The Phoenix Campaign (Grace Colton Book 2)

by Heidi Joy Tretheway

  “OK, let’s say you get over the hard part of telling Jared. Now you’ve only got to tell a few hundred million more. Are you going to tell America you’re pregnant before or after the election?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “It’s not like being pregnant is a crime. But I’m afraid that if I don’t say something now, it will taint everything about my leadership. If we even win.”

  “You’ll win,” Trey says confidently. “You will, because you’re tough and you’re smart and you can do this. You were meant to do this.”

  His faith rocks me and squeezes out a few tears. If only I felt like Jared had that unshakable belief in me, that he’d stand by me, no matter what, the way Trey assuredly does. “Thank you. For everything.”

  “Honey, we’re just getting started. I’ll run interference for you as much as I can on your schedule. Does Sasha know?”

  I nod guiltily, embarrassed that she pegged it long before Trey did. “She guessed. I had to admit it or lie.”

  Trey spreads his hands as if the answer is self-evident. “See? You can do this. The truth will set you free.”

  ***

  My phone trills and my fingers scramble across the bedside table to find it in time to answer. I know that ring—it’s not Jared. It’s nobody in politics.

  “Hi, Mama Bea.” I yawn. Dawn light filters through my curtains.

  “Darling, where are you?”

  Oh, shit. Did I miss dinner? I wrack my brain to figure out whether I promised to be there last night. But Trey would have reminded me. After our talk, he sent me home with Mac and Eric with strict instructions to just sleep and let him field the calls and emails.

  “I just got back to D.C. yesterday. I had trips to LA and Portland. I’m sorry I haven’t called in a while. Did I forget something?”

  I hear her breath on the line, short and sharp. “No. I’m just wondering if Trey’s with you on a trip. He didn’t come home last night. And he didn’t call.”

  My heart stutters and stops. “Did you try his phone?” It’s a non-answer, but it buys me time to re-engage my brain, to figure out what Trey’s supposed to be doing right now.

  It’s almost seven. He should be working on his first grande triple-shot, directing my staff in our office, fielding requests and coordinating my calendar with Sasha. And if he’s not there….

  “The campaign’s got us going in a hundred directions. Let me check in with Sasha. Can I give you a call back in a few minutes?”

  She hiccups a tiny sob and my heart breaks from her depth of worry. But she lets me hang up the phone.

  I call Trey’s phone first and it pushes me straight to voicemail. I call Sasha too and get voicemail, but her calendar says she’s in the air, en route back to Washington.

  I don’t call Jared, who is somewhere in Texas with Shep. After the way we left things in LA, I don’t know how he could help. Or if he’d even want to. The things that need fixing between us have to be done in person and that’s not going to happen until I see him again in Charlotte.

  I call Mama Bea back, buying time with the fact that Sasha’s on a plane, and that she probably sent him somewhere last night, even though I know that’s a damn lie. She wouldn’t. She’d go herself.

  My heart is heavy when I go through the motions to dress, to get to the office, to start the day without my favorite person leading me through the million details.

  My staff feels disconnected, whispering questions about where Trey is, timidly approaching me when they need a decision. It makes me respect how much he handled behind the scenes even more. He’s the man behind the curtain in more ways than one.

  ***

  I light up Sasha’s phone with several messages and she calls me the minute she lands. “I have no idea…” is the beginning of her answer to Trey’s whereabouts and I barely hear the rest as I sink into my chair and anxiety leeches into my skin.

  Where the hell is he?

  Trey doesn’t have many friends. How could he, when he spends pretty much every waking hour either working with me, working out, or being a dutiful adult son for Mama Bea? But there’s one person who must know.

  Joel. I curse myself for not thinking of it earlier. I don’t know his last name, but I can Google the shit out of the few details Trey’s given me, the fact that he works in a wine bar in Georgetown. I think it was on M Street? N Street?

  “Jeroboam Bistro and Bar,” the chipper voice answers.

