I paused, turning over the thing I’d never been able to fully understand, much less articulate, and a sudden, disquieting thought began to take shape.
“He quietly funnels money into causes I care about,” I explained. “At first, I assumed it was out of guilt, or maybe his way of keeping me tethered to him. But what if it’s more calculated than that?” I rubbed my jaw, the stubble rough against my fingers, as the thought began to crystallize into something more concrete.
“My father is a lot of things, but stupid isn’t one of them. He has to see the writing on the wall; the party he supports is unraveling. Meanwhile, his son has connections, credibility, and a track record of winning races.”
I let out a dry, humorless laugh. God, how had I not seen this before now?
“I think he’s hedging his bets. Building me a runway in case the day comes when a Carruthers needs to be on a ballot, and the R next to the name isn’t an option.”
The irony was suffocating. Could my father really be positioning me for a political future?
No. Not when he'd disown me the second he learned why I would never produce the wife and kids the Carruthers brand demanded.
“But?” David said.
Because in politics, there was always a “but.”
I stared at the whiteboard behind his head, at the numbers that represented Kendra’s chances of winning this election.
“But they are vehemently against queer rights. My mother sits on the board of an organization that has actively lobbied against marriage equality, adoption rights, and anti-discrimination protections.” There was no mistaking the bitterness in my voice, and as I spoke, I began to rethink my earlier statement about them not being monsters. “She has this misguided notion that she’s protecting the family institution, but what she fails to realize is that if she’s successful, her own fucking son won’t get to have a family at all.”
David remained quiet, simply letting me talk. I’d never been able to say most of this out loud, and now that I was, it was like a dam had burst and I couldn’t stop even if I wanted to.
“I love them. I hate that I love them, but I do,” I said, and the admission felt like swallowing glass. “And so every year that goes by, the lie gets more elaborate. More impossible to undo. I should have come out in college. It would have been so much easier back then. Before I spent a decade building a life specifically designed to accommodate this one terrible secret.”
I pressed my fist against my mouth for a moment before dropping it. “But I didn’t. And now I’m thirty-two years old, and I’ve played this role for so long that I don’t know how to stop.”
David leaned back against the cushions and studied me for a moment, his head nodding slightly. “When I left D.C., my mentor—a gay man who’d been closeted his entire career—toldme something I think about a lot. He said, ‘The closet doesn’t just hide you from other people. It hides you from yourself. And the longer you stay in it, the harder it gets to remember which version of you is real.’ I don’t know if that’s something he came up with himself, or if he read it somewhere, but it affected me profoundly at the time.”
It affected me profoundlynow.
The sting hit before I could brace myself for it—a sudden, sharp heat behind my eyes that I was too late to stop. I looked up at the ceiling, my jaw clenched tight, willing the feeling back down the way I always did. But for once, the trick didn’t work. A tear slipped free, tracking down my cheek. Then another.
I swiped at them with the back of my hand and cleared my throat. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be,” David said, his voice steady and unbothered, as if men cried on his proverbial shoulder all the time.
Maybe they did.
I pressed my palms flat on the desk and held them there, focusing on the cool surface beneath my fingers until my breathing evened out. Then I straightened in my chair and rolled my shoulders back, looking David in the eye, squashing down any embarrassment I might have felt.
“I’m not going to lecture you,” he said. “You’re a grown man in a complicated situation, and the last thing you need is me telling you what to do. But I will say this: the people who matter won’t care who you love. And the people who care shouldn’t matter.”
Theoretically, I knew this was true.
That itshouldbe true, at least.
But …
“That’s easy to say when your family doesn’t manufacture the weapons those fucking people use to shoot up gay nightclubs.”
David absorbed the weight of my claim without blinking. “Fair point.”
We sat with that for a long moment. Outside, a car horn sounded from the street below, followed by the muffled hum of traffic resuming. The building’s heating system clicked on, pushing warm air through the vents.
Normal sounds.
The world carrying on as ifmyworld hadn’t just tilted on its axis.
