“How long have you been sitting on this?” she asked, reaching for her pen, which had rolled across the table.
“I haven’t been sitting on anything. I’ve beenbuildinga case. I didn’t have the full picture ready until now.”
“Same thing,” she challenged with a stubborn lift of her chin.
“You say to-may-to; I say to-mah-to.”
She narrowed her eyes, though she was fighting back a grin. “Smug is not a good look on you, Sebastian.”
“Every look is a good look on me.” I winked, moving back to the table and bracing my hands on the back of my chair.
“Okay, so tell us what we should do?”
“Here’s what I’m proposing: We take the story to the press in phases. Start with the Penobscot Pines scandal, and let Merrick scramble. Then we follow it up with the employment complaints. By the time he walks onto that debate stage, voters will have a clearer picture of who he really is.”
Maya’s expression turned uneasy. “She’s said a hundred times she won’t go on the attack. She won’t?—”
“Win?” I finished for her, the word landing exactly as hard as I intended.
“That’s not what I was going to say.” She scowled at me, crossing her arms over her chest.
“But it’s what’s going to happen. She’s hemorrhaging support against a man with a history of discrimination. If she doesn’t leverage this information, she loses. It’s that simple.”
“It’s not that simple forher,” Maya said quietly. “She’s married to a Black man in the whitest state in the country. She attacks Merrick—especially on a topic like racism—and a large chunk of the electorate will find a way to makeGeraldthe problem.”
“Look,” I said, my tone gentling. “I’m a white man, as we’ve established every Monday since I’ve been here. I know I’m speaking from a position of privilege. I wish the country was different—that who you were married to wasn’t a factor in whether or not you were qualified for a job—but unfortunately, this is the nature of modern politics. It’s not just about policies?—”
“We make sure the attack doesn’t come from her directly,” David broke in. “It’s better anyway if the stories come from the people Merrick impacted directly, not Kendra herself. Then all she has to do is express concern and call for accountability. Say that every Mainer deserves to know who’s asking for their vote.”
“While you do the dirty work underneath,” Maya said, her face lighting up as she pointed at me.
“Well, thatiswhat you all hired me for.”
Maya sighed. “She’s going to push back.”
“She’ll come around.”
I’d sat across from enough reluctant politicians to know exactly how the conversation would go—the principled objections, the what-ifs, the long silence before they finally asked, “What do I need to do?”
If politics was a game, I was an MVP. I knew how to strip a problem down to its barest, coldest logic until emotion had nowhere left to hide.
Unfortunately, I’d extended that facet of my personality to my personal life as well. Ever since I’d walked out of Taylor’s house two weeks ago, I’d shut down. I simply couldn’t fight Kendra’s battles and my own at the same time.
There wasn’t enough left in me for both.
Kendra joined us forty-five minutes later, wearing the slightly harried expression of someone who’d just spent half an hour reassuring anxious union reps that she was, in fact, on their side.
She dropped into the chair at the head of the table and looked around the room. “Catch me up.”
David handled the high-level summary, Kendra's fingers steepled in front of her mouth, her expression neutral and unreadable. A solid poker face.
Good. She’d need it.
He wrapped up by saying, “And finally, Sebastian has some new opposition research he wants to walk you through.”
Her gaze shifted to me, her nose scrunched in distaste. “Let me guess, I need to go after him.”
Two weeks ago, I would have eased into this. I would have laid the groundwork, softened the edges, given her room to arrive at the conclusion on her own. But I was out of patience—with Merrick, with the polls, with … well, with fucking everything.
