The thing about being wrong was that it had a texture.

Meera had been wrong before. Not often — she was precise, she was thorough, she checked things twice and sourced things three times and she had a system for exactly the kind of story where being wrong had consequences — but she had been wrong before, in the small ways that journalism permitted: a date transposed, a name misspelled, a quote that turned out to be slightly less precise than her notes suggested. She had issued corrections. She had felt the specific discomfort of a correction, which was not quite shame and not quite humiliation but something in the register of both, the particular feeling of having put something into the world as true and then having to go back and say: not exactly.