But I was already moving to the door, because if I heard the rest I'd stay.I got the door open.Stepped into the hall.And the last thing I saw before it swung shut was his face, the realest face in a building full of liars, looking at me like I was walking out of the only honest room either of us had ever stood in.
I made it to the elevator before the tears came in earnest, weeping like the boy my mother trained me not to be.
How would I ever get over him?
ChapterTwelve
Alec
I'd interviewed people in the worst hours of their lives.War widows.Wrongful convictions.A mother whose kid had been failed by every system built to catch him.I knew, professionally, what grief looked like from the outside.
Somehow I’d gotten to thirty-three years old without knowing what it felt like from the inside.And now that I did, I was pacing a beige hotel room like an animal in a cage.
He'd walked out four hours ago.Forget about me.The door had clicked shut and I'd stood there in the middle of the room with my hand still half-raised toward a man who wasn't there anymore.I hadn't moved for a long time, and then I'd started pacing and hadn't really stopped since.
The room was too small.Every lap I made past the window I saw the convention towers lit up against the dark and thought about him up there in his cage, weeping in a fancy ass suite doing the noble and idiotic thing.Throwing me clear of the blast radius like that was a kindness instead of the cruelest thing anybody'd ever done to me.
Because here was the wreckage, all of it, laid out cold.
I’d caught feelings.Me.The guy who'd told a stranger in the dark that wanting people was a sucker's bet, the cleanest way to get destroyed there is.And then I'd gone and proved my own thesis in record time.Hell, I’d fallen for the single most impossible man in America, and was tossed aside in less than forty-eight hours.The armor I'd worn for a decade had turned out to be made of paper the second Harrison smiled at me.Now I was standing in the rubble of it wondering how I'd ever been stupid enough to take it off.
And let's not forget my career.Because the thing I'd flown out here to do—the thing Hallie had sent me to do—was the one thing I now knew, with total certainty, I was never going to do.
I couldn't write it.I'd had the story of my life in my hands, gift-wrapped, and somewhere between the doorway of 1218 and the held hand in the dark I'd quietly become a man who would rather torch his own career than press the button that ended Harrison Cole.I didn't even have to decide it.It had decided itself, the way the truest things do.
Which meant I'd lost both.The man and the work.The whole reason I'd come and the thing I hadn't known I'd find.Zero for two, in a hotel in Nebraska, and a flight home tomorrow to a Substack read by twelve people and an editor I'd let down.
My phone buzzed on the nightstand and lit up with her face.HALLIE.Incoming video.
I knew what she wanted.She wanted the thing I'd promised her in spirit if not in words, the thing that justified her neck on the line, and I had nothing to give her but a confession I couldn't make—I fell for the subject, boss.I'm not going to file—so I did the cowardly thing for the second time in twelve hours and hit decline.The screen went dark.I'd deal with the wreckage of that later.
I stood there in the silence and the dread, and then—because I am, at the absolute bottom of everything, still a reporter, and because a working animal reaches for the thing it knows how to do when everything else has gone to hell—a thought surfaced through the grief.
There's another story.
There had to be.This building was stuffed to the rafters with ten thousand of them.Ten thousand delegates preaching family and chastity and the sanctity of this and the abomination of that, and half of them had spent the whole weekend lighting up a hookup grid two floors below their prayer breakfasts.
I'd never needed Harrison for the story.The hypocrisy of this place was the size of a stadium and it didn’t require me to put one specific beautiful ruined man's head on a pike to prove it.I could give Hallie her story and leave him out of it entirely.
It was a lifeline and I grabbed it with both hands.
I picked up the camera, clipped on the lanyard, and I went down to watch the people who'd built Harrison's cage celebrate themselves one last time, and to find the story that would let me keep my career without costing him his life.
* * *
The closing rally was the morning kickoff with the dial turned to eleven.
They'd been building to this all weekend and now they spent it all at once—the LED walls running a relentless reel of flags and crosses and soldiers and babies, a worship band sawing away at something that wanted to be a hymn and a fight song at the same time.Even the fog was thick enough to taste, the whole arena a single ten-thousand-throated organism roaring for the thing it had paid to be promised.
I set up in the press pen with the long lens and I shot it, all of it, because every frame was evidence: the rapture on the faces, the money in the suits, the hands raised toward a stage that was selling them their own hunger back at a markup.
It was everything I'd come to expose, and I felt nothing but sick.
Senator Finch worked the room like the closer he was, big and silver and beaming, running the crowd up and up.He did the country twang and he railed against the enemy and the coming storm.Then he gathered them in close, dropped his voice into the velvet register, and said the thing they'd all been waiting for.
“And now,” Finch purred, “the man who needs no introduction.The shepherd of the Citadel.The conscience of this movement and the future of this fight.Lay your hands together for Pastor.Harrison.Cole!”
The arena detonated.I put the lens on the wings of the stage, and there he was.
