Chapter 11
Abigail has been going over the Vega case file for three hours when Marcus walks in without knocking.
She doesn't look up right away. There's a clause on page seventeen she's been turning over in her mind for twenty minutes, and she still hasn't decided whether it's actually a problem or just looks like one.
Marcus has a habit of barging into her office whenever she's at the firm, because he considers being her husband a kind of all-access pass that Abigail has been trying to revoke for years without success.
"Not now, Marcus."
"Have you heard?"
Something in his tone makes her look up.
Marcus is standing in the doorway with his phone in his hand and an expression that isn't the condescending partner from a few days ago or the functional husband from evenings in their living room. It's something different. Something more unsettling.
"Heard what?" Abigail asks.
"Eleanor." Marcus pauses — a ridiculously small pause, but Abigail feels everything freeze inside her at the thought that something might have happened to her.
"What's wrong with her?" she asks, pinning her husband with her eyes.
"She just held a press conference. The FBI is investigating her number two for corruption."
The office doesn't change. The screen is still on, the Vega file still open to page seventeen, the desk lamp still giving off the same light it always does.
Everything is exactly the same as three seconds ago.
And yet something happens inside Abigail that she hopes only she can hear — something that starts in her ears, a low hum that settles there and flattens every other sound: Marcus's voice, the noise from the hallway, the traffic that always seeps through the window even when it's closed.
Abigail lowers her hands from the desk and folds them in her lap when she feels them start to shake.
It's not much — not visibly, at least from where Marcus is standing — but she can feel the quiver in her fingers, that fine vibration she can't control, that her body has decided to produce without her permission.
And the first thing she thinks, completely irrationally, is that she needs to hide them before her husband sees.
"Abigail?" His voice reaches her muffled, as if from far away. "Did you hear me?"
She looks up, and Marcus shakes his head.
"Your sister is screwed," he says, still from the doorway.
"Stepsister." The correction comes out on its own, dry, the way it always does whenever someone says they're sisters and she feels that uncomfortable shiver at the thought of what they do — because even though they don't share blood, they've always felt that whatever it is they have, the thing neither of them names, is forbidden.
"And Eleanor isn't corrupt," she adds, irritated.
"That's what she says." He steps into the office and leans against the side of her desk, arms crossed.
"But you and I both know it doesn't matter if she's innocent.
She's the head of the party, and nobody's going to believe she didn't know.
" He pauses. "She's screwed, Abigail. They'd better have good lawyers in that party. "
Abigail doesn't respond.
Not because she has nothing to say — she has plenty.
The full argument is already assembled in her head with the precision of someone who's spent fifteen years building cases.
But her hands are still shaking under the desk and the hum in her ears hasn't entirely gone away, and if she opens her mouth right now she can't be sure what will come out.
"Leave me alone," she says without looking at him.
Marcus hesitates.
"Abigail..."
"Please." This time her voice is almost pleading. "I need to be alone."
Marcus straightens, looks at her one second longer, then walks out and pulls the door shut behind him.
Abigail waits until she can hear his footsteps fading down the hallway.
Then she brings her hands out from under the desk and looks at them.
Still shaking — less than before, but it's still there, in her fingers, in the part of her that has always been the most honest, because she can't lie with her hands the way she can lie with her face.
She opens a new tab on her laptop.
She searches: Eleanor Montgomery press conference.
The results appear immediately. Six different networks, three newspapers, two streaming news channels. All from less than an hour ago. Abigail clicks the first video that comes up — the local Chicago affiliate with the best audio quality.
The image loads, and there she is.
Abigail knows her in every version. She knows her asleep and loose, back when they were living with their parents in the Pittsburgh house and her father used to ask her to go wake her up.
She knows her tense and furious in the darkened hallway of a graduation party, and she knows her undone and trembling in a garage that smells like motor oil.
But this version — this Eleanor standing before the microphones with her back straight, her chin lifted, her hands on the podium — is the one the world sees, the one Abigail has spent twenty years watching from a distance on television screens and newspaper covers.
And this version, right now, is being devoured.
She can see it even though Eleanor won't show it.
She knows precisely because Eleanor is hiding it — because Abigail knows every millimeter of that face and can read what lies beneath the composure of the woman she has heard gasp her name so many times.
She sees it in the tension along her jaw, in the way her eyes move across the press room just a fraction faster than usual, in the way her hands press down on the podium with a pressure that, from the outside, looks like confidence.
"Today I was informed that the FBI is conducting an investigation into David Cooper," Eleanor says on screen, her voice even and controlled in the way that's almost false — too perfect to belong to someone using every ounce of available composure to sound exactly like that.
Abigail grips the edges of the laptop with both hands.
