by Sara Celi
Goddamn it.
I had lost South Carolina by two thousand votes. Just over eighty thousand people voted, a record for the primary, but no, they didn’t vote for me. The scandal played that high and that loud. And in the end, it pushed them over to Howard. Howard-fucking-Sayers.
“We need to go down there and say something to the few people who’ve bothered showing up,” I told Kathryn as I stared at the TV screen. CNN showed a large map, called the “Path to the Nomination,” and a silver-haired anchor who looked like a bad imitation of Anderson Cooper wildly gestured back and forth about how Sayers had a likely path to the nomination, and I had a small one, even if I maintained Dwight Jameson’s support. “They’ll want to hear from me, I guess.”
She stood from the other end of the bed. “This campaign is dead. A waste of time.” She sniffed. “Waste of money.”
My phone buzzed, and I grabbed it from the duvet. When I saw the name on the screen, my shoulders slumped. “Dwight, I was just thinking about you,” I said into the receiver.
“Wanted to call with my condolences.” He cleared his throat. “But we’d be kidding ourselves if we didn’t see how was this was going to go ahead of time, Patrick.”
“Alex and I—” I glanced over at Kathryn, who glared at me, then got off the bed and began pacing the room with the phone still to my ear. “She was a good communications director. Great person.”
“Sounds like she was more than that.”
“Listen this…”
“Don’t try to snow me,” Dwight said. “You and I both know where we’re headed from here.”
“Sometimes people lose. I lost.” It sounded so hollow, but I didn’t know how to respond. Nothing I could have said would have made it any better. “We can still move on to Super Tuesday, and Nevada is coming up.”
“Not good enough.” Dwight clicked his teeth. “I stuck my neck out for you. Believed in you. I thought I could overlook some of my misgivings, but I’ve got to be honest. You don’t have me going forward. I need to look out for my own seat. Facing a tough primary challenge this time around, and my staff needs to focus on that.”
I stopped pacing near the bathroom door. “I understand. Completely.” Disgust and sadness coursed through my body, but I knew I only had myself to blame. In the end, I hadn’t made the sale. I hadn’t done my job. I’d lost. After Dwight and I ended the call, I shuffled back into the main part of the suite.
“What a shame,” Kathryn said.
“Not the kind of conversation I wanted to have, I’ll admit that.”
Kathryn turned her attention back to the TV, and the brunette surrogate for Howard Sayers being interviewed by Darla Martin. The woman had a large, victorious smile on her face.
“You’ll never come back from this loss,” Kathryn said. “Momentum has shifted. Sayers came in second in Iowa, second in New Hampshire, and first here. The energy is with him, not us.” She walked over to the large mirror and examined her face as if she’d see some hint of her former life peeking out from underneath the pounds of makeup she wore. “Thank god we aren’t in too deep. I would have hated to get past Super Tuesday only to see this whole thing collapse.”
“Don’t act like you’re sad or anything.”
“I’m not.” She turned to me, and her face softened into something that resembled sympathy, but wasn’t. “I’m tired, Patrick. Exhausted.”
“Me, too.”
In the end, I gave one of those speeches to the small crowd that night, one that sounds like hope but is really just a bunch of bullshit. I do so with an annoyed and disappointed Kathryn by my side. We could have moved on, we could have tried for Super Tuesday, but everyone knew we wouldn’t. When I ended my campaign the next morning from the lobby of our hotel, no one seemed that surprised. Only one media outlet, MSNBC, bothered to carry it live. The others decided to focus on Sayers and his new position as the default Democratic nominee.
Sometimes in life, you lose. It’s not an easy lesson to learn—especially for someone as proud and sometimes arrogant as me. A lesson like that stings. It’s not something that a man forgets.
“I can’t do this anymore,” I said to Kathryn as we got on the bus after my suspension speech. Only Doug and Heather planned to join us on the long trip back to DC. The other interns, volunteers, and die-hards planned to find their own ways back to their hometowns or to Washington. “I need a break from this. And from you.”