  “I need to speak with Joel.” My voice is tight, urgent, begging this girl to dispense with the pleasantries and get him on the line.

  “Oh,” her voice falls. “I’m sorry, he isn’t in today.”

  Bingo. At least I’ve found the right wine bar. “Then I need his phone number.”

  Her voice takes on an officious clip. “I’m sorry, we can’t give out staff contact information. It’s against policy.”

  “Can I at least get a last name?”

  “I’m sorry—” she starts.

  I want to scream. “No. You’re not sorry. You’re following instructions and I get it. But I’m not some crazy person or stalker. I just need to talk to Joel. Immediately. His boy—I mean, he knows someone who is important to me. And I need to find that person.”

  The girl’s voice drops. “Do you know what happened to them?”

  Those few words flood my chest with a sickening darkness.

  “Cops came this morning,” she adds. “They’re trying to find next-of-kin.”

  Stop my heart. Stop the clocks. Nothing can prepare me for this. I crumple and my knees hit the scratchy carpet in my office. I pull my hand tight around myself and just shake, gulping in breaths of air.

  “Is Joel”—I grasp at an innocuous word, something with an open end—“hurt?”

  The girl groans as if she’s relayed this information again and again today, and perhaps she has. I’m struggling, grasping at the last threads of my composure as they slip away.

  I imagine the worst.

  I flash back to the moment I heard the news of the Willamette Mall shooting. It was reported dispassionately on public radio during my commute home. It was horrible, yet I didn’t cry.

  The guilt that I didn’t cry when I first heard of the deaths floods me.

  I didn’t cry until I knew who they were. And I knew even before the police officers at the door, a man and a woman, opened their mouths to speak. I knew from the pity in their eyes that my life had changed.

  My world tilted.

  And I fell on the porch on that cold, drizzly December evening and wailed like I was being torn apart on a rack, inch by agonizing inch.

  Now, as I beg the girl for details and flood her with promises that I’m not the media, I’m just a good friend of Trey’s, and yes I knew they were dating and yes I want to help and no I’m not a reporter, I know what it will be like for Mama Bea when I tell her.

  Because I have to tell her. I have to be the one.

  But first, I have to know more.

  ***

  I throw open my office’s main door and whirl my head around, looking for Mac or Eric in the hall. Instead, it’s two guys I’ve never seen before. “I need to go to George Washington University Hospital,” I demand. “Right now.”

  The taller Secret Service agent’s brows soar behind his mirrored glasses and I dive back into my office for my purse and phone. And charger. And laptop. I’m going to be ready no matter what.

  “Congresswoman Colton? That hospital’s considered a high-risk location. We have a lot of ingress/egress points we need to cover and secure. May I ask the nature of your visit?”

  “My friend is there,” I say, the pitch of my voice rising rapidly as I struggle to stay cool. Stay in command. Stay focused on what I need to do. “Are we going now or do I need to call Mac and Eric?”

  “That won’t be necessary. I’ll just call ahead to—”

  I tug on his jacket sleeve and propel us down the hallway to the elevator. “If I have to, I’ll walk out on the sidewalk and hail a cab my
self. And don’t think I’ll share it with you babysitters. So either we’re going right now, or I’m going. Solo.”

  “Congresswoman Colton, you can’t.”

  “I sure as hell can.”

  “I mean, you can’t go without an escort. The hospital has protocols. Do you think you’ll be able to walk in and just see your friend? They don’t let anybody do that.”

  I plant my hands on my hips, still trying to maintain the upper hand. “If you can get me in to see Trey Adams faster than I could do it on my own, you can come.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  A person’s head is supposed to be shaped like an egg. And yet, Trey’s dark skin and tightly coiled black hair don’t even slightly resemble an egg.

  White bandages, stained yellow and red, cover his forehead and parts of his scalp. A fat translucent tube protrudes from his throat, linked to a respirator. Pale green tubes are threaded up into his nose, which is heavily bandaged.

