Harry, who'd spent three patient months trying to sell me on the idea that two people could be something other than a time killer.Right up until he took the job in Chicago and proved my entire worldview correct by ending the whole thing over a text message I still hadn't deleted.
“Harry's in Illinois, Hallie.”My voice dropped into the flat, defensive register I kept for exactly this.“And don't talk to me about love and romance.That's silly shit that happens in movies.But a well-documented lie—that's a thing that actually changes the world.”
She looked at me for a long three seconds, and the silence between us was thick with everything we'd never bothered to say out loud.Hallie knew the radical-honesty crusade was my identity.She also knew, better than anyone alive, that it was the armor I strapped on every morning so I'd never have to look too closely at my own empty life.
“Just get on the plane, Alec,” she said finally, the snark gone soft.“Keep your eyes open.Call me when you land in Lincoln.”
The screen went black.
I crossed to the window and watched the rain pool on the brick sidewalk below.The cynicism was armor, sure, and most days it was light enough to forget I had it on.Some days it weighed a ton.Thirty-three years old, living in a space the size of a shipping container, chasing corrupt politicians and religious hypocrites across the country to keep proving the world was every bit as broken as I'd long ago decided it had to be.If I struck out in Nebraska, the door to the national stage didn't just close.It locked from the outside.And I’d spend the next twenty years writing investigative pieces for the twelve people who still read alt-weeklies on a Sunday.
I rolled my shoulders, trying to shake the dread loose, and picked the phone back up.Out of habit I tapped on the Grindr app again.Switched the location home to Richmond.Watched my own grid populate—indie musicians, scruffy VCU grad students, a bartender I’d hooked up with a few weeks ago.Mine was one of the only profiles in the radius wearing an actual face: shoulder-length dark-blond hair I never got around to cutting, a permanent five-o'clock shadow, an expression that read as professionally unimpressed with the entire concept of being looked at.No headless torso or starched-shirt cosplay.Truth was the brand, even when all I was hunting for was a way to quiet my own head for an hour.
Tomorrow I'd walk into a convention center full of hypocritical men hiding in the dark, terrified of their own reflections.I should feel excited, ready to expose them to the world.So why did I feel like my entire world was about to implode?
ChapterTwo
Harrison
Ihad written the sentence four times, and four times it had died on the page.
The cursor blinked at me from the half-finished line—the nation does not have a political problem, it has a spiritual one—and I sat back in the leather chair and let the silence of my office press in.It was a beautiful room.Everyone said so.Floor-to-ceiling walnut shelves filled with mine and my father’s books, a Persian rug that cost more than the cars most of my congregation drove, tall windows looking out over six manicured acres of River Oaks that the Houston sun gilded every evening into something that looked, if you squinted, like the grace of God.
It was a beautiful room, and I’d come to hate the man who worked in it.
The speech was for Lincoln.Crossroads America National Summit, Saturday's keynote, the slot they gave the man they wanted the cameras on.Three thousand delegates, a dozen lawmakers, and somewhere in the back a wall of press my mother had personally vetted for friendliness.I’d given a hundred versions of this speech and could give it in my sleep.I had, in fact, given it in my sleep, woken up reciting the part about the family as the first church, the cornerstone of a righteous nation.The words came easily.They always did.That was the trouble with them.
I typed a fifth version of the sentence and deleted it too.
Something was wrong.Not with the speech—the speech would write itself, it always did.Something underneath the day, low and persistent, like a sound you can't hear but can feel in your teeth.I'd woken with it before dawn, surfacing out of sleep into a dread that had no shape, only weight.I'd lain there in the dark of the master bedroom—the bed I'd slept in alone for a decade and called widowhood—and waited for it to resolve into something I could pray over, and it hadn't.
I'd carried it through my coffee and my morning correspondence and a forty-minute conference call with the political consultants in Northern Virginia.Those men spoke about souls the way bankers speak about collateral, and the whole time the wrongness sat with me at the desk like a second presence in the room.A draft moving through rooms I kept locked, stirring things I had long ago laid to rest and trusted to stay buried.I was a man who’d built his entire existence on control—of the message, of the image, of the careful distance between what I was and what I performed—and control was precisely the thing I could feel slipping away, like sand going out under the tide.
A soft knock, and the door eased open.
“Pastor Cole?”Marisol stood in the gap with her hands folded, the way she always did, as though she were sorry to exist in my line of sight.She'd kept this house for nine years and still apologized for interrupting me.“I've finished your bags.Both cases are in the foyer.And your mother—” a small, careful breath, “Mrs.Cole asked me to tell you she's waiting in the car.For the airport.”
“Thank you, Marisol.”I didn't look up from the screen.“Tell her five more minutes.”
“Yes, sir.”She hesitated—there was always something she wanted to say and never did, some kindness she'd been trained out of offering a man like me—and then the door clicked shut and I was alone again with the cursor and the feeling of dread.
Five minutes.I saved the file, closed the laptop, and slid it into the briefcase, the good Italian leather my mother had given me the Christmas after Father died.As if a briefcase were the thing a son needed in the season of grief.I gathered my phone, my pen, the leather folio.And then I stood, turned toward the door, and the photograph on the far wall caught me the way it had caught me ten thousand times before and never once landed until that exact moment.
Kimberly.
She was smiling in the picture, the both of us were, in front of the church on a spring morning the year we married.She wore yellow.She'd liked yellow.I remembered almost nothing else about what she liked—and that was the thought that stopped me cold in the middle of my own office, briefcase in hand, because the date had been sitting under the whole day like a stone under still water, and only now did it surface.
Ten years ago.Today.A brain hemorrhage on an ordinary Tuesday, no warning, no mercy, twenty-five years old and gone between one breakfast and the next.
I waited for the grief, the way you brace for a wave you can hear coming.It didn't come.What came instead—what always came, what I had stopped pretending wouldn't—was the guilt, and it tore through me, because I was not grieving my dead wife.I was grieving the fact that I had so little to grieve.I’d married her at twenty-two because my parents arranged it.It had been expected of me, because a young pastor needed a wife the way a young pastor needed a good suit.
I’d been kind to her, and faithful, in the only way the world could see.And I had never once loved her, or wanted her, never lain beside her without a wall of merciful dark between us.When she died my first feeling—my first, before the funeral and the casseroles and the three thousand cards—had been a relief so enormous and so shameful that I’d gone into the garden at midnight and been sick into my mother's roses.
Because dead, Kimberly could do for me what living she never could.
Dead, she was my alibi.The grieving widower.Ten years a monument to a love that had never existed, and the world looked at my empty bed and called it devotion.No one asked why I never remarried.No one had to.She was the most useful thing in my life, my poor sweet wife, and she had to die to become it.
“I'm sorry,” I whispered to the photograph, and I wasn't sure which of the two of us I truly meant it for.
