Chapter 17
The painting in front of him was a seven-foot canvas of what appeared to be a red square on a white background.
It’s very... red.
He was, he realized, the plus-one.
The GW/Corcoran Gallery was a long, clean-lined room—polished concrete floors, track lighting, temporary walls creating alcoves for each artist’s work.
Maybe sixty people milling around with wine glasses and the purposeful drift of people who knew how to look at art.
Hank did not know how to look at art. He knew how to look at polling data, legislative markup, and the particular expression on a colleague’s face that meant I’m about to tank your amendment. None of these skills were useful here.
His phone buzzed. He glanced down.
Patricia Odom: New internals from GA. Tightened to 4. Call me tomorrow.
Patricia. Twenty years running campaigns in Georgia, a stare that could freeze lava, and the ability to reduce any situation to a number. Four points down with four days to go. He should care more about that than he did right now.
He pocketed the phone.
A server passed with a tray of something involving goat cheese and fig. Hank took one because it gave his hands a purpose, then wasn’t sure what he’d do with the toothpick.
“You look like a man who wandered into the wrong hearing room.”
He turned. Frannie was standing behind him, drink in hand, looking entirely too pleased with herself. She wore a dark green blazer over black—her off-duty uniform, which meant she’d come straight from somewhere more important and wanted him to know it.
“I’m fine,” Hank said. “I’m appreciating the art.”
“You’ve been staring at that red square for four minutes. I timed it.”
“It’s a compression study.”
“It’s a red square, Henry.”
“I was giving it the benefit of the doubt.”
Frannie took a sip of her wine, surveying the room with the same expression she wore during Judiciary Committee hearings—alert, amused, cataloging. “Where’s the boyfriend?”
“He’s not my—” Hank stopped. Reconsidered. “He’s over there. Talking to someone about... texture. Possibly pigment. I lost the thread around minute two.”
“And you didn’t follow him because—”
“Because I’d contribute nothing to that conversation, and I know it.” Hank ate the goat cheese thing. It was excellent. He still didn’t know what to do with the toothpick. “This is his night. I’m trying not to make it about me.”
Frannie’s eyebrow rose a fraction. The fraction that meant she was filing something away. “Well. Introduce me before I form an opinion based solely on what I can observe from here.”
“What can you observe from here?”
“That he’s younger than I expected, better-looking than you described, and that he just redirected that woman’s attention away from you and back to the painting behind them without her noticing.” Frannie paused. “That last part was interesting.”
Hank looked. Chad had indeed shifted the conversation—the silver-haired woman was now studying the piece on the wall behind them, gesturing at something specific while Chad nodded. Hank hadn’t even seen it happen.
“He does that,” Hank said. “Reads rooms. Steers them.”
“I know the type.” Frannie’s mouth twitched. “I employ the type. Come on. I didn’t put on heels and drive here to stare at you staring at a square.”
They crossed the gallery. Chad saw them approaching, and his posture straightened—his hands going still. He smiled, but Hank caught the flicker underneath. Nerves.
“Chad, this is Senator Frances Holloway. Frannie, this is Chad Ellsworth.”
“The famous Frannie.” Chad extended his hand. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”
“And I about you. Relentlessly.” Frannie shook his hand, holding it a beat longer than strictly necessary—long enough to take a reading. “You have good hands. Artist’s hands. My husband Charles paints, though calling what he does painting is generous. More like organized suffering.”
“That’s not entirely inaccurate as a description of the process.”
“He says the same thing.” Frannie released his hand, turned to the painting behind them—one of the faculty pieces, bold color work that Hank couldn’t have named the style of with a gun to his head. “Walk me through this. I know what I like, but I’ve never understood why I like it.”
It was a test. Hank knew Frannie’s tests—had been on the receiving end of them for six years. She wasn’t asking about art. She was watching how Chad answered. Whether he condescended. Whether he showed off. Whether he could translate what he knew into language that others understood.
Chad considered the painting for a moment. “See how the red at the top pushes forward? And the blue underneath pulls back? Your eye doesn’t know where to rest. That tension is the whole point—you’re not supposed to settle. You’re supposed to feel a little off-balance.”
Frannie studied the canvas. “Hm. That’s either profound or the most convincing nonsense I’ve ever heard.”
“Could be both.”
“Could be.” Frannie turned back to Hank. Said nothing. Sipped her wine.
