My Husband Held Her Hand On Stage

He won. He walked to the podium, raised his campaign manager’s hand, and left his wife at the bottom of the stairs. That photograph is on every front page in the state.

Every speech Pierce Whitlock has given in sixteen years came out of my laptop.

The one that made him a senator was written at our kitchen table at two in the morning.

Adaeze Okafor ran the campaign, and ran it brilliantly, and if I’m honest she is the one he has actually talked to for the last eleven months.

So when the numbers came in and the room went up, he reached for the person he’d shared it with. It was instinct. That’s what makes it unbearable.

I went down the back stairs while he was still on stage. I’ve come home to Larkspur Falls, to the paper that gave me my first byline, and I am writing again — under my own name, for the first time since I married a man who needed mine.

Pierce has a victory speech scheduled for the inauguration. He hasn’t noticed yet that the draft is mine, or that I’ve taken it with me. When he does, we can talk about what he says instead, and to whom, and how loudly.