Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
Alec
Back in my room, I opened my laptop and I typed his name into the search bar like a man pressing on a bruise to make sure it still hurt.
PASTOR HARRISON COLE. Forty thousand results in half a second.
There he was, in high resolution, from every angle.
Pastor Cole on the cover of a Christian leadership magazine, arms crossed, jaw set, lit like a cologne ad.
Harrison Cole behind a plexiglass pulpit the size of a small car, ten thousand hands raised toward him.
Cole in a gray suit on the steps of the Capitol, shaking hands with men whose names showed up in my own reporting under headings like dark money and under investigation.
The Citadel of Faith, Houston—a glass-and-limestone spaceship that seated thousands and had its own multi-level parking structure and, according to one breathless profile, a Starbucks. Annual revenue that made me set the whiskey-less glass down and read the number twice.
On the church’s website there was an entire page devoted to his dead wife.
Kimberly Cole, in a soft-focus memorial slideshow set to a hymn, gone ten years, beautiful, blond, and forever mourned.
The grief that built a ministry, one headline called it.
The widower pastor who never remarried, who'd turned his loss into a foundation, a sermon series, a bestselling little book about suffering and surrender.
Of course, the internet loved him for it.
But the internet had no idea his dead wife was the most useful prop in the church.
I clicked through it the way you pick at a scab, telling myself it was research, knowing it wasn't. Research has a stopping point.
This didn't. I watched a twenty-minute sermon clip with the sound off just to study his hands.
I read his Wikipedia page, his ministry bio, a hagiographic Texas Monthly feature, the comments under a YouTube video where four thousand strangers called him a man of God.
I knew what I was doing. I'd done it to subjects a hundred times—build the file, know the target, find the seams. But this didn't feel like building a file.
This felt like the thing the closeted men downstairs in the hotel lobby were doing to their blank screens.
Refreshing Grindr over and over again, hungry for an actual face.
I was stalking Pastor Harrison Cole. But I’d been trained to call it journalism.
“Did he fucking use me?” I slapped the laptop shut.
Swear to God I'd been used. Taken to bed and discarded by morning, the cheapest transaction there is, and I hadn't even charged him for it. I'd thrown it in for free, with feeling.
Except…
Except I kept seeing Harrison’s eyes. Not the stage eyes—the other ones, the bedroom ones, the way they'd gone wide and wet and disbelieving when I kissed him. You can fake a lot of things, but you can't fake relief. Relief is involuntary. It’s the body telling the truth.
“No,” I said out loud. That way was a trap, and I knew exactly what kind.
That was the way that ended with me deciding he was secretly good, secretly suffering, even savable—and I am not, have never been, will never be, the kind of idiot who looks at a man holding a knife and decides what he really needs is a hug.
So instead of sympathy, I picked the anger. Grabbing my press pass and camera from the bed next to me, I went to the door and turned the knob.
“Time to go hunting.”
* * *
My green media credential, it turned out, was a skeleton key for a building run by people who profoundly did not expect to be questioned.
I walked through doors that should have stopped me.
I haunted the VIP press lounge with its sad little fruit trays, the carpeted mezzanine, the roped-off corridors where the real business of the convention got done in handshakes the cameras never saw.
I moved like I belonged, because the single greatest disguise in America is a lanyard and a confident walk.
Once, near the private elevators, I saw him. The dark hair, the broad shoulders, moving through the middle of a blonde huddle of women who all looked oddly the same, and my heart did something stupid and lurched. I moved toward him, already arranging my face into something hard—
—and then he turned, and it was a bodyguard.
Black-haired, broad, a curled wire behind his ear, scanning the room with the flat eyes of a man paid to find threats.
Not Harrison. A stand-in. A decoy the right height and the right color, and Harrison himself was probably sealed away in some suite or a town car, gone behind a wall of muscle where a man like me could never reach him.
I stood there in the lobby with my hard face on and nobody to point it at, and felt like exactly what I was: a guy who'd been used, chasing the ghost of the man who discarded him.
* * *
The Cornhusker Room looked different at dusk.
Same leather, same mahogany, but the manic energy from earlier had cooked down into something lower and sadder—ties loosened, delegates slumped, the long exhale of men who'd spent all day worshipping and politicking and had a couple of hours before they had to do it all again.
I sat down at the bar where I'd sat the day before, in the exact spot where a stranger had turned my whole nervous system inside out through a phone screen. When the bartender came I did not order soda water.
“Bulleit,” I said. “Neat. Double.”
He poured it without comment, and I looked at the drink for a second, this amber thing.
Because here was the actual load-bearing rule of my entire working life: you don't drink until the story's filed.
