“If you don’t, you may as well concede.”
The word tasted sour in my mouth.
Conceding was exactly what I’d done with Taylor. I’d decided the fight was too hard, that I was never going to win, so I’d walked away before things got any messier, telling myself it was the smart move.
It wasn’t lost on me that now I was sitting here telling Kendra that doing essentially the same thing made her a quitter. Never let it be said that politicos weren’t the worst sort of hypocrites.
She tilted her head. “You realize the moment I start punching, the story becomes about me punching—not about what I’m punching at, right?”
“You won’thaveto punch.” I stood, sending the slide I'd shown David and Maya earlier back to the screen and walking her through it the same way I’d walked them through it, letting the evidence build.
Kendra’s poker face held up while I detailed the club membership scandal and the employment case. It finally cracked when I read her the quote attributed to Merrick about his gay female employee.
“And you want me to use this?”
“I want you to win, and this is how. Or you can run a squeaky clean campaign and lose to a man who doesn’t deserve to hold office. The choice is yours, but this is what you hired me to do.”
“What I hired you to do,” she countered, “was help me win without compromising who I am.”
“And I’m telling you that thinking that way is going to cost you the race.”
She didn’t speak for a long time. When she finally did, her voice wasn’t that of a politician carefully weighing the situation. It was the voice of a woman who was sick and tired of mediocre men getting what they didn't deserve.
“How solid is the information?”
“The club applicant will go on the record. One of the former employees will speak about her experience without violating her NDA. It’s above board.”
She looked at David, and he gave her a small nod. He could make the narrative stick.
“Draft the plan,” she said, turning back to me. “But I get veto power over what goes out and when.” She stood and collected her belongings, pausing only to add, “I want to meet them before any of this goes public. I want to sit across from them and hear it for myself.”
The office emptiedout in stages. Maya left first around six, poking her head into my office to ask if I needed anything. David stayed later, his voice carrying faintly as he worked the phones in his office down the hall.
I pulled up a blank document and started building the plan I’d promised Kendra. This was the part of my job I loved. Laying out each piece of a strategy like a chess game, anticipating the opposition’s counter-move, building a plan that could hold up under pressure.
When I was deep inside it, there was no room for anything else. The noise in my head went quiet. The mess that was my personal life ceased to exist. There was just the problem and the solution and the clean, satisfying distance between the two.
At least, that was the way it’d always been before.
Now, my thoughts bounced between Kendra possibly not winning this thing, the very real chance that I’d lost Taylor, and Wyatt refusing to leave me the fuck alone.
For the most part, the majority of his texts were of the mildly condescending variety, steeped in that “I know better than you” tone of his, but his voicemails were becoming increasingly pointed, no doubt designed to trigger the part of me that couldn’t resist knowing what was happening behind the scenes.
I forced myself not to play into it.
Taylor, at least, had respected the boundary I’d set. No more texts. No more voicemails. I’d told myself that was what I wanted—space, distance, room to think. But his silence felt like a great yawning void that I was drowning in.
I fucking hated it, but I'd made my bed, and now I had to lie in it.
By eight-thirty, I had the first two phases of the plan drafted and was deep into the debate prep framework when a knock on my door pulled me out of the zone.
David leaned against the jamb, holding a box of pizza. “Thought you could use some food.”
“I ate,” I said, going back to my work.
“A granola bar doesn’t count.” He stepped inside and set the box on the corner of my desk, flipping it open.
The smell of garlic, cheese, and spicy pepperoni hit me immediately, my stomach clenching in a way that reminded me I’d never even finished that damn granola bar.
