Chapter 2
Callum
Fourteen degrees at the trailhead, and his bottle had a skin of ice on it by mile six.
Callum liked the climb out of the gap best in winter, when it hurt enough to be the only thing in his head.
Legs, lungs, the burn under the sternum at the switchback where the guardrail gave out.
Forty minutes up. Nothing in his head but the next thirty feet of road, then the next thirty.
By the top he was scoured out and empty.
That was the point. He had never once said so out loud to anybody.
His father had run. Same principle. Graham Fairbanks used to go out the kitchen door at five in the morning for years, and it had been decades before Callum understood that his father had been running away from a house rather than toward a road.
He crested, unclipped, and stood there heaving with his hands on his knees while the sweat went cold across his back. Below him the valley was doing the thing with the fog where the ridgelines came up through it in layers. Blue behind blue behind blue.
He got his phone out and took a picture of it.
He looked at the picture a second. Then he sent it to Senna, who would say something funny about it, put the phone away, and rode home.
Winslow was in the kitchen when he came through with his cleats in his hand. She had her laptop open on the island, the guest list for the March thing up on it, her coffee going cold at her elbow.
"There's eggs," she said.
"I'm good, I'll grab something on the road."
"Okay."
"Fifty-two on that list is too many."
"It's forty-nine."
"Feels like fifty-two."
She didn't answer that. He went upstairs and stood in the shower with his forehead on the tile and thought about nothing for four minutes, which was as much as he ever got.
The Richmond office was eleven people in a space built for seven.
The coffee maker had a note taped to it that said DO NOT, with no further instruction, and the whole place smelled of toner and somebody's microwaved soup.
His grandfather had owned four buildings within a mile of this one and Callum had picked this office specifically because a Fairbanks had never set foot in it, which was the sort of decision that felt enormous when he made it at thirty-two and looked fairly stupid now.
Senna had the whiteboard going before he was through the door.
"Merrill flipped," she said.
"Merrill flipped?"
"Merrill flipped. Overnight. His district got the Blackwater numbers Tuesday and his phones lit up." She had a marker cap in her teeth and took it out to finish. "So we're at forty-one hard, six soft, and I think Kellerman is lying to us."
"Kellerman's always lying to us."
"Kellerman is lying to us differently." She tapped the board twice. "He's not saying no. He's saying he's worried about the rural set-aside, which means somebody got to him about the rural set-aside, which means we're getting rolled Thursday unless we move first."
Callum put his bag down and looked at the board a long moment, and there it was. The thing he could only find in this room.
Two hundred people in this state thought he was going to be something. Four of them could do the actual arithmetic on how. Three of the four worked for him, and one of those was standing here at twenty of nine in the morning with marker on her wrist, telling him the truth before he'd asked for it.
"Move first how," he said.
"You call Kellerman yourself. Not staff. You. And you don't defend the set-aside, you offer to shrink it, and you let him talk you back up."
"He'll know I'm doing it."
"Sure. He'll like it anyway." Senna shrugged one shoulder. "Men enjoy being handled by a senator."
He laughed. It came out of him before he chose it, which almost never happened in a building where somebody was always writing things down.
They worked until seven. At some point Dara brought sandwiches, and at some point the sandwiches were gone. The light went orange across the parking lot, then blue, then off. The whiteboard filled, got wiped, filled again.
Around four his cousin Adair called from New York.
"Two things and then I'll let you go," she said. "Spring disbursement. Do you want your name on the Appalachian water line?"
"God, no."
"Thank you. Neither do I. Everett wanted both of ours on it and I told him it'd read as a purchase."
"It'd read as a purchase."
"That's what I said." Paper moving on her end. "Second thing. Hollis is getting divorced."
"Since when?"
"Since Tuesday. Nobody's told Gran, so don't."
They talked six minutes about his cousin's marriage and hung up. His trust had thrown off more that afternoon than the bill would move in a year. Neither of them mentioned it. The family had a rule about that, and the rule was that you did not.
He called Kellerman at ten past six. It took eleven minutes and the man came home soft.
"Told you," Senna said.
"You did."
"Say the rest of it."
"You were right. I was wrong, and I should listen to you sooner." He did it in the announcement voice, hand on his heart, and she threw a marker at him.
Dara caught him in the parking deck with her keys already out.
"Your wife drove that suit down Thursday," she said.
"I know."
"I'm saying she drove ninety minutes for a suit."
"I know, Dara."
"Okay." Dara got in her car. "Good night, Senator."
His mother called while he was on 64 with the radio off.
"Easter," Marlowe said. "I need a number from you by Sunday."
"Mom, it's February."
