them that made headlines—literally.

That’s how the podcast got its name, when Kwame was celebrating finally cracking the case with his family. His mom evoked the Bible when she raised a glass to toast, quoting a bastardization of Luke 12: “What’s done in the dark always comes to light. Hallelujah and amen.”

Kwame wasn’t sure how accurate that expression was at the end of the day; plenty of secret misdeeds and hidden messed-up shit stayed buried, but in this case, the truth won, all thanks to the light he was able to shine on it. Both Mike Brooks and his nephew ended up behind bars, and Devon was released, with his twenty-year sentence vacated.

Not that it’s been some kumbaya happy ending, the kind where everyone just gets on with things. There’s been plenty of fallout, the forever kind. Devon is now his roommate because he had no place else to go. So Kwame has witnessed firsthand how hard his transition from prison has been. His buddy has intense nightmares, he paces around the apartment at all hours, he hates the dark and keeps all the lights on all the time, which has been terrible for Kwame’s utility bill as well as his sleep. Devon is pathologically afraid of being alone, so Kwame always feels bad when he’s not around, like now. But Kwame has a demanding career, he has to constantly hustle to find his next story and his next paycheck, and he can’t just be posted up at the house all the time. Kwame hates himself a little when he thinks, Devon, you gotta man up. Or when he thinks, Get it together, when Devon’s confronted with all the adulting BS he has no idea how to do. It’s not Devon’s fault that he’s pretty much helpless at being a grown-up after being locked up at sixteen, but Kwame hadn’t counted on giving someone a crash course in how to live in the world, like opening a bank account or figuring out the Chicago transit app.

The saddest consequence of Devon’s incarceration is how he seems to read every room for danger, so Kwame has gotten used to arriving in what appears to be a perfectly normal restaurant and having Devon whisper under his breath, “Not here.” He doesn’t question it anymore. They just find somewhere else to eat.

Kwame also had to help Devon get a job, which was no easy feat considering he had zip in the way of work experience. The job he finally landed, driving a delivery truck for Amazon, doesn’t pay much, though. Not enough for him to get his own place yet, because without a credit history, he has to put down a ton of money up front. But Kwame is going to help with that too. As soon as he’s able, he’s going to set Devon up to thrive on his own; he’s been eyeing a studio in his building so they can still be close but not on top of each other. If Kwame can just think of a killer premise for a second season of What’s Done in the Dark, he’ll be looking at a windfall coming in the wake of the popularity and shine on season one. He just needs an idea.

He pulls up his phone to look at the awards ceremony itinerary and also to have another peek at one of the other winners, CNN reporter Riley Wilson, who is getting an award for a series she did on foster care in Georgia that got state laws changed. Kwame looks like a straight buster next to her fine ass in his old stiff headshot, and he makes a mental note that he needs new ones taken stat. That pencil-thin wisp of a mustache was a bad idea. His new goatee is a much better look. Meanwhile, Riley looks like an Essence cover model. He entertains the idea that he could have had a shot with her if she wasn’t already married to some dude named Corey, as Google was quick to reveal in a New York Times wedding announcement.

There are only three Black faces on the list of winners. The other, the lifetime achievement award winner, is a guy named Jackson Wainwright, who’s a dead ringer for Morgan Freeman. He’s one of the founders of The Milwaukee Star, a Black newspaper started back in the early ’60s. His headshot looks like it could have been taken that same year. Jackson sports one of the biggest Afros Kwame’s ever seen.

The flight attendant comes by with an open bottle of red. He could go for a pinot for sure, but it’s not worth the risk of spilling wine down his white shirt, especially since he has to go straight from the airport to the event. Besides, the champagne already has him feeling just on the right side of buzzed.

The downside is he has less control over his thoughts, so they drift to where they’re not supposed to go: Simone. And the fact that she finally emailed him back, agreeing to be on the alumni panel he planned. He pressed his luck and immediately followed up over text, asking her to lunch beforehand, and watched those dots on his phone appear and disappear and appear again, until he thought he might have a heart attack. Finally, hours later, a one-word reply: Sure.