The anger arrives before anything else — not at Eleanor, but at everything happening on that screen.
At the reporters with their hands raised, asking questions designed to wound.
At the headlines she can already imagine before she reads them.
At the injustice of watching Eleanor stand there in front of all of it, completely on her own.
And underneath the anger, helplessness.
That's what hurts most. Anger she knows how to manage, because it's useful — it turns into arguments, strategy, action.
Helplessness is different. Helplessness is being seven hundred miles away, watching a fifteen-inch screen while Eleanor Montgomery handles the worst crisis of her career by herself, and not being able to do a single thing about it.
"I won't speculate on facts that are still under investigation," Eleanor continues, "but I can assure you that once we have the full picture, we will share it with complete transparency."
Hands go up in the press room, and Abigail closes the laptop.
She stares at the lid for a moment. Then she opens it again — not to watch more, but because she needs to do something with her hands and the laptop is what's in front of her.
Eleanor is alone in this. Not in any practical sense, because she knows Eleanor has staff, an assistant she's mentioned more than once, plenty of lawyers, Washington's resources, and no doubt the full machinery of her party moving around this crisis.
She's surrounded by people. But Abigail knows better. Eleanor is on her own.
She's known for twenty years exactly what that means when it comes to Eleanor — because she's seen enough versions of her to know which ones she shows the world and which ones she saves for the silence of a room with the door locked.
She picks up her phone and looks at it for a moment.
They don't call each other. That's one of the unwritten, unspoken rules — but as real as any law Abigail has ever studied: no calls between them except for a family emergency. An illness. An accident. Something that can't wait.
Abigail dials Eleanor's number, because this feels like an emergency of the highest order.
It rings three times before voicemail picks up.
You've reached Eleanor Montgomery. Please leave a message after the tone.
She hangs up without leaving one, because she has no words for any of this, for anything she's feeling right now, and she's not going to leave a voicemail Eleanor will listen to at some future moment when all of this has either passed or gotten worse.
She sets the phone down on the desk, and five seconds later it rings. She grabs it thinking Eleanor is calling back, but it's Carol.
She answers before the second ring.
"I just heard," Carol says, skipping hello. "Have you talked to her?"
"She's not picking up." Carol's voice has a slight tremor Abigail doesn't know how to soothe, because Eleanor is her daughter and she must be terrified. "I've been trying since the press conference ended."
Abigail stands up. She can't sit still — she needs to move — and she starts pacing back and forth across the office with the phone pressed to her ear.
"What about Daniel? Have you tried him?"
"Yes. He says she hasn't come home yet, that he hasn't spoken to her."
Of course. Abigail clenches her jaw. Daniel Carter, who's spent too many years being Eleanor's husband, and who tonight, when she comes home after the worst day of her political career, will be sitting calmly in the living room — or simply won't be there at all.
"Abigail." Carol's voice drops a little, growing smaller. "It's bad, isn't it?"
Abigail stops in front of the window.
"Pretty bad," she admits, because she loves Carol too much to lie to her. "If it isn't handled right, this could destroy her public image and her career."
The silence on Carol's end breaks only with the sound of a soft sob.
"She didn't do anything," Carol says, and it's a mother's certainty, one that knows her daughter better than she realizes. "I'm sure of it."
"I know, Carol." Abigail presses her fingers to her temples. "I know she didn't."
"Then she has to be able to get through this."
"She can. With good legal representation, and if everything's handled well from the start..." Abigail pauses. "If it's done right, she can come out of this."
Another silence, until Carol says something that catches Abigail completely off guard.
"You know she'll only listen to you, right?"
Abigail doesn't answer right away.
"Yes," she murmurs, pressing one hand against the window glass. "I know."
"Good," Carol replies, with a faint note of relief. "Will you call me if you manage to reach her?"
"Of course."
"Thank you, Abigail."
They say goodbye, and Abigail drops into her chair.
She dials Eleanor's number again.
One ring.
Two.
Three.
Voicemail.
"Damn it, Eleanor," she mutters under her breath, almost a whisper, gripping the phone so hard her knuckles go white. "Pick up the goddamn phone."
When she gets no answer, she hangs up and stares at the screen, Eleanor's name still showing in her call history. Two calls in ten minutes. Her hands are shaking, and her eyes are stinging in a way she finds hard to understand — the same way she can't explain what she feels for Eleanor Montgomery.
She drags the back of her hand across her eyes.
A rough gesture, almost angry at herself, as if the wetness were a betrayal she can't afford right now, not when there's so much to think about, so much to do, so much to decide.
Carol said it plainly: she'll only listen to you. And Abigail knows it's true.
She calls Eleanor again, but Eleanor doesn't answer, and that evening Abigail leaves the office feeling like something has been torn out of her.