If she had been there last night, would things have been different? Would Derek still have broken down and cried, running away from the reporters? If she had been there, maybe he would have been stronger. He wouldn’t have run away, a coward. The pieces were already shattered, and he’d made everything worse, possibly unsalvageable. As though every step down those three flights had further ground the fragments under his feet, and how do you put that back together again? His staff would be doing their best, she knew. It’s what they were there for. If she had been there, she would have promised him that everything would turn out fine.
But making promises to Derek wasn’t her job now, professionally or emotionally, and she was only spinning in her mind. The reason for her headache, she supposed, because she couldn’t relax or think of anything else. She showered and got dressed, headed off to work, taking the bus because of a chance of rain, but this was a mistake because she was so jittery, her legs bouncing up and down. The woman sitting beside her with a bouquet of shopping bags noticed and was trying to move over, to put more space between them, but there wasn’t much to go around. So Brooke got off two stops early, figuring a walk would do her good.
She checked her phone now, finally—just to see the time, but also all the notifications. The messages the night before from her sister, her mother, but that was it for actual people. None of her former colleagues had been in touch—but why would they be? When she’d been shuffled out of that office in shame back in June, Brooke had mostly ceased to exist as far as they were concerned, and all her years spent cloistered in that political bubble had long ago cut her off from everybody else. Although the isolation she had come to appreciate, one bit of a silver lining to being trapped here in this no-man’s land, because she couldn’t imagine how she’d explain it, what might happen if she had to account for herself. Mortifying. So angry and heartsick, and she’d sound like a fool. Everybody would know that she was one.
What a mess it all was, she thought, scrolling right down to the end of her notifications, the initial alert that had started it all: BREAKING: Murdoch holding late-night emergency press conference.
She cleared her phone now, blanket deletions. It was noise, all of it, a story still developing, too soon for conclusions, and all those assholes who’d seen it coming: “I never trusted the guy.” Never mind that they had been bending over backwards to stay in that guy’s good books, to get him onside so they could get him to do their bidding. Everybody was a special interest group—but not Brooke. She was a rare breed in politics, she knew—she’d learned from the best.
Though she had always been like this. A reliable and diligent teenager, Brooke had been appointed to the school board as a student representative, where she discovered that behind the scenes was where the real work happened, unlike the popularity contest that was high school politics, which was mostly about organizing spirit rallies before the football game. It was the kind of showmanship she’d never gone in for, preferring substance instead, and Brooke had learned that much of what people recognize as politics—ideology, dogma, ego, spin—was really a distraction. What mattered was facts, and truth, and the weight of people’s stories, and when you really took the time to listen, walls came down and the space between didn’t seem so wide after all. Politics worked when you took the politicking out of it, which is what Derek had always told her, what they’d both learned from their years in the trenches.
And for sure, there were those who indulged in practices that gave politics its bad reputation, the power-grabs, lying, cronyism and chicanery—because that was the way it had always been done. But Brooke knew there was another way. Faith was fundamental to her politics—not the religious kind of faith, but instead certainty that there really were things to believe in. This was what had drawn her to Derek in the first place, the way he affirmed her ideals about how the world worked and what it could be. It was where they had always seen eye to eye.
When Brooke arrived for her shift at the library that morning, however, and began her first task—the newspapers—that long-held certainty was challenged. Unrolling the day’s editions—the increasingly diminished national papers, all three of them, plus the local daily and the weekly—pulling each one apart section by section, then re-assembling them on wooden rods designed for optimum organization and easy reading. Before any of this, however, she had to remove yesterday’s, folding each paper back into a tidy stack. Yesterday’s papers didn’t know about any of this, their headlines still screaming about electricity rates, and Derek would be quoted somewhere in the article, common sense, the voice of reason.
But today he was on every front page, photos from that moment at the press conference when he’d started to cry. Looking guilty as anything, it could not be denied. How could you spin a face like that?
The headlines today all-caps and all-incriminating:
DEREK MURDOCH ACCUSED OF SEXUAL MISCONDUCT
BEFORE
The first time Brooke met Derek, she was downtown at Slappin’ Nellie’s, a dive bar Derek’s best friend Brent Ames had bought up and resurrected a few years before as part of a wider effort to rejuvenate the downtown core. It was the go-to place, where they were lax with ID if you didn’t make a point of being conspicuously drunken. And staying under the radar was fine with Brooke, because the whole scene was overwhelming—dark walls and flashing lights, pumping bass and dancing bodies—and she was uncomfortable with the idea of being absorbed into it. Instead, that night, she was watching, swaying, smiling, because she’d had two drinks, but there would be no more. She didn’t want to lose what little cool she had, ending up like her friend Vanessa who, at that instant, was vomiting into a toilet already stopped up with reams of paper towel. Because as much as Slappin’ Nellie’s was their current stand-in for something worldly, being here only underlined to Brooke how much she wanted more than what this place had on offer. She knew that at the end of the summer, she and Vanessa would go their separate ways, and it was the possibility of it all that had Brooke swaying with more verve than usual that night, feeling above her station, perhaps, when Derek Murdoch appeared at her side. Scoping out the scene himself as he sipped his drink, offering a conspiratorial glance. He was better-looking than in photographs, she noted. Before, Brooke had wondered what his appeal really was, but seeing him in person, you could almost understand.
“Your friends are out there?” he asked her, gesturing toward the dance floor, and Brooke nodded, even though they weren’t. She didn’t want to let on that she was alone. Derek said, “Well, then, why aren’t you dancing with everyone else?” That old song was playing about the bed that’s on fire with passionate love.
But Brooke was determined not to be undone by his charm. She shrugged. “I don’t have to dance with everyone else.”
Derek nodded intently, like he was really considering what she’d said. “What’s your name?” he asked. “I think I’ve seen you around.”