The Prize - Greg Morgan

In the aftermath of a school bombing in Columbus, Ohio, a photograph is taken that changes four lives forever. Alex Kelly, thirteen, is the girl in the image - bleeding, screaming, standing beside a firefighter who carries a dead boy from the rubble. She hates the photograph, can't stop looking at it, and carries a copy in a ziplock bag while running a months-long truancy con her mother knows nothing about. Ronny Martinez is the firefighter the world calls a hero, but Ronny knows what the camera didn't capture: the minute he walked away from that boy's body to search for his partner - a partner already dead beneath a collapsed stairwell. Jordan Lowe is the boy's mother, a woman who counts everything in groups of five and whose grief leads her into an affair with Ronny - the last man to hold her son - that becomes the architecture of her survival and the thing most likely to destroy them both. And Demian Ochoa is the photojournalist who pressed the shutter, won the Pulitzer, and flew to Columbus carrying the dead boy's mother's letter in his breast pocket, looking for a forgiveness none of them are sure they can give. When Demian and Alex form an unlikely bond - he teaches her photography, she teaches him how to see without hiding behind a lens - Alex begins pulling all four of them into the same orbit, engineering collisions between people who have every reason to hate each other, believing that the photograph that froze them in the worst moment of their lives might also be the thing that sets them free.