Kathryn sat down on a bench in the bus and tossed her handbag onto the floor next to her. “Good, because I’m done, too. I can’t take it anymore.”
Like I said, in politics, no one wants to be around the loser; everyone wants to hitch themselves to the winner. In some ways, that meant that winding down the campaign wasn’t as hard as I expected. The staff understood; this was how politics worked. People had jobs one day and lost them the next. It happened. No fuss.
The only thing that bothered me was Alex.
When she resigned, she did it fast. We couldn’t stop her; she’d made up her mind. She wanted to leave, even though I wasn’t asking her. She wouldn’t have it any other way.
But I kept thinking about her. All the way back to DC, on that lonely overnight bus ride where Doug and I sat in the back while Kathryn fumed in the front, I thought about Alex. When I dreamed, I dreamed about Alex.
The truth was, I needed her.
And that’s how I found myself on her doorstep three weeks later. I’d driven by it a half dozen times, but I hadn’t worked up the courage to stop, get out of my car, and confess to her what I’d been thinking. It took a while to gather that kind of strength.
But then I did. I knocked three times on the front door of apartment 4C, and she answered a half-second after the third knock. She wore a pair of grey sweatpants, a red tank top, and her hair pulled back in a low ponytail.
“What do you want?” She sneered, and her eyebrows lifted. “Why are you here, Patrick?”
I regarded her for a beat, marveling at how gorgeous she looked, even though she appeared to have not slept in six months.
“May I come in?”
“No.”
“Fine,” I said. “I deserve that.”
“If this is about the news coverage—”
“It’s not.” I winced. It had died down right along with my failed campaign. No one cared about the love life of a failed presidential candidate once he’d dropped out of the race.
“Like I told you in my resignation letter, I’m going to lay low,” Alex said. “I’ll probably go back to Omaha, or maybe the West Coast. You won’t have to hear from me ever again, and I won’t sell my story. You can trust me.” She braced her arm on the doorframe. “So I don’t know why you’re here, because we have nothing to say to each other.”
“But I need you. That’s why I’m here.”
She recoiled. “What?”
“You heard me,” I said. “I need you. I haven’t ever needed anyone, but I need you. And I—” I stepped closer to her. “I want you to understand something. I know I screwed up. I know I’m not perfect. But I know—”
“Stop,” she said, but a small smile pulled at her lips. “I know where we stand. You don’t have to say anything.”
“Yes, I do.” I placed a hesitant hand on her arm. “Let me explain.”
She answered me with a small nod.
“Kathryn and I are over. She’s—” I glanced away and grinned at the memory of the last time I’d seen Kathryn, and the disgust that decorated her face. “I’m not useful to her anymore, so she walked away.”
“What about the pictures? The cocaine?”
I shrugged. “She might leak them, but trust me, the junior senator from Ohio isn’t exactly someone she cares about. She and her father want bigger fish than me. I don’t think she’ll use them. And if she does—”
“People in DC have long memories.”
I sized her up. She still had it. She still turned on something inside of me that no one else ever had. “So do campaign staff
ers.”
“Why should I trust you?” she said. “What makes you think that you deserve it?”
“I don’t. After all that I’ve done to you, I don’t. I don’t deserve it at all, and if you want me to leave right now, just say the words. I’ll leave. You’ll never hear from me again.”
We stared at each other for a beat.
“I just don’t know.” She frowned. “This hasn’t been easy for me.”
“I know, and that’s my fault. But please, Alex. Please. I have to say that I want a second chance.” I reached out and cupped her soft cheek.
“I want to try again, and do it right this time. Will you let me? Will you let us?”
Now her smile became a grin.
“Of course,” she said. “I could never resist you, Patrick.”
“Never?”
“Never.”
