Chapter Fifteen
Now
I hate first days. Always have.
Doesn’t matter if it was school, or at a job, I hate them. I don’t like the uncertainty, the anxiety.
People who don’t know me the way my family and my boy know me see a confident, borderline swaggering kind of guy with his shit together.
It’s another suit I wear. Fortunately, for my personal and professional success, over the years, I’ve learned how to wear it damned well.
Too well, sometimes.
I wake up earlier than I planned, hours before dawn, and lie there staring at our bedroom ceiling in the DC townhouse. Already, I miss our house in Massachusetts. It’s less than five hours away, between the train and car ride home, but it might as well be on another planet right now.
This townhome is nice, don’t get me wrong, but once we no longer need it, I’ll be selling it as quickly as possible. I hold no emotional attachment to it the way I do our home in Massachusetts. The ten acres, walks in our woods. The peaceful little town nearby where we shop and go to church and have dinner and know many if not most of the residents.
The home where we’ve made beautiful memories and I’ve learned happiness is achievable, even if it’s different than I once imagined it would be.
It’s where my husband helped love my heart and soul into healing.
DC is where we work, but it’s never been “home.”
And while I know a lot of people in this city, I don’t consider any of them true “friends.”
Acquaintances, sure, lots of those. But with new faces in the House every other year, and up to a third of the Senate changing every two years, depending on how incumbents fare in their races—along with ever-changing staff, interns, and advisors—it’s difficult to keep track. I do well to remember all the faces in my offices here and back home.
Honestly? I haven’t paid attention to Senate races for other seats beyond Daniel telling me the overall November election results so I know if we held the Senate or not. I haven’t had time for any of that. Besides, I’ll never remember the incoming class’ names until I meet them in person and can put a face and voice to the name to help cement it in my memory. So what’s the point?
Especially if they’re not Democrats.
I focus my limited mental resources on my husband, my state, and my job outside of the Senate. I still have a couple of clients I do work for on the side, handling cases that don’t conflict with my Senate duties. There’s a minimum number of hours I need to keep up with continuing education credits to maintain my bar status, too.
I was able to blow off a couple of DC socials and dinners around the holidays with claims of family and work stuff going on when the truth is, other than office time spent meeting with constituents, I spent it holed up at home with Daniel. Yes, I did work, but most of that was done either through online classes on the couch, my laptop in front of me and him curled up naked beside me, or reading through legal texts and case law for my clients.
We spent Christmas with my brother and his family, so technically not a lie there. No one else needs to know we avoided humanity for a little while. Neither of us are DC social gadflies, either. We treasure our privacy and our private time. We’re far happier slipping away to our home and attending our church and staying out of DC when we can.
In the early morning quiet, I hear a distant siren somewhere outside. A garbage truck.
DC is a noisy city even during its quietest times. It’s never completely asleep. The business of critical federal government functions know no downtime. There are always workers coming and going, and the support structure that keeps everything running, from the White House to the Capitol, to the Pentagon, to Foggy Bottom—just because the public doesn’t always see the cogs and gears in motion doesn’t mean they’re not running.
They are.
It means there’s always noises. Different noises than in New York City. There, everything blurred into one continual background hum that was easy to ignore, once you got used to it.
Here, there are quiet cycles where individual noises stand out and draw notice, like early morning before the rest of the civilized world awakens. Noises that can startle me out of a sound sleep, even when Daniel’s safe at my side.
Noises that sometimes remind me too much of New York City.
Nothing like the peaceful darkness at our home in Massachusetts, where I can sometimes hear birds or insects at night, maybe the occasional passing car if the wind is still and the conditions right, but compared to the din of DC it’s a velvety, blissful silence. We can leave our bedroom window open and never hear human-made sounds, some nights.
I wouldn’t dream of leaving a window open in DC for a variety of reasons, starting with security, the smell of exhaust from vehicles, and the noise.
Why am Ireallydoing this? Am I trying to prove something to myself, or someone else?
When a ghostly alternate timeline drifts into my mind, I viciously shove it away. My New Year’s Day musings not withstanding, that’s happened infrequently over the past couple of years, and usually seems to occur on first days like this one.
Memorable days when, in the past, I would default that evening to composing a draft and, sometimes, even sending it.
