An older man.Sixties, good suit, the soft pink face of someone who'd spent a career being agreed with.A delegate lanyard, flipped backward so I couldn't read the org.And he was doing the thing—the thing all of them did—the quick scan left and right, checking the room, making sure no one he knew was close enough to hear, before he leaned in and dropped his voice to almost nothing.
“Weren't you,” he murmured, “on the—you know.The app.Couple nights ago.You were the one with the, um, the face.”He said face like a man confessing to something.“The real photo.”
And there it was.I'd lit up their grid like a flare my first night here, the one unblurred face in a city of cowards, and this poor terrified man had clearly been scrolling through the gray squares looking for exactly that.Someone real, someone brave enough to exist out loud, and he'd remembered.
A week ago I'd have felt nothing but contempt.The hypocrisy of it, the wedding ring I could see on his hand, the lanyard for an organization that probably had a whole policy platform built on making men like him hate themselves.And the contempt was there, sure.But it didn't win.Because I'd spent last night with one of these men—the most powerful one in the building—and I'd held him while he cried, and I knew now what I was actually looking at.Not only was he a hypocrite, this desperate man was a casualty.This was what the machine made: a sixty-year-old man in a four-thousand-dollar suit reduced to whispering in a hotel lobby, hungry for one honest face, terrified of his own reflection.Harrison's whole world, standing in front of me with its hand on my arm.
“Sorry,” I said, gently as I could.“You've got the wrong guy.”
Something collapsed behind his eyes—disappointment, relief, I couldn't tell which, maybe both—and he nodded too fast, let go of my elbow, and melted back into the crowd of suits like he'd never been there.
I stood there a second.Then I turned around and walked straight out the front doors of the Lincoln Grand, because suddenly I couldn’t eat one bite of food inside that building, surrounded by all that beautiful expensive misery.
* * *
The Hi-Way Diner sat three blocks off the convention drag, a chrome-and-vinyl holdout from a better-fed decade, and walking through its door felt like surfacing from underwater.No fog machines, closet-cases, or god-rays.Just the smell of coffee, griddles hissing, and a hand-lettered sign promising pie.I could have wept with relief.
“Sit anywhere, hon, I'll find you.”
I took a booth by the window and a waiter materialized inside of a minute—late twenties, tight black T-shirt, an apron tied with more flair than strictly necessary, and a once-over that took my measure and clearly approved of it.
“Well,” he said.“You're not from around here.”
“That obvious?”
“Baby, you've got that big-city haven't-slept look and you ordered nothing yet but I can already tell you're gonna ask if the coffee's fair trade.”He grinned.“Johnny.What can I get you, and what in the world are you doing in Lincoln?And don't say the ambiance, I'll know you're lying.”
I laughed.“Waffles.Bacon.Coffee, and I genuinely do not care where it's from.And I'm here for—” I gestured vaguely back toward the towers.“the Crossroads convention.Down the street.”
And the temperature in the booth dropped forty degrees.
It happened in real time, the warmth just draining out of his face.The grin went flat and polite, and the eyes went somewhere far away.Then he straightened up, clicked his pen, and said, in a voice with all the personality removed, “Waffles and bacon.Coffee.I'll get that right in.”
“Did I—” I blinked.“Sorry, did I say something?”
He held my gaze for a second, and there was no flirtation left in it at all, just a flat and tired wariness.
“Look,” Johnny said.“You seem nice.But I don't really waste my good energy on people who pay money to go sit in a room full of folks who think I shouldn't exist.No offense.”He set the check facedown on the table.“Food'll be up soon.”
And he was gone.
I opened my mouth to call after him—to sayI'm not one of them, I'm a reporter, I'm here to burn that place down, I'm on your side—and then I closed it again, because what was I going to say, really?That I'd spent last night in bed with the literal keynote speaker?That the man who ran the machine Johnny was talking about had wept in my arms and I was now seriously considering protecting him?I didn't have a clean version of that sentence.There wasn't one.
So I sat there and took the verdict from a guy who'd clocked exactly what that convention was about in the time it took to refill a coffee, and who'd put me on the wrong side of it, and who was not wrong to.That was the part that sat in my chest like a swallowed stone.He wasn't wrong.I'd flown out here certain I was the one honest man walking into a cathedral of liars.The good guy with the camera.And a waiter had taken one look at me and known better.
The waffles came, delivered by a different server.They were perfect.I ate them anyway, every bite, the way you do when your body wants something even when the rest of you has lost the thread.
And that's when my phone lit up, face-up on the table, and the screen said HALLIE and under it the little pulsing word: incoming video.
My stomach dropped clean through the vinyl seat.
I could have let it ring.I thought about it for one cowardly second.But you don't let Hallie Barnes go to voicemail, so I wiped my mouth, propped the phone against the napkin holder, and tapped accept.
Her face filled the screen, the D.C.newsroom roaring behind her.
“There he is.”She tipped her head, studying me through the glass the way she always did.“You look like hell warmed over and served with syrup.Where are you?”
“Breakfast.Off-site.Getting some air.”
