Lanark Telegram
“MURDOCH CRUISES TO AN EASY WIN”
SO LET’S CALL IT a comeback. Seven months after resigning as party leader due to allegations of sexual misconduct, hometown boy Derek Murdoch cruised to an easy win in the mayoral race, defeating four-term incumbent Caroline Rawlings in a surprise upset. Defying pollsters—not for the first time—and delivering a swift jab to opponents all too ready after the scandal to declare Murdoch finished in the world of politics, he would stand up in his victory speech and declare himself vindicated.
“I want to thank my family, and the people of Lanark for always standing by me. The last few months have been a journey,” he said, “but everything that’s happened has only made me a stronger person, a better politician. My friends, this is only the beginning…”
Seven Months Previous
Tuesday Morning
She hadn’t been drinking—this was the thing. Yet that morning Brooke woke up with a hangover, and it took about five seconds to put the night back together again. She had a different taste in her mouth, but the weight on her head was just the same. So what had happened? What had led to the restless, uneasy sleep that she was now shaking off like a blanket, eyes struggling to come to terms with the daylight?
And then there it was, reality settling over her like dread, and it was all coming back: the press conference, watching the live-stream as her phone buzzed. A bombshell that ricocheted, the whole thing unfolding with no warning of what might happen next—except Brooke had some guesses. A level of insight into the general narrative that didn’t serve to make her feel better, or wiser. It made her feel worse, and she’d broken out in a sweat, even though her extremities were freezing and her legs were shaking the way they’d been shaking the second time—which was really the first time—that Derek Murdoch kissed her.
It was uncharacteristic, that’s what they all said. The pundits, and the people online who were paid to talk even when they didn’t know what they were talking about. They explained how Derek wasn’t a person who ran away from challenges, no matter how difficult. Principled. That’s what they kept calling him, the key to his character, they supposed. They’d never seen him like this, so rattled, and Brooke would admit—as she’d watched him falling apart on the screen—that she hadn’t recognized him either. Could the breakdown be part of a performance? Was this the strategy they had in mind? Maybe it was supposed to be humanizing. Because she couldn’t think of any other reason for Derek to have fared so poorly. Professionally, at least, he’d never been unprepared for anything in his life.
When the whole thing started kicking off, Brooke was miles and worlds away from the action. She was babysitting—a part-time gig she’d found after tearing a phone number off a poster on the community board at the library. The poster belonged to Marianna Tavares, a single mom who worked at a seniors’ home, mostly day shifts, but she needed someone to watch her daughter on the odd evening. An arrangement that worked fine most of the time (the one upside of no longer having a social life was availability for odd jobs to supplement Brooke’s meager income), but what an odd evening this one turned out to be, Olivia finally tucked into her bed upstairs, asleep. Brooke was scrolling on her phone, thinking about putting on Netflix, when she received a text from her sister Nicole, the first time she’d heard from her in ages: What is going on NOW?
Brooke replied with a string of question marks—and then her phone buzzed again. And again, and again. She hadn’t taken Derek’s name off her news alerts when she left his office, and now his name was everywhere. There had been allegations, two women saying shocking things, and he’d be holding a press conference, pre-empting the story before it broke on the newscast at ten o’clock.
Everything was happening on Twitter, and Brooke scrolled through her feed, ignoring her sister’s message, searching for some confirmation herself, an understanding of the bigger picture, but she could find none. Her desperation for clarity mingling with fear, frustration, even fury. What have you done? she was thinking. After all she had given him—and forgiven him—over the course of his career, and hers—to have it all come down like this. Was there no limit to how much Derek could betray her?
As she refreshed her screen again, new details appearing, they finally began to form a picture. And it was also a relief to realize this was not one particular shocking story it could have been, blowing up her whole life all over again, only this time with the world watching. This breaking story now had nothing to do with her—although this also underlined how remote she had become from Derek these last few months. Entirely out of reach—and yet, not so far that she couldn’t discern what was going on. For years, shady characters had been willing to offer to pay for dirt on Derek, something to mess with his image, to tarnish his sterling reputation. Brooke had seen them sniffing around, had even talked to some of them directly, and now, apparently, someone had finally taken them up on the offer.
Derek would have known this too, which was surely the reason he’d been so indignant as he stood before the reporters, sending the press conference off the rails before it even began. Where he should have been calm and assured, he was agitated and angry, and not remotely convincing as an innocent man as he pledged to push back against the allegations. He was going to fight to clear his name, he explained. Except he hadn’t been in fighting form at all, particularly at the end, when he’d been speaking through tears, and then he’d cut the whole thing off abruptly, reporters chasing him down three flights of stairs.
Marianna was home by then, and she and Brooke were watching the whole thing together, and witnessing Derek in this state—he was so pathetic, with the crying and the running away—seemed to snuff out any residual anger Brooke had been harboring toward him these last few months. She had been imagining him back in the city, living his life as though nothing had happened, while her whole world had ended, and she’d let herself yearn for a sign that he’d suffered at all. A self-centered twist on empathy, for him to know what she knew, what she felt, and she’d wondered whether it might even feel good to see him hurting—some kind of justice delivered, his comeuppance. But now she knew that it didn’t, not at all, because it felt so unnatural not to be on his side, and because whatever else Derek had done, he was paying for it now—that much was obvious.
Marianna proclaimed the whole affair “a gong show,” and Brooke couldn’t argue. Derek’s performance had been so bizarre, the allegations so tawdry. And why did he have to fall apart like that in front of the cameras? Running scared. The one detail she kept getting stuck on, because it just didn’t make sense. The Derek she knew would never have let that happen. Was no one looking out for him?
Marianna wanted Brooke to stay, she’d open a bottle of wine the way they had on other evenings, and together they’d hash the whole thing out—she hadn’t sat down in front of the TV news for years, she said, it was kind of fun. Trying to decipher the puzzle of baffling men was one of Marianna’s favorite pastimes, although she’d never once gotten to the bottom of it. But what Marianna didn’t know was that Brooke had a personal investment in the matter unfolding on TV before them now, in this particular baffling man, and Brooke didn’t want to get into it with anybody, let alone somebody who wasn’t even properly a friend. The emotions were still too raw for her to be detached enough from any of it, and nobody she’d tried to explain her connection to Derek to had ever understood.