  His lips and eyes are swollen to twice their size, with a deep gash on his brow showing fresh stitches.

  He looks like he went to war, lost, and was dragged a thousand miles home. He doesn’t look like my Trey. My sweet friend, my almost little brother.

  I grasp his hand and let the tears tumble, let myself feel the depth of hurt he felt. Who did this to him? What happened? My mind races with questions until a soft sound behind me alerts me that I’m no longer alone in this room of shallow beeps and buzzes.

  “Excuse me, Congresswoman Colton? Do you know this man?”

  “He’s my chief of staff.” I take note that this man is in a security uniform, not a doctor’s coat or scrubs, but I plow on. “What happened to him?”

  “That’s what we’re trying to put together. Did you see him last night?”

  “Only until I left my office. Around seven.”

  And then the man explains what’s happened in the eighteen hours since.

  ***

  I call Jared as the Secret Service takes me to Mama Bea’s apartment, then curse when his voicemail greeting begins. I leave a message with the minimum information.

  I buzz and Mama Bea lets me into the building. As hard as it was to leave Trey at the hospital, I can’t send some poor cop to watch her collapse from the news the way I did. I climb the stairs flanked by the Secret Service, but direct them to stop on the landing below her apartment door to give her privacy.

  She opens the door and in one painful glance, she knows it’s bad. My reddened eyes and tear-stained cheeks are enough to break the news. I wrap my arms around her and whisper unfounded promises about how it will be OK, how Trey will get through this, how it just looks so much worse but it’s sure to be OK.

  OK.

  OK.

  OK.

  There are so many more words I need to express the wish I have for Trey. I need him to be not just OK, but whole. I need him to be not just OK, but alert and able and out of pain.

  I don’t just want this. I need this to be true. Because I don’t want to go forward without my greatest ally and trusted friend.

  Where there is doubt with Jared, there is none with Trey. I have no doubt he loves me, warts and all.

  I pull Mama Bea into her living room and let the Secret Service close her apartment door behind us. I hold her hand and tell her what I was able to glean from hospital security and from the chief surgeon who apparently had no earthly clue what was going on with Trey, but wanted to take the opportunity to meet the possible future vice president.

  Fucking bastard. I asked him to bring me the guy who did the actual surgery to insert a shunt to relieve pressure from the swelling in Trey’s brain. That guy turned out to be a girl, not even a resident but an intern, who I guess drew the short straw of operating on some dude who got himself beat up.

  No ID. Probably uninsured.

  Black kid. Probably a gangbanger.

  No known emergency contact. Who can you call? Nobody called anybody, because nobody knew where to start with him. Except Joel, who is also lying unconscious in another hospital room. His family had no idea who Trey is to Joel.

  I can’t begin to explain Joel to Mama Bea. Trey’s ID was lost, but Joel’s was still on him when the night jogger found them lying in a D.C. park.

  It was a place that had developed a reputation for attracting a certain crowd. It was a place for anonymous hookups and covert partying. A place where you didn’t need to go if you were out, because you could go to any of the gay-friendly bars in DC.

  But if you were closeted, you could only go here and a handful of other shady places where no one asked for ID and no one needed to look you full in the face. I learned all of this from the intern who patched up other victims from this park a few months ago.

  When Mama Bea’s tears have run dry and when I’ve assured her our very next step will be a trip back to the hospital to see him, she blows her nose into a pink, scalloped-edge handkerchief and asks me the hardest question.

  “Why was Trey there? At a park like that, so late at night?”

  I know. “I don’t know.” It’s one of the few lies I’ve ever told Mama Bea and my heart quakes from telling it. If I can’t trust her, a woman closer to me than my own mother, whom can I trust?

  But it’s not about whether I trust her. It’s about whether I can give away Trey’s secret. It’s simply not mine to tell. And so I hedge my falsehood with misdirection. “We can ask Trey when he wakes up.”

