Chapter 37
Sloane
Icall him from the stairwell, because I have to know one thing before Friday, and the landing between the second and third floor is the only place left where I can hear the answer without anyone watching what it does to my face.
I took the stairs because the elevator has a camera and a mirror and I can’t be near either right now.
The stairwell is concrete and fluorescent and smells like cold metal and somebody’s decade-old cigarette, and it hums — the low building note you only notice once you’ve stopped being able to hear anything else.
My heels are loud on the landing.
I make myself stop pacing. I put my back to the wall the way I’d tell a junior to — find the wall, find your breath — and I dial before the advice can talk me out of it.
“Sloane—” He picks up before the first ring finishes. There’s noise behind him, an airport, a gate announcement, and some part of me files it and sets it aside, because I am not here for where he is. I’m here for one question.
“I need you to answer something fast,” I say. “Without thinking about how to say it well. You’re good at saying things well. I need the version from before that part kicks in.”
“Anything. Sloane, I’ve been trying to reach you, I’m at the—”
“If a reporter called you right now. On the record, today. And asked whether this is real.” I close my eyes. “What do you say?”
And he stops.
***
It’s half a second. Less. The length of one breath he doesn’t take.
Here’s what a half-second is, when you’ve trained your whole life to hear it.
It’s a canyon.
The gate announcement behind him keeps going, some flight to somewhere boarding by zones, and the fluorescent tube above me ticks, and my own pulse arrives in my ears like something with footsteps.
I don’t think he’s lying. He isn’t Lucas, who never paused, because there was never anything underneath to pause for. Carter pauses because there’s something real down there and he’s looking for the version of it that doesn’t cost me my career.
There isn’t one. He’s finding that out in real time, and I’m listening to him find it.
That’s what ends it. Not a betrayal. Worse.
I needed, exactly once in my life, to not be the thing being weighed.
“Okay,” I say.
“Sloane, wait—” The noise behind him, the hope cracking into something else. “That wasn’t— give me one more second, I can—”
And there it is.
Give me one more second.
Because I have had my own half-second, haven’t I. Eleven o’clock at night with a phone in my hand and a man asking me a direct question about a nineteen-year-old with flashcards, and I did not hesitate for even that long. I had the sentence pre-drafted. Entirely true. Designed to tell him nothing.
He is standing in an airport failing to find a clean answer fast enough.
I found mine in under a second and I was proud of how good it was.
I know exactly what I’m doing as I do it. That’s the part I’ll own at three in the morning for the next ten years — not that I ended it, but that I ended it knowing, on a technicality, using the one skill he never once used on me.
“I have my answer,” I say. And I do. Not the one for the reporter. The other one. “I’m going to sign the memo. I’m recusing from the campaign and releasing a statement that says it was always the campaign. Clean. On my terms, before anyone writes it for me.”
“It’s not the campaign.” His voice does a thing I’ve never heard it do. “Sloane. It was never—”
I pick up the knife that’s nearest. It’s his.
“Some things really are just campaigns, Carter.” Level. Final. The voice I close a thousand calls with. “You should be glad. You’re very, very good at them.”
I hang up while I still have a steady hand, because the steady hand is the last thing I own.
For a moment there’s just my own breathing and the building humming its one low note.
I take the inventory I always take when everything else is gone. I check that my hands aren’t shaking. They aren’t. Lucas taught me that — the only useful thing he ever left me — how to keep your hands quiet while the rest of you goes down somewhere nobody can see it.
***
The text comes ninety seconds later, while I’m still standing there not having moved.
I’m at the gate. I was getting on a plane to come tell you the true thing. I had it in my hand. The pause wasn’t a no, Sloane, it was me running out of time to do the brave thing well — please don’t sign it tonight, please give me the version where I get there.
I read it.
I read it again, once, the old habit I broke months ago coming back for exactly this, because I want — with everything I have left — to be the woman who answers it.
He was coming. He had it in his hand.
There’s a version of tonight where I am brave instead of safe.
I can see it from here the way you see a city from a plane: close enough to name the streets, too far to be standing on any of them.
In that version I type come, and I mean it, and I find out whether getting there eventually is the same as being there when it counts.
I am not the woman who types come.
So I make a decision, and I want it on the record that it was a decision and not a collapse, because I have never in my life failed to do a thing by accident.
I open the message. I put my thumb on the keyboard. I type four letters.
Then I delete them, one at a time, the way I once deleted a man’s emoji off a contact card — carefully, deliberately, taking my time about it, so that nobody could ever say it happened to me.
I turn the phone face-down on the cold metal rail.
And I stay standing, because sitting down would mean it’s real, and I am not ready tonight for it to be real.