That was the approval. Hank had sat through enough committee votes to recognize a yes that didn’t announce itself. The absence of further questions. The half-smile she was hiding behind her glass.
“I like your friends,” Frannie said to Chad. “The loud one over there in the fabulous jacket just offered to make me something called a Hemingway Daiquiri. At an art show. I’m considering accepting.”
“That’s Ricky.” Chad glanced across the room. “He’s harmless. Mostly.”
“The best usually are. Mostly.” Frannie patted Hank’s arm as she turned to go. “I’m going to look at the rest of the show. You two do whatever it is you do.” She took three steps, stopped, and looked back. “Chad. The piece at the end of the far wall—the dark one. That’s yours too?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Go stand in front of something else for a while. I want to look at it without your face telling me how to feel.”
She disappeared into the crowd. Chad exhaled.
“Was that good?” he asked.
“That was very good.”
“She’s terrifying.”
“She made partner at a Denver law firm at thirty-one. She was elected to the Senate at forty-three. She once made Mitch McConnell apologize in writing.” Hank found Chad’s hand and squeezed it. “And she just asked to look at your painting alone. That means she wants to actually see it.”
Chad looked at him. Then at the space where Frannie had been. Then back at Hank.
“Huh,” he said.
They drifted through the show together, and Hank tried to be useful—which mostly meant keeping his mouth shut and letting Chad narrate.
Chad knew every piece, every artist, and the story behind each one.
A ceramic installation by a second-year who’d nearly quit last spring.
A series of charcoal drawings by a woman whose work ethic Chad described with something close to awe.
Martin’s own contribution—a large landscape that Hank actually liked, though he suspected liking it was the pedestrian response.
“You can like it,” Chad said, reading him. “It’s good. Martin won’t be offended that a senator likes his painting.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You didn’t have to. You got the look.”
“What look?”
“The one where you’ve formed an opinion and you’re running it through six filters before you say it out loud.”
Hank opened his mouth. Closed it. “That’s... uncomfortably accurate.”
“Three years behind a bar.” Chad steered him toward the next alcove. “You learn to read faces, or you drown.”
They rounded the temporary wall, and Hank stopped.
First Kiss was hanging on the far wall of the alcove, lit from above by a single track light that caught the blues and burgundies differently than the lamp in his apartment. A small white placard to the right: First Kiss. Chad Ellsworth. Acrylic on canvas.
He’d lived with this painting for weeks. He saw it first thing in the morning when he came out for coffee, and last thing at night before he turned off the lights. He knew its shapes, its colors, the way the two figures blurred into each other at the edges.
But here, on a gallery wall, with proper lighting and a placard and strangers stopping to look—it wasn’t his painting anymore.
It was a painting. It belonged to the conversation happening around it.
Two women were studying it now, speaking quietly.
One of them pointed at something in the lower-left corner that Hank had never noticed.
“Strange, isn’t it?” Chad said beside him. “Seeing it out in the world.”
“Yes.” Hank cleared his throat. “It looks different here.”
“Better lighting. Our apartment has the aesthetic of a mid-range interrogation room.”
Hank looked at him.
“Your apartment,” Chad said. “That’s what I—your apartment.”
A small silence. Neither of them touched it.
“It looks good here,” Hank said. “But I want it back.”
“You’ll get it back.” Chad bumped his shoulder. “Come on. There’s one more I want you to see.”
The painting was in the last alcove, smaller than First Kiss but more immediate—darker, more urgent, the kind of work that didn’t wait for you to come to it but reached out and grabbed you by the collar.
A figure, half-formed, pushing through layers of shadow into something that might be light.
The brushstrokes were visible, almost aggressive—nothing like the careful blending of First Kiss. This had been painted fast.
Hank read the placard.
Emergence. Chad Ellsworth. Acrylic on canvas.
He looked at it for a long time.
The figure wasn’t anyone specific—at least, Hank didn’t think so.
It was more like the idea of someone trying to become visible.
The shadows clung. The light ahead was uncertain, more suggestion than promise.
And the figure’s posture—shoulders braced, head slightly bowed, leaning forward against resistance—carried something Hank recognized in his chest before he could name it in his head.
“When did you paint this?” he asked.
“A couple of weeks ago.”
The timeline landed quietly. The radio silence. The nine days when Chad hadn’t answered his phone and Hank had lain awake counting the distance between them in unanswered texts.