For Alison. Andy Parker

      In the darkness, the marina looked sinister, downright evil, a terrible place where my brilliant, beautiful daughter had lain dead on the planking for hours until she’d been photographed and fingerprinted and identified, until she’d been searched and tagged and bagged, until she’d become not a she but an it, not a person but a body, not Alison but evidence. She had lain there for hours, her precious blood soaking into the decking, until at last someone came to take her away.

      Did they cover her? Did someone think to cover her face when the hot summer sun was beating down on her perfect porcelain skin? Did they shield her from the eyes of the crowds that inevitably gathered when they heard the shots, when they saw the news? The eyes that probed and profaned even as she lay stiffening like the splintered wood underneath her?

      This was the last place she had ever been. Something here was the last thing she had ever seen. Somewhere around us was the last breath she’d ever drawn, her last exhalation, thrumming in the air around us. I took a breath, maybe sharing some of the same molecules, and then I turned my back on the marina. I have never looked at it again.

      Chris and I were met by law enforcement and escorted through the mad bustle of media frenzy, everyone chasing the same story. En route to the Fox News camp, the CBS producers caught up with us—now I understood how they’d planned to find us—and were brushed off by the Fox handlers before we could say a word to them. It was like watching seagulls fighting over a chicken bone, and we were the chicken bone.

      Fox’s field studio was a large collapsible tent in the middle of the grassy field across the street from the marina. They intended to put us on air with the marina at our backs. That was fine with me, just so long as I didn’t have to look at it. The producers miked us and fussed with our shirt collars. Chris was wearing a black-and-white striped dress shirt; I’d apparently changed into a solid black button-up at some point, though I couldn’t tell you when that had happened. They fitted us with earpieces so we could listen to the audio before we went on. Rick Leventhal, the Fox correspondent, was describing the shooter’s “manifesto”: he’d had a list of targets at the station, Leventhal claimed, and he’d used hollow-point bullets with his victims’ initials Sharpied onto the tips.