  Mama Bea whirls through their apartment, grabbing a bag of Trey’s clothes and her knitting. I gently suggest getting some clothes for herself as well in case she needs to stay overnight.

  The gravity of this request seems to stop her, to add weight to this already heavy news. Her eye twitches and lips tug down. “If you think I need to.”

  “You need to,” I affirm quietly.

  ***

  A funny thing happens in crisis. Like a window-washing that surprises you with just how gritty things had become, crisis makes things clear.

  You move from thinking to knowing. From reacting to the whirl around you to acting on instinct. From your gut. From the truest, most primal part of yourself.

  And now I know. Less than forty-eight hours to go before the vice presidential debate in Charlotte, I know what I want and what I need to do with startling clarity.

  Mama Bea sits by Trey’s bedside, rocking herself and holding his unmoving hand, singing “You Are My Sunshine,” in a voice hoarse from crying. I sit with her for hours, excusing myself only to pee or to deal with the flood of people who are suddenly very interested in Trey Adams.

  Not because he’s a black guy who got beat up.

  Because he’s part of my team.

  Sasha, to her credit, locks down my office activity, directing everything seamlessly in Trey’s absence and getting me out of a dozen commitments that I really don’t have time to neglect. She makes it possible for me to stop being the candidate for a day and just be family.

  Shep sends flowers and a beautiful note to Mama Bea that makes her cry more.

  Jared’s stuck at the event with Shep in Texas, but he sends blankets, soft and expensive—one each for me, Mama Bea and Trey. He knows we’ll be here overnight. And before I can go down to the hospital cafeteria for rubber chicken or gluey mac and cheese, dinner is delivered—glorious lasagne from Nicolette’s—courtesy of Jared. I text him my appreciation.

  Grace: Thank you. For everything.

  Jared: I know everything isn’t right between us, but never doubt I love you.

  Grace: I didn’t doubt you. I doubted me.

  Jared: Don’t. Because there is nothing in the world that could make me doubt you. You’re exactly who you need to be and everything I want.

  Grace: Everything?

  Jared: Everything but here. I want you here. Better, I want to be there with you. I’m sorry I’ve got nothing but blankets and food to show you I care.

  Grace: Believe me, those go a long way.

  Jared: I’m getting out of Texas as fast as I
can, home to you.

  Grace: Home’s a moving target.

  Jared: Don’t care. So long as you’re there.

  I speak to the hospital staff, call in favors from personnel on the Hill to get Trey’s medical details worked out and then I go speak with Joel’s family.

  While some people deal with grief in sadness, others process with anger. Joel’s father, Martin Butler, is one of the angry ones.

  “My son had no reason to be in that park unless that other guy took him there.” Deep lines around his eyes are laced with hatred and fear.

  “You’re seriously going to blame Trey for this? Joel’s a grown man with his own mind. He could do what he wanted, without coercion.”

  “And look where that got him,” Martin says, jabbing a finger at his son’s prone form. Martin’s wife sniffles by Joel’s bedside, but she won’t speak to or even look at me.

  It’s a breathtaking change from the legions of people who have gone out of their way to fake-nice at me during the last few months of appearances. Even with journalists who are supposed to be objective, I never knew where I stood, never knew if they were buttering me up or trying to take me down a notch.

  I hold up my hands and take a step back toward the door, not wanting to stir the hornets’ nest further. “Look, I think we can all agree that we want justice for whoever did this to our families.”

  Martin snorts. “Families? That’s my son. Who is that black guy to you? Your staff? Are you going to trot this out on the nightly news to show how diverse you are? Lucky you, you’ve got a double whammy—a black gay.”

  “Shut the hell up,” I hiss. “Don’t you dare talk about my friend like that. Trey is as close to a brother as I’ve got and his Mama Bea might as well be my own. I’m here with my family. I’m going to protect my family, not exploit them for political gain.”