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“Of course. That’s what I meant.”
“Alex, don’t you have something else to do on a Friday afternoon? You’re twenty-one. You should be playing beer pong or getting ready for a party or something.”
“I do all of those things,” he lies. “I just also do this.”
“Come on. I’m trying to give you some advice, from one old man to a much younger version of himself.”
“You’re thirty-nine.”
“My liver is ninety-three.”
“That’s not my fault.”
“Some late nights in Denver would beg to differ.”
Alex laughs. “See, this is why we’re friends.”
“Alex, you need other friends,” Luna tells him. “Friends whoaren’t in Congress.”
“I have friends! I have June and Nora.”
“Yes, your sister and a girl who is also a supercomputer,” Luna deadpans. “You need to take some time for yourself before you burn out, kid. You need a bigger support system.”
“Stop calling me ‘kid,’” Alex says.
“Ay.” Luna sighs. “Are you done? I do have some actual work to do.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Alex says, gathering himself up from his chair. “Hey, is Maxine in town?”
“Waters?” Luna asks, crooking his head. “Shit, you really have a death wish, huh?”
As political legacies go, the Richards family is one of the most complex bits of history Alex has tried to unravel.
On one of the Post-it notes stuck to his laptop he’s written:KENNEDYS+BUSHES+BIZARRO MAFIA OLD MONEY SITH POWERS=RICHARDSES?It’s pretty much the thesis of what he’s dug up so far. Jeffrey Richards, the current and supposedly only frontrunner to be his mother’s opponent in the general, has been a senator for Utah nearly twenty years, which means plenty of voting history and legislation that his mother’s team has already gone over. Alex is more interested in the things harder to sniff out. There are so many generations of Attorney General Richards and Federal Judge Richards, they’d be able to bury anything.
His phone buzzes under a stack of files on his desk. A text from June:Dinner? I miss your face.He loves June—truly, more than anything in the world—but he’s kind of in the zone. He’ll respond when he hits a stopping point in like thirty minutes.
He glances at the video of a Richards interview pulled up in a tab, checking the man’s face for nonverbal cues. Gray hair—natural, not a piece. Shiny white teeth, like a shark’s. Heavy Uncle Sam jaw. Great salesman, considering he’s blatantly lying about a bill in the clip. Alex takes a note.
It’s an hour and a half later before another buzz pulls him out of a deep dive into Richards’s uncle’s suspicious 1986 taxes. A text from his mother in the family group chat, a pizza emoji. He bookmarks his page and heads upstairs.
Family dinners are rare but less over-the-top than everything else that happens in the White House. His mother sends someone to pick up pizzas, and they take over the game room on the third floor with paper plates and bottles of Shiner shipped in from Texas. It’s always amusing to catch one of the burly suits speaking in code over their earpieces: “Black Bear has requested extra banana peppers.”
June’s already on the chaise and sipping a beer. A stab of guilt immediately hits when he remembers her text.
“Shit, I’m an asshole,” he says.
“Mm-hmm, you are.”
“But, technically… I am having dinner with you?”
“Just bring me my pizza,” she says with a sigh. After Secret Service misread an olive-based shouting match in 2017 and almost put the Residence on lockdown, they now each get their own pizzas.
“Sure thing, Bug.” He finds June’s—margherita—and his—pepperoni and mushroom.
“Hi, Alex,” says a voice from somewhere behind the television as he settles in with his pizza.
“Hey, Leo,” he answers. His stepdad is fiddling with the wiring, probably rewiring it to do something that’d make more sense in anIron Mancomic, like he does with most electronics—eccentric millionaire inventor habits die hard. He’s about to ask for a dumbed-down explanation when his mother comes blazing in.
