Chapter 26
SEBASTIAN
Every Monday, Maya called our weekly sit-down to order with whatever name the administration’s talking heads most recently lobbed at liberals.
Last week, it was the Woke Mob Agenda Club.
The week before that, the Godless Socialist Committee.
She always capped it off by rattling through a roll call of the team—a rundown of every stereotype the right feared, except for me, the token straight white guy.
This morning, she rapped her knuckles against the conference room table three times—her version of a gavel—and cleared her throat with exaggerated formality. “I hereby call to order this week’s meeting of the Radical Left Scum Club.”
Without looking up from his phone, David murmured, “You used that one three weeks ago.”
Maya let out a huff and tapped her nails against her chin, her eyes narrowing. “Fine. I hereby call to order this week’s meeting of the DEI Dream Team.”
She swept her hand around the table like a QVC host presenting a product lineup, then dropped into her best Stefon impression, which was scarily accurate.
“Portland’s hottest club has everything: a Black lesbian keeping us on point.
” She batted her eyelashes. “A gay Mexican man holding down comms.” Her gaze slid to David, who offered her a lazy salute.
She pointed at me next. “And our token straight white guy.”
“Gay,” I intoned, the correction leaving my mouth before I’d fully decided to say it. “But yeah. Definitely white.”
David took a slow sip of his coffee, his laughing eyes meeting mine over the rim of his mug.
I’d planned this, of course. Or something like it, anyway. This group was as safe as it got. Their lack of reaction told me I’d made the right call.
“Let’s talk about these new polling numbers,” I said, pulling up the data Michael had sent over last night.
“Uh-uh. No.” Maya slapped her hand to the table and spun her chair to face me. “You’re gay? For real?”
So much for non-reactions.
“For real,” I said, turning back to my screen.
She spun toward David. “Did you know about this?”
He caught my eye, and I gave him a small nod.
“Yeah.”
“How?” she squealed. “I have excellent gaydar, and I completely missed it. Zero clue.”
He chuckled. “A couple of weeks ago, I caught him getting out of his boyfriend’s car wearing the same clothes he left the office in, so …” David shrugged, and she pivoted back toward me.
“There’s a boyfriend, too?! Tell me everything.”
I curled my palm against the back of my neck, feeling it grow warm. “We might have broken up, actually.”
David’s eyebrow ticked up, and he set his mug aside.
“It’s always the quiet ones who are the most dramatic,” Maya mused.
“I’m not dramatic,” I argued. “Just … you know. Dealing with some shit.”
Maya opened her mouth—probably to crack another joke—then closed it, the playfulness draining from her expression. “Anything we can help with?”
I shook my head and stared at my computer screen. “It’s fine. Let’s get back to work.”
In my peripheral vision, Maya and David exchanged a look that was a whole conversation.
David reached for his laptop and cleared his throat, shifting back into work mode. “Merrick’s favorables went up three points in the western counties after that ‘Real Mainer’ ad blitz last week. He’s pulling support from independents and soft Democrats under forty-five, almost entirely men.”
“Shocker,” Maya muttered as she jotted down notes to share with the wider team later.
“What did Kendra say?”
David rolled his eyes, his frustration bleeding through his professional facade. “She wants to stay the course. Focus on policy. Let the voters see through him.”
“They won’t,” I stated, though he knew it as well as I did.
David rubbed his jaw. “She doesn't want them going after Gerald."
“I get that; I do. But we’re weeks away from the election, and I hate to say it, but there might not even be time to turn this thing around.”
I turned to Maya. “She trusts you. Is there anything you can do?”
“She might trust me to run her life, but with this kind of stuff?” She shook her head, her lips turning down. “Nah. She doesn’t take advice from me.”
My phone buzzed against the table, and I glanced down to see yet another text from Wyatt on the screen—the fourth one since Friday. He’d tried calling three times as well.
Wyatt
Call me back already, damnit.
I need to talk to you.
I swiped the notification away without opening it.
Two months ago, I would have called him back within the hour. That was how it had always worked between us—Wyatt reached out, and I responded. For seven years, I had never once let him wait.
But Taylor's words kept playing on a loop in my head.
I hated that he’d said those things to me, but what I hated even more was that he wasn’t entirely wrong. I was pissed off at him, and angry at myself, and I just needed to prove to both of us that Wyatt didn’t have me on a leash. That I was my own man, who could make my own damn decisions.