THE END
Eight months after the South Carolina primary
The photographers lay behind the line of cars parked across the street from Chez Patrice, New York City’s trendiest French bistro. I saw ten of them through the window at least, all poised to capture anything they might be able to twist. Idiots. They thought I wouldn’t see them when I glided out of the restaurant’s front door. Wrong. I knew them. I knew what I wanted. I’d give it to them, but only for a few seconds.
I had this down. The grand tease. The small glimpse. I’d mastered all of it.
And now that I’d finished my meal, it was show time.
“Thank you again,” I told the hostess as I walked toward her on the way out of the restaurant. “It was excellent, as always.”
“You’re most welcome. We hope to see you soon, Miss Van der Loon.” Her eye contact lingered longer than it should as I breezed past. She knew me, but she didn’t want to show it. Chez Patrice had strict, unspoken rules about how to handle the higher-profile clients who regularly dined on escargot and commiserated over crème Brule. Autographs, for example? In a word: don’t.
Those days, everyone in New York City knew me—or thought they did. Since February, I could have made a small fortune alone on the number of times my name had appeared in Page Six. Too bad I hadn’t figured out how to capitalize on it beyond the occasional Instagram sponsorship or designer dress for an event. “Infamous” had an interesting ring to it, however. Even I had to admit that.
I fastened one more button on my Burberry trench coat, tied the sash, took a deep breath, pushed opened the door, and stepped outside. From there, the Uber driver in his black car waited for me about a half a block away. Less than three hundred steps. No big deal.
My tan boots barely brushed the ground before the catcalls came.
“Miss Van der Loon, what have you been doing?”
“Did you enjoy dinner? What did you eat?”
Smile. Walk. Wave. This will all be over soon. Keep moving. Don’t stop.
“Did you see the latest from Washington?” called one of the photographers. “Patrick passed the paternity test. What do you think about that?”
“Do you have anything to say to Alex, his new girlfriend? They looked pretty cozy in St. Croix this last week.”
“Are you still heartbroken?” shouted another.
I’d heard it all before, and I’d probably hear it again. New York City’s tabloid photographers and gossip bloggers could be relentless and insatiable. They needed something to fuel the city’s social columns, and for most of the year, stories and blind items about me had been more reliable than snow in the wintertime. The perfect storm of the Van der Loon last name, DC intrigue, and the endless election cycle had kept them salivating.
“Have you made a decision about who you’re voting for? Howard Sayers, or Mike Kilgore?”
I sighed and considered if I wanted to answer this question. After defeating Patrick Blanco in the South Carolina primary, Howard Sayers had coasted to the nomination of the Democratic Party in June at the convention in Atlanta. Meanwhile, Mike Kilgore, a loudmouthed Texas billionaire and the Republican nominee, had gone through a much tougher fight; the Republicans hadn’t declared a winner of the primaries until late April. Dozens of protesters had greeted their convention in Boston, too, and the national media openly speculated about whether or not the Republicans would survive the election in November.
“I’m keeping my options open,” I said to the crowd. “And anyway, it’s a secret ballot.”
“Miss Van der Loon,” yelled a photographer as I pulled on the Uber car door. “Patrick Blanco was seen ring shopping in DC. Do you want to offer any words of congratulations?”
I pushed my frustrations down to the pit of my stomach and turned my attention to the last question. “That’s wonderful.” I smiled. “I truly wish him the best. Alex is a lucky woman.”
Then I slipped in the car and slammed the door shut with a flourish.
“Are we still heading to Tribeca?”
“Yes, no change. Corner of Hudson and Harrison streets, please.”
“Right away, miss.” The driver took the vehicle out of park, flipped the merge signal, and pulled the car away from the curb, into traffic. Outside, the light rainfall turned into a deluge.
I exhaled and sank further into the black leather seat. Months after I last saw him, the memory of the embarrassment Patrick Blanco had dealt me during the South Carolina primary still stung like a fresh wound, an itch that gave me no relief, and a bruise that wouldn’t fade. I couldn’t think about him without wanting to break something.