"It is February. I have a woman in Charlottesville holding forty-one chairs on my word. Your grandmother is ninety-one, and I'd like her at a table with all of you at it once more before I can't arrange it."
Callum switched hands on the wheel.
"Put us down for two," he said.
"Is Winslow coming?"
"Why wouldn't Winslow be coming?"
"I'm asking about Easter," his mother said, in the voice she used when she was not asking about Easter. He let a mile go by. Then he gave her a number and got off the phone.
He got home at nine. The kitchen light was on over the stove and the rest of the house was dark. There was a plate in the microwave with a piece of tape on it that said 2 MIN in Nadine's handwriting.
Winslow's door was closed. Not the bedroom.
Hers, the little room off the landing where she did the correspondence.
He stood in the hall with the plate in his hand, looking at the strip of light under it, running the sentence he'd open with.
Kellerman, the whole eleven minutes of it, the part where the man had actually said well, hell, Senator out loud on a phone call.
She'd have laughed. Ten years ago she'd have made him do the voice twice.
He had no reason not to knock.
He went down and ate standing over the sink.
***
The call came at ten past two.
He was awake anyway. He'd been awake since one, on his back in the dark on his side of a bed the size of a parking space, running the Thursday markup for the fourth time.
"You're up," Senna said.
"I'm up."
"Kellerman's guy sent a redline at midnight. It's fine. I'm not calling about the redline."
"Okay."
Her breath went out on the other end. Somewhere behind her a radiator was clanking.
"I've been sitting here an hour trying to decide whether you're going to hate this bill in ten years," she said. "The set-aside. I told you to shrink it, you shrunk it, I was right about the vote. I'm not sure I was right about the bill."
Callum sat up. He put his feet on the floor and let the wood be cold.
"Say the rest," he said.
She said the rest.
"You put a floor under it. Fifteen percent, hard, no waiver. And in eight years some governor's going to look at that fifteen and read it as a ceiling. Every county under nine thousand people gets exactly fifteen, forever. They'll call it your number."
"It's not a ceiling."
"Nothing's a ceiling until somebody with a budget decides it is." A pause. "I might be completely wrong here."
"You're not."
"I might be."
"Senna. You're not." He rubbed his face. "That's the trouble. Go on."
She went on. It took twenty minutes. It was good, it was hard, and the second time she said I might be completely wrong she wasn't either.
By the end of it he was out in the hallway with his back against the wall outside his own study, in a t-shirt, at twenty of three in the morning, and he had stopped talking about the bill.
"I ran a whole campaign on that town," he said. "Six hundred and forty households. And I still can't tell you whether I did that for the water or for the room."
"Both," Senna said. "It's always both."
"That's a generous read."
"It's an accurate one. You want the generous one, I'd have to lie."
He laughed, quiet, hand over his eyes.
"I was ten," he said. "My father came home from a fundraiser and my mother was in the pantry. Door shut. I could hear her in there. I stood in that kitchen and did the math on it, and I told myself, whatever he is, I'm not going to be that."
The radiator clanked.
"And?" Senna said.
"And I ride a bicycle up a mountain in the dark to get away from a house. Same house. Different mountain."
He had never said that to anybody. Not to his mother, who had lived it.
Not to his sister, who had been nine. Not to the woman asleep, or not asleep, forty feet above his head, who had married him ten years ago in a barn in Pennsylvania with rain coming under the doors and two hundred of his relatives sitting on folding chairs her father had rented himself, against everybody's advice, because he'd wanted to pay for one thing.
The silence on the line was not an uncomfortable one. That was the part that should have scared him.
"Get some sleep, Senator," Senna said.
"Yeah."
"I mean it."
"Yeah."
He sat on the stairs a while after she hung up.
The thing nobody said out loud, at Easter or anywhere else, was that Callum did not need the job.
He didn't need the salary, he didn't need the office, and he could have self-funded a Senate race out of the interest on a trust he had never once touched, which he had refused to do in 2018 and had been refusing every eighteen months since.
Adair thought he was being romantic about it.
His father thought he was being vain about it.
Both of them were partly right and neither of them had ever asked him a third time.
His parents had gotten through worse than this and come out the far end holding hands, and everybody in the family told it like a bedtime story. His father in the driveway in the rain. The vow. All of it. He'd been raised on that road. He knew every foot of it.
Which was how he knew he wasn't on it. A man can't walk into a thing he's been warned about his whole life. Not with his eyes open.
He went up.
Winslow's back was to him. She'd left the lamp on his side going, which she did every night, and had done every night for ten years, and he could not remember ever having said one word to her about it.
He turned it off. He lay down on his side of the parking space and looked at the ceiling until it went gray.