27. Epilogue
Epilogue
Beckett
Jared Byrne is thirty-six years old, worth approximately nine hundred and fifty million dollars depending on the quarter, and is currently sitting across from me in my office explaining that he intends to run for Congress in eighteen months and would like Apex Elite to handle his security for the duration of the campaign.
I've done political security before. It is its own category — different threat profile than corporate, more visible, more variables, more people who believe their feelings constitute a credible risk assessment.
I tell him this. He nods like a man who has already considered it and arrived at the same conclusion and is not concerned, which is either confidence or arrogance and sometimes both.
His file is thorough. He built his money in construction and urban renewal, and there's a period in his late twenties his PR team has worked to reframe. He does not try to explain it away when I reference it, which tells me he is either honest or has been very well coached. Possibly both.
We spend forty minutes on logistics. He asks good questions and takes notes, which men of his net worth do not always do, and he does not try to accelerate the parts that require time by throwing money at them. By the end of it I am reasonably confident he will not be an impossible client.
When we have covered everything on my list I ask him, as I ask every new client, whether there is anything else I should know. Anything that might complicate the security picture.
He leans back in his chair and looks at the ceiling for a moment with the expression of a man doing an honest inventory.
"My team keeps telling me," he says, "that a man running for Congress needs to look settled. Family-oriented." He looks back at me. "Apparently I do not currently project wholesome."
"I wouldn't know," I say.
"I need a wife," he says. He says it the way you say something you have been told enough times that it has lost its edges — more observation than complaint, more problem than plea.
"Or at minimum, someone who photographs well and does not actively undermine the image. " He pauses. "That was a joke. Mostly."
I look at him.
I think about a conference room not very far from this one. About a year ago, a matchmaker with a file and a problem that turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me.
I think about this morning. Elias knocked over Isla's coffee reaching for Percy and she caught it without looking up — one hand on her mug, the other already back on her laptop, the way you catch things when you have stopped bracing for them.
The kind of easy that takes time to build.
Eight months ago she walked into a situation she had every reason to manage at arm's length, and instead she stayed.
She kept showing up. She brought Thai food to my door uninvited and made grilled cheese at eleven o'clock at night and sat across from me at a threat board and said say it out loud and meant it every time.
She learned the sound of my footsteps the same week I learned hers.
She figured out how I take my coffee before I told her, and I let her think she was being subtle about it, and I was not subtle about it at all.
What I found when I walked into that room was not what I was looking for. It was better. Considerably messier and considerably better, and I would not trade a day of it.
I think about all the things I didn't expect to find when I walked into that conference room, and I think about what it means that my seven-year-old picked the ring.
"It might have been a joke," I say. "But I might have an idea."
He looks at me with the attention of a man adjusting his read on a conversation. "You're not joking."
"I'm rarely joking," I say. "Ask my wife."
He studies me for a moment. Then: "What kind of idea?"
"There's a firm," I say. "Match Maven. The founder is someone I trust. She has placed three senators and a governor in four years without a single scandal." I pick up my phone. "And she has a consultant I think you should meet."
I dial Celeste Harper-Andrews.
She picks up on the second ring.
"I have a client," I say, "who needs exactly the kind of help you specialize in."
Celeste is quiet for a moment — the quiet of someone already thinking three steps ahead. Then she says, "Send me the file. I'll make some calls."
I look at Jared Byrne across the desk. He is sitting forward now, the studied ease replaced by something sharper, a man who has decided this conversation became interesting approximately forty-five seconds ago.
I know that feeling.
I hang up the phone.
"Someone will be in touch," I say. "Be patient. And be honest with her, whatever she asks. The process works better that way."
He raises an eyebrow. "Speaking from experience?"
"Speaking from experience," I say.