No one treated me the way that he did and got away with it.
Besides, Patrick’s whole campaign for president had been nothing more than a sad exercise in futility, a depressing waste of time that did nothing but make me look like a jilted, weak woman who “stood by her man no matter what.” I spent most of late summer figuring out a way to get revenge, a way to get even. He deserved it, after all. He’d broken our agreement and humiliated me on a national level. I couldn’t go to have drinks at the Four Seasons or dinner at Cipriani without getting a sympathetic look from a hostess, or overhearing a whispered comment about my “unfortunate love life,” or seeing a blind item the next day in Page Six that referred to me as “heartbroken.”
I squared my shoulders and crossed my legs. Well, it was time for me—a woman people probably thought of as a nameless socialite with too much money and far more ambition—to move on.
As the car made its way to Van der Loon Place, I opened my purse and took out my iPhone. From what the photographers said, it sounded like Alex and Patrick’s relationship had gone to another level. Even though I never cared about him in a romantic way, curiosity got the best of me. I opened the Safari browser and searched Patrick’s name.
About a hundred news articles came up in the window. They ranged from the typical gossip to several editorials about his prospects now that he had the presidential primary behind him. A few summed up his record in the Senate, and one listed him as a DC “Power Player” in the Democratic Party.
And then, on page two of the search, I found an article I would have missed if I hadn’t been scrolling so carefully. The Columbus Dispatch had an update on the Ohio senate race. “Surprise Polling Shows Blanco Tied for Votes,” read the headline. When I clicked on it, the sub-headline elaborated on the poll’s results. “Challenger Landon Marsh running dead even with Blanco in statewide polling, gaining ground in urban areas.”
Landon Marsh. Landon Marsh. Landon Marsh?
I almost dropped the phone. I hadn’t thought about Landon Marsh in over fifteen years. Not since senior year at Choate Rosemary Hall. The Landon Marsh I knew had been one of the most popular and well-liked boys in my class, the kind of guy everyone knew would go on to amazing things. He’d seemed destined for the kind of easy life that would end with billions, and his name was attached to a few university endowments.
So what was he doing still stuck in Ohio?
Maybe it wasn’t him. There could be another Landon Marsh in the world. I scrolled through the screen, skimming it
for clues. And then, seconds later, another article showed me his photo.
Dear god. This changes things. A lot.
I shut the browser, opened the phone contact list, and punched a phone number our company had reserved for emergencies. I gulped. The phone rang once.
“What’s going on, Miss Van der Loon? Are you okay?” Jayne, my father’s longtime executive secretary, sounded alarmed. She probably should have been—I’d just dialed this number for the first time in at least half a year.
“I’m fine. I hate to call this late, but I need to get on my father’s schedule,” I told her. “I know he’s busy, but this is important. It’s imperative that I speak to him.”
“Of course, absolutely. How about tomorrow? One thirty? I think I can fit you in after the board meeting.”
“Perfect.”
I hung up the phone a few seconds later and tried not to think about how much it bothered me that my brother Seth had a place on the board of Van der Loon Global, and I didn’t. What a shame. I’d had the better grades at Choate and graduated magna cum laude from Wellesley. I knew more about the business than he did. Seth had two DUIs and had pissed PETA off five years ago by being stupid enough to post photos of his big game conquests during a safari in South Africa. PETA sympathizers still trolled him on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram about it, and the photo of him holding an elephant tail had launched a thousand memes.
None of that mattered to Daddy, though.
He favored Seth, and he’d always underestimated me. He didn’t seem to believe that women belonged in the management structure of a Fortune 100 company. He’d always wanted me to prove my worth to the family, and if I wanted to be honest, that was part of why I still kicked myself about the fiasco with Patrick.
No matter. I’d get another chance soon, and it looked like that would happen in Ohio. Ohio, of all places? Ohio? Again?
Well, if that’s what it took, then that’s what it took.