Not one sip. A drink is a loosened screw, and an investigative reporter with a loosened screw is just a drunk with opinions.
I'd watched better men than me drink their credibility down a hotel drain.
I drank it anyway.
It went down like a struck match and I let it, because the truth—the actual truth, the one underneath the anger I'd been carrying around like a shield all afternoon—was that I was scared. The story of my career was somewhere in this hotel sealed behind a wall of bodyguards and I couldn't reach him.
Did I even have to lose the story, though? I mean, why was I even caring that he’d used me?
That was the second whiskey talking, and it talked smooth. Because I had the man dead to rights, the kind of scoop that doesn't just make a career, it defines one.
SHEPHERD, STATESMAN, SERVANT, and a pic of Cole’s torso on a hookup app. Hallie would weep. The network would clear the schedule. I could file the story tonight and be on a national feed by the weekend and never want for work again.
So why was my stomach turning over?
Because—and the whiskey laid it out for me gently, like a friend—because I'd seen his face up close. Not the polished face. The thing underneath it, the half-second of pure hollow despair when he thought he could let down his guard and be himself.
Perhaps it wasn’t hypocrisy? What if it was a cage? What if Harrison Cole didn't want one single inch of the life he was standing up there defending—the wife he didn't have, the God he couldn't please—and what if I was the only person on earth who'd ever seen him unfiltered?
What if I could get him out? Save him.
I set the glass down hard enough that the bartender glanced over.
“Oh, no,” I muttered. “No, no, no.”
Because I knew that thought. I knew it intimately.
That was the codependent fantasy of every fool who ever looked at a beautiful disaster and decided love was a renovation project.
I was not that guy. Alec Friedman didn't rescue people, or even harbor the delusion that he could. I kept one foot out the door of everything, always, on principle. Hell, that’s why I met guys on Grindr. Just get off and move on.
And here I was, now three whiskeys deep, seriously entertaining the single most one-foot-in thought a human being can have: I think I could save him.
“You absolute clown,” I told myself, for the second time in one day.
And then, because I am weak and the whiskey had kicked the door of my judgment clean off its hinges, I pulled out my phone and opened Grindr. Told myself I was just checking the wreckage.
The grid loaded its sad familiar census of the closeted and the terrified, the gray squares and the headless torsos, the family-values delegates refreshing their screens in their separate locked rooms, and my inbox was a horror show, dozens of new messages, the same hungry anonymous tide as yesterday.
But at the bottom of all of it, in the dead thread where it had all started, there was one new message. With a trembling finger I opened the message.
Can we talk?
I stared at it. The bar noise went away. Harrison Cole was reaching back through the same dark channel, asking to see me again.
Every brain cell screamed at me to put the phone down. File the story. Get on a plane back to Richmond. But instead I typed three words and hit send.
12th floor. Now.
* * *
The doors opened on the twelfth floor and down at the end, outside the door of room 1218 was Harrison Cole.
He'd shed the armor. No jacket. The charcoal suit pants and a white dress shirt open at the collar, sleeves shoved up his forearms, the tie gone entirely, and the immaculate hair was wrecked where he'd dragged his hands through it.
He looked nothing like the man in the column of light.
He looked like the man from the dark—the real one, the one whose hand I'd held—except now I knew that face threw a forty-foot shadow over ten thousand people, and the knowing sat between us in the hallway like a drawn blade.
He pushed off the wall when he saw me. Opened his mouth to speak but nothing came out.
I walked the length of the hallway with my keycard already out, and I didn’t look at his face because if I looked into his eyes I was afraid of what I'd do—hit him or kiss him, and I genuinely didn't know which.
I swiped the card and the light blinked green.
I shoved the door open, walked into the dark room, and left it open behind me, which was the only invitation he was going to get.
The door swung shut on its heavy hinge and clicked, and the sound of it was a starting gun.
I turned around.
He was right there—too close, always too close, the man could not stand in a room with me and leave a decent amount of air in it—and his face in the spill of light from the window was open and wrecked and bracing for whatever I was about to do, and that, somehow, was what tipped me over the edge.
“How could you,” I said, and my voice came out low and shaking and not at all the cool blade I'd wanted, “how could you use me like that?”
He flinched. I kept going.
“Tell me what I was. Go on. I want to hear you say it.” I took a step toward him and he didn't back away.
“What am I to you, Harrison? Some cheap trick you can fuck and weep on and discard before the sun comes up? A nameless face on a phone you used to feel something for one night and then walked right past in front of God and ten thousand people like I was nothing—”
My voice cracked clean in half on the last word, and I hated it, hated that he got to see it, hated that after everything the thing underneath the anger wasn't rage at all.
“Answer me, damn it!” My fists clenched at my sides. “What am I to you?”