He can still hear what Devon said to him when that text came in. “You’re looking for a world of hurt.” Devon’s been harping for a minute now on what a bad idea seeing Simone is. “As my mama used to say, that’s settled dust, Kwame. Don’t go stirring it up. You need to move on. Pining isn’t a good look.”

But that’s the problem—Kwame couldn’t move on. A year later, six years later, yesterday… he can’t let Simone go. The memory of the way the back of her neck smelled or the way she always held the paper so close to her face when she read his work, like she wanted to be physically closer to the words on the page, still set him off more than he would care to admit. Devon’s right, though. Simone living rent-free in his head is not a good look. He’s also right that seeing her is probably a bad idea. But why would Kwame let that stop him? Everything else in his life is finally falling into place. He wants—needs—Simone to at least see that, even if he’s given up any hope of her being a part of it. Or maybe the problem is he hasn’t given up hope, and that’s exactly why it’s such a bad idea.

Kwame drifts off in the reclined leather seat, fantasizing about all the ways his meetup with Simone could go, and doesn’t come to until the plane thuds against the runway and releases a long roar as it slows to a speed that won’t send it barreling into the terminal.

Traffic from JFK to Midtown is a beast, and he worries he’s not going to make it on time. He hates being late and hates the sweat stains that are expanding on his shirt at the thought of it. By the time he dashes into Gotham Hall, he’s missed the cocktail hour, which is just as well because he has little patience for the empty schmoozing and small talk or trying to balance a drink in one hand and some sort of complicated canapé in the other.

He throws his suit jacket on as he hustles to his table to hide his wet pits. It’s a good call, because the sweating gets worse when he slips into the seat at the award winners table right next to Riley Wilson. Good-looking women always make him nervous. And she has the nerve to smell good too.

“Hey there, I’m Riley.” She extends one elegant hand, but he’s distracted, craning his neck as subtly as possible to double-check the other one. He clocks her wedding band just as he takes her hand into his, holding it a second longer than strictly necessary before reaching over and dapping up Jackson, seated to Riley’s left. Dude seems to have scooted his chair awfully close to hers, and leans in even closer now to say something to Riley that Kwame doesn’t catch, only the sound of her bubbly laugh.

I see you, old man. Kwame aspires to have this level of game in forty years. Or hell, right now.

There’s a plate of rubbery chicken in front of him. He washes it down with the champagne that keeps being poured into his glass at regular intervals by vigilant waitstaff in tuxedos. He’s given up trying to get a word in edgewise with Jackson talking a mile a minute. Jackson’s stories are riveting, though, so Kwame doesn’t mind. He tells tale after tale about how it was “back in the day.” How the Star’s offices were firebombed almost a dozen times. All the death threats. How printer vendors refused to work with them. Jackson lists all the changes the paper was able to bring about despite the constant threats and dangers, with zero humility, but why should he have to hide his legendary work behind some false humbleness?

Every time Kwame thinks he’s struggled and survived, some old-timer like this makes him realize he hasn’t actually been through shit. He went to an excellent charter school. He got a full scholarship to Northwestern. His parents have been happily married for forty-five years and still send him a crisp fifty-dollar bill on his birthday without fail.

Zero hard knocks. Zero excuses.

Jackson keeps right on talking through most of the speeches, and there are a lot of them. He half listens while following along in the program, his heart hammering harder and harder as it gets closer to his category. Riley glances over at him and smiles sympathetically when she sees his knee bobbing up and down. He cuts himself off the bubbly three awards before his, so he doesn’t get up there and bungle the speech he’s written and rewritten about a hundred times. He’s got to knock it out of the park, especially with all the heavy hitters in this posh-ass ballroom, folks who are contacts for future opportunities.