Page 12 of Keep

The Commerce Committee hearing lasted two hours and fourteen minutes. Hank knew because he checked his watch—discreetly, beneath the table—eleven times. The political brain parsed testimony for inconsistencies and opportunities, while the rest of him kept circling back to blue eyes and dimples.

By eleven-forty it was over, and Hank was gathering his folders when a voice caught him in the corridor.

“Well, well. Henry.”

Warm and smooth, and it made Hank’s shoulders tighten before he turned around.

Clancy Howard approached from the direction of the Judiciary Committee room—tall, silver-haired, impeccably dressed in a charcoal suit that probably cost more than Hank’s entire wardrobe. He had the easy, proprietary stride of a man who believed corridors were built for his convenience.

“Morning, Clancy.”

“You’re looking well.” Clancy fell into step beside him, uninvited. His cologne preceded him like an advance team. “Bright-eyed, bushy-tailed. Good weekend?”

“Fine, thanks.” Hank kept walking.

“You know, I’ve been thinking.” Clancy’s voice dropped half a register—the practiced intimacy of a man accustomed to hallway deals. “We really should get together. Just the two of us. I’ve got a place in Dupont—very private, very civilized. Good bourbon. Better conversation.”

“I appreciate the offer, Clancy. I’m pretty busy these days.”

“Surely you can make time for a colleague.” Clancy’s hand landed on Hank’s shoulder. It stayed a beat too long—deliberate, testing. “After all, we bachelors need to stick together.”

The word bachelors landed with the weight of a shared secret being leveraged. Hank stopped walking.

He turned to face Clancy, stepping back so the hand fell away. The corridor was busy—staffers, interns, a tour group rounding the far corner. Public. Observed. His political brain cataloged this automatically.

“I appreciate the collegiality, but I’ll have to pass.”

Clancy’s smile didn’t waver. It never did. But something recalculated behind his eyes—cold and quick.

“Of course, Henry. My mistake entirely. Just being friendly.” He adjusted his cufflinks, unhurried. “You know where to find me if you change your mind.”

He turned and walked away. Unhurried. Untroubled.

Hank stood in the corridor and felt his pulse in his throat. He filed it away. Clancy was not a man who forgot a slight, and Hank suspected he was not a man who let things go.

He headed for lunch.

The hideaway was in the basement of the Capitol—a narrow room with wood-paneled walls, a small table, two mismatched chairs, and the faint, permanent smell of old stone and older ambition.

Every senator was entitled to one of these private offices somewhere in the complex. Most were hidden and indifferently maintained. Frannie Holloway’s had the advantage of being genuinely difficult to find, which suited her preference for conversations that stayed off the record.

She was already there when Hank arrived—a sandwich from the Senate cafeteria in front of her, a can of Diet Coke, and the look of a woman who had been waiting to interrogate someone.

“There he is,” she said, gesturing to the empty chair. “Sit. Talk. I ordered you a turkey club from the cart. No tomato because I know you’re a child about tomatoes.”

“I’m not a child about⁠—”

“You pick them out. I’ve watched you pick them out. Sit down.”

Hank sat.

Frances Holloway was sixty-one, silver-haired, sharp-jawed, and entirely too perceptive for Hank’s comfort. She’d represented Colorado for three terms, sat on Appropriations and Foreign Relations, and had earned bipartisan respect by being smarter than most of her colleagues and less interested in pretending otherwise.

She was also a Democrat—the other side of the aisle, a fact that made their friendship a source of perpetual fascination for the press and perpetual irritation for their respective party leaderships. Hank had once overheard a colleague describe them as “the Senate’s most confusing lunch date.” He’d taken it as a compliment. He suspected Frannie had arranged for him to overhear it.

Hank didn’t care about the optics. She was the best person he knew in this building, and the fact that they disagreed on tax policy and health care and most things that involved a roll-call vote didn’t change that.

“You sounded strange on the phone this morning,” she said, studying him over her Diet Coke. “Happy. It was unsettling.”