And it felt like every call or text I didn’t respond to was a step toward proving that.
“Walk me through the details for the final debate,” I said, pushing the thought away.
Maya pulled up an email on her iPad. “Everything’s squared away with the auditorium. We’re locked in for a state-wide broadcast, with both local and national affiliates carrying it.”
“That’s our window then. If we can reframe the conversation before then, Merrick walks onto that stage playing defense.
" I shuffled through the windows on my computer until I found the one I was looking for. "I’ve been digging into his background, and I think I've found a smoking gun.” I pulled up the opposition research file I’d been building since my second week here and mirrored my screen to the TV mounted on the far wall.
“He was a member of the Penobscot Pines Club for eleven years. He only resigned his membership last year, right before he started making noise about running for office.”
David leaned forward. “That’s the club that got sued a couple of years back, isn’t it?”
“One and the same.”
“What for?” Maya asked, also leaning forward.
“Two Black men who’d been sponsored by existing members were rejected without explanation.
The club settled out of court and sealed the terms, but I tracked down one of the applicants.
” I clicked to the next slide. “He said the membership committee told his sponsor that he ‘wasn’t the right fit for the club’s more refined culture. ’ Merrick was on that committee.”
“You’re kidding.” Maya's jaw dropped.
You'd think by now these things would stop being shocking, but every day, another example of how horrible he really was came to light.
“I wish I were, but it gets worse.”
I clicked past two other slides and landed on a page I’d titled PATTERN OF CONDUCT that was broken into three columns: club membership, employment complaints, and the public record. Lined up side by side, the picture was damning.
“I pulled employment records from his logging operation. In the last eight years, three employees--two women and one man of color--have filed discrimination complaints with the Maine Human Rights Commission. Two were settled with NDAs, while the third was withdrawn after the employee suddenly left the state, never to be heard from again.”
David’s jaw tightened as he did the math—three complaints, two bought off, one that simply vanished.
“One of the settled cases included an allegation that Merrick referred to a lesbian worker as a ‘bull dyke that just needed to get fucked properly.”
Maya’s pen hit the table with a sharp clack. She sat back and folded her arms across her chest, her jaw set in a way I hadn’t seen from her before now. “That fucker.”
David’s eyes met mine, his thumb rubbing slowly back and forth along the edge of his coffee mug. “Tell me you have receipts.”
“The club lawsuit was sealed, the employment settlements are under NDA, and the third complaint was withdrawn.” I leaned back in my chair. “But sealed doesn’t mean buried.”
David dragged a hand over his mouth. “Walk us through it.”
I spent the next forty-five minutes going over what I’d found. When I was finished, Maya stared at me with an expression that seemed caught somewhere between horror and respect—like she was seeing me clearly for the first time, and hadn’t yet decided what to make of it.
I was just full of surprises today.
“How long have you been sitting on this?” she asked, reaching for her pen, which had rolled across the table.
“I haven’t been sitting on anything. I’ve been building a case. I didn’t have the full picture ready until now.”
“Same thing,” she challenged with a stubborn lift of her chin.
“You say to-may-to; I say to-mah-to.”
She narrowed her eyes, though she was fighting back a grin. “Smug is not a good look on you, Sebastian.”
“Every look is a good look on me.” I winked, moving back to the table and bracing my hands on the back of my chair.
“Okay, so tell us what we should do?”
“Here’s what I’m proposing: We take the story to the press in phases. Start with the Penobscot Pines scandal, and let Merrick scramble. Then we follow it up with the employment complaints. By the time he walks onto that debate stage, voters will have a clearer picture of who he really is.”
Maya’s expression turned uneasy. “She’s said a hundred times she won’t go on the attack. She won’t—”
“Win?” I finished for her, the word landing exactly as hard as I intended.
“That’s not what I was going to say.” She scowled at me, crossing her arms over her chest.
“But it’s what’s going to happen. She’s hemorrhaging support against a man with a history of discrimination. If she doesn’t leverage this information, she loses. It’s that simple.”
“It’s not that simple for her,” Maya said quietly. “She’s married to a Black man in the whitest state in the country. She attacks Merrick—especially on a topic like racism—and a large chunk of the electorate will find a way to make Gerald the problem.”