Snapdragon (Love Conquers None Book 1)

by Kilby Blades

  “What do you have on him? Video of him protesting for the other side? Pictures of him burning the flag?”

  “Nothing like that,” Shirley shook her head as if to appease Darby rather than to take it as its intended joke. “I don’t know what’s going on between the two of you and I don’t care. But I don’t want you to be blindsided. You should know—there’s been tension between your father’s administration and lobbying efforts that are heavily supported by Dewey and Rowe.”

  Darby’s heartbeat quickened. That was the name of Michael’s firm.

  “It’s getting ugly,” Shirley continued. “The senator needs his neighborhood redevelopment projects on the South Side to look like a sweeping success. He needs to show that he’s delivered on campaign promises. The opposition lobby is fighting him with exactly what you’d expect. They’re calling it the most egregious attempt this city has ever seen at self-serving gentrification.”

  “They’re right.” Darby said impassively. In this case, her hostility toward her father had more to do with the atrocities he was willing to commit as a policymaker than with the atrocities he had committed as a man. Her father’s brand of “neighborhood redevelopment” used public funding to improve housing and amenities to neglected areas while doing nothing to make sure that longtime residents could still afford to live there. She saw the effects of this nearly every day in her work, and even apart from her own observations, the link between drug use and urban displacement was well-understood.

  “They’re winning,” Shirley shot back gently.

  “Which Frank can’t afford right now,” Darby sighed, connecting the dots.

  “All the lobby cares about is changing outcomes for the South Side. They don’t know about his run.”

  Shirley didn’t need to go on for Darby to understand the implications. Under other circumstances, Frank might have negotiated, but he needed to achieve specific outcomes in order to signal his influence and effectiveness with the party. He couldn’t back down. He had to fight and he would do what it took to win.

  “How does Michael play into all this?” Darby asked finally. It didn’t escape her that Michael was from the South Side and that perhaps his involvement was personal. If that was the case, it would explain the linkage between the lobby and Michael’s firm.

  “Dewey and Rowe is known for corporate responsibility. Their track record of partnering with local and indigenous people worldwide across construction project ecosystems is…impeccable,” Shirley admitted, seeming somewhat in awe. “For all of their work, they set conditions—hire for the build from the impacted community and set long-term controls in place to ensure community stability. And they’re sought-after enough to be able to make those kinds of demands. They spend 15% of their work on pro bono projects in the cities where they have offices. Their focus is on helping underserved communities. Michael serves as chair of their corporate responsibility group worldwide.”

  “That doesn’t mean he’s close to the lobbying effort,” Darby pointed out.

  “I’ll admit,” Shirley hedged. “He’s been particularly careful not to criticize the senator directly, which is more than what can be said of other business leaders tied to the lobby.”

  “But?” Darby knew there was a ‘but’.

  “But in a few months, someone will make the connection. Reputable papers will juxtapose the senator’s position with the position of his daughter’s boyfriend. You’ll be asked to comment. Whichever side wins will be accused of making a back room deal. If the senator wins, big future successes for Dewey and Rowe in the city of Chicago will look like his doing.”

  Darby’s lips began to tingle.

  “The longer it drags out, the more of a problem it becomes that he’ll run as part of a national election. Enemies who want to weaken the Republican ticket will pile onto the controversy back here. He’ll be under scrutiny from the party to handle it. And he’ll have to protect his interests. If that happens, you know what he’ll do.”

  Shirley’s words hit Darby like a punch in the gut. But she didn’t dare to speak the words out loud. She didn’t need to.

  He’ll ruin Michael, or his firm, or both.

  It took her long moments to let all of it sank in.

  “We’re not dating, Shirley,” she repeated more weakly that time.

  “But everyone thinks you are,” her friend argued softly. “I know you’ve fought hard to distance yourself from all this. But if you don’t handle it, it’s gonna become a thing.”

  Darby sighed bitterly. Shirley wasn’t giving her a hard time. Everything she was being told was absolutely correct.

  “I’m not getting him involved in this.”

  “He’s already involved. And if you want to protect both of you, get ahead of it. It’s time to come up with a plan.”

  An hour later, Darby was exiting her car, walking heavily up her back steps, toeing off her boots, and walking dejectedly into her kitchen. Though she’d just downed two martinis at the St. Regis, she found her laptop and poured herself a glass of wine.

  She hadn’t thought of Googling Michael in several months—not since her dinner with Ben, not since she’d vowed not to let her curiosity take over. With trepidation, she navigated to a query page and typed ‘Dewey and Rowe south side neighborhood development’ into a Google search. The picture Shirley had painted came to life.

  Most of the articles dated back to months before she and Michael had even met. The majority were feel-good stories about volunteer work the firm was doing in the community. From employee service days spent building playgrounds, to offering pro bono services to rebuild an apartment complex destroyed by fire, to helping business owners make repairs, it was clear that the firm was deeply committed. They must have had a great PR agency as well, because the dozen projects they had done there over the past three years had gotten a lot of press.

  Darby felt an unsettling mixture of pride and betrayal as she read through the articles and watched the video clips. Michael was all over them. She could have guessed that he would be a media darling—in print, his quotes were articulate, on video, he came off as credible and persuasive. But some of the still pictures of him—a dramatic shot of the house he had grown up in rising high behind him, one of him next to railroad tracks with dilapidated buildings all around, a picture of him smiling with neighborhood kids—were stunning. It made for good art—Michael’s sparkling beauty against the backdrop of a shabby, neglected place. The stories humanized these neighborhoods and portrayed Michael very well.

  But she found more than she bargained for. First there were the pictures of Michael raising money for his foundation—the one Ben had alluded to—the one that helped fund art education for underprivileged kids. There were others of Michael and Darby together, but a far greater number of him alone or with people Darby didn’t recognize. She quickly gathered that Michael had been busier than she thought. As she clicked on the events he’d been seen attending without her, she quickly saw that the majority of them were in Chicago. They were precisely the kinds of events she would have expected him to attend—charity auctions and professional functions—they were all recent, and she hadn’t been invited to a single one.

  Reading these articles hurt. Interviews that focused on Michael revealed deep involvement in the community, beyond what his firm was doing. He was clearly the reason why Dewey and Rowe was so active, but it looked as if he had also been investing funds of his own back into the South Side. In a high profile spread for Chicago Magazine, he talked about the first house he had bought back in his old neighborhood—he had completely renovated it, but instead of selling it on the open market, he had sold it back to the tenant on a rent-to-own agreement. Since buying that first property five years before, he had done the same thirteen times. According to the article, he was hailed as a local hero.

  How do I not know this?

  A sick feeling that had started in the pit of her stomach as Darby continued to read now settled there. She remembered Ben mentioning Michael
’s modesty, but it felt like there was a huge part of Michael’s life that she knew absolutely nothing about.

  Her next search—a similar one on her father’s name—found more evidence of what Shirley had told her. The community disliked the senator. Years of bad blood from the days when he was mayor placed him at an automatic disadvantage. And his recent attempts to ingratiate himself to these constituents had fallen flat. At the same time, private initiatives, including those supported by Dewey and Rowe were lobbying against Frank’s plan given his track record. Not only that—they had an alternative plan for neighborhood redevelopment that they seemed in a strong position to pull off even without state funding. And if they did, it would draw attention to her father’s own plan, which would look bloated and ineffective in comparison.

  Her mind went to an unexpected place. A fantasy she hadn’t had in a long time—one that involved being vocal about her own political views and publicly opposing her father—popped into her mind. It occurred to her to make a large donation to support the lobby, and she wondered why she had never considered anything like it before. Darby liked the idea of Frank being defeated. He didn’t care about those people—all Frank wanted was a feather in his cap and another excuse to throw business to his cronies. But Shirley’s words came back to her then.

  You know what he’ll do.

  Darby wasn’t so much afraid for herself as she was for Michael. Frank would never do anything to Darby that shattered the illusion of his happy family. He might do something privately to undercut her, something only she would understand. But he would never do anything that prevented her from leading an ostensibly normal life. Michael was a different story and so was his firm. Dewey and Rowe may have been a multi-national company with influence of its own, but it was no match for the unscrupulous methods of Frank Christensen. She spent the rest of the afternoon trying to figure out what to do next.

  After a restless night of sleep that left her wide awake at six in the morning, Darby decided to take a very long walk to work. The hospital was several neighborhoods away and the weather was predictably frigid. Some part of her wanted this—wanted the harsh conditions to numb the pain, or maybe to jar her out of her befuddled fog.

  She had spent all night trying to talk herself into believing that there could be any good outcome for Michael if he remