ChapterOne
Alec
Looking for the truth at a Crossroads America convention was a fool's errand, and I knew it before I booked the ticket.
They didn't deal in truth at those things.They dealt in optics, absolution, and the kind of financed piety that talked ordinary people out of their savings and their better judgment one tax-deductible donation at a time.
I was getting on the plane anyway.Because exposing a well-documented lie was the only thing that reliably kept me from pitching my laptop into the James River, and lately the river had been looking awfully inviting.
I sat at my teak dining table—which doubled as my desk, my filing system, and on bad nights my pillow—and watched a late-May drizzle turn Oregon Hill the color of wet slate.Down the hill, the James River shoved itself under the bridge, brown and impatient.Inside my two hundred square feet condo, the only thing moving fast was the countdown to whatever my career was about to become.
The condo was small and historic and, because it sat in the trendy gut of Richmond, criminally overpriced.You paid extra for character, which mostly meant the draft through the floorboards smelled like century-old tobacco and river damp, and the single-pane windows did roughly nothing against a February wind.But it was mine.Gritty, independent, gloriously detached from anyone's corporate oversight.I'd built a whole identity out of that detachment.It was cheaper than therapy and it photographed better.
My laptop chirped.The grey dot beside Hallie Barnes's name pulsed, went aggressively green, the way everything Hallie did was somehow aggressive.I hit accept, and the feed flickered to life.
She filled the frame from her office at Capital News Network in D.C., looking exactly like the woman who'd hauled me through six years of local reporting by the back of my collar.Silver-streaked hair clamped in a plastic claw clip, tortoiseshell readers down at the tip of her nose.Dark, terrifyingly perceptive eyes already taking my face apart pixel by pixel.And in her left hand, the white ceramic mug I'd given her as a joke three years ago, the block letters aimed dead at the camera: WORLD'S OKAYEST BOSS.
“You look like an unmade bed, Friedman.”Her voice was flat, dry, allergic to anything resembling a greeting.
“Good afternoon to you too.”I leaned back until the wire-frame chair creaked a genuine threat.“I'll have you know this is the face of indie-journalism royalty.The dark circles are authentic.My readers find them relatable.Aspirational, even.”
“Your readers pay you in pocket change and moral validation.”She took a slow, pointed sip from the mug.“Capital News Network pays in dental insurance and national syndication.So adjust the aesthetic accordingly before you board that flight tomorrow morning.”
That one landed somewhere under my ribs and stayed there.On the table, beside a half-dead bag of organic coffee, sat my laminated press credentials for the Crossroads America National Summit.Seventy-two hours in Lincoln, Nebraska.Not a gig—an audition.Hallie had spent two solid weeks of her own hard-won professional capital just to get me a conditional offer in front of her executive producer, and if I turned in a tidy, boilerplate nothing, I wasn't just torching my own shot at the national stage.I was leaving her holding the match.
“I know what you put on the line, Boss,” I said, and let the snark drain out for exactly one second.“I know what it took to get me in that room.I'm not going to waste it.”
She held my eyes through the lens, steady.“A story is just a lie with the lights turned on, Alec.The people running Crossroads spend millions keeping the lights off.They picked Lincoln because it's a mid-tier convention town where they figure the national press won't bother camping out.”She tapped her pen against the mug.“Go find the switch.Turn it on.And for the record, I didn't stick my neck out because I enjoy your company.I need you on a national feed so I look intelligent by association.”
“How charitable of you,” I said, pulling my knees toward my chest.“So what does the executive producer actually want out of the Lincoln Grand?”
“The machinery,” she said, the warmth snapping off.“My boss wants to see how a faith-and-politics fusion movement locks down an electoral battleground.But more than that, they want a hook.Not a policy essay, Alec.They want a human contradiction.”
I glanced at my second monitor, where a live scrape of the Lincoln digital grid was crawling down the screen in pale green, and felt the old, ugly delight wake up and stretch.
“Speaking of contradictions,” I said.“The summit hasn't even officially started, and the local servers downtown are already begging for last rites.”
Her eyebrows cleared the frames.“Meaning what?The grid's choking?”
“The gay hook up app, Grindr.”I couldn't help the grin spreading across my face.“It's the same comedy routine every single time a so-calledfamily valuesconvention rolls into a town.Running joke in my circles—you want to know the exact minute a family-values delegation lands, you don't check the flight tracker.You watch the local hookup servers start to lag.”I tapped my phone awake, opened the app, switched the location from Richmond to Lincoln, and actually laughed out loud at what populated.“Right now?Triple capacity inside a one-mile radius of the convention center.A data spike that looks like a cardiac event.And the profiles, Hallie.The profiles are a masterpiece of pure, undiluted terror.”
“Let me guess.”Her snark settled into its comfortable, lethal rhythm.“A sea of headless torsos.”
“An entire desert of anonymity.”I held the phone up to the camera so she could see the grid of grey.“Blank squares.Cropped shots of a starched dress shirt with the tie loosened just enough to signal a man at the absolute edge.No names.No faces.Bios that all read the same—in town for the weekend, discreet only, please don't ask for a face pic.Hundreds of pro-family policymakers and megachurch delegates standing at podiums by day, and by five o'clock they're standing in a bar refreshing a blank screen, praying to the god of cellular encryption that some local will make the fantasy real and never, ever utter a word to another soul.”
Hallie threw back a sharp bark of laughter and shook her head.“The beautiful, terrible symmetry of the American closet.”Then she leaned toward the lens, and the laugh cooled out of her.“But you know the hypocrisy itself isn't a national headline anymore.A closeted aide or a married deacon working a midnight hookup in a mid-tier hotel—that's a Tuesday afternoon.White noise.We don't hand you a prime-time slot for catching small men in small bedrooms.”
“I know,” I sighed.“It's set dressing.Background radiation.”And I did know it.But some traitor part of me—the part I kept locked up with everything else I didn't examine—snagged for half a second on a single grey profile near the top of the grid.Not on the joke of it.On the person sweating behind it.On the question of what it actually cost a man to want something he'd built his entire life, his whole public face, around hating.
What did it do to a person to split himself down the middle and live on both sides of the wall at once?
“Focus on the people holding the strings,” Hallie stated.“The money and the control.The systemic leverage.Don't get distracted by the headless torsos in that silly little app.Prove to me you can cut through the public piety and find the real engine running underneath it.That's the story that moves you to a national news desk.”
I nodded, tracking the edge of my aluminum laptop case with one finger.“Don’t worry, Hallie.There are no distractions keeping me from doing my best.I'm focused on nothing but this story.”
“Excellent.”Her attention was already splintering toward whatever editorial meeting came next.And then, lightly, like she wasn't aiming at all: “And Alec.Speaking of your absolute lack of a personal life.How's Harry?”
The name came through the laptop speakers like a draft under a door, and the whole room went a few degrees colder.My thumb stopped dead on the trackpad.Six years of being read by this woman and she still knew, to the millimeter, where the soft place was and exactly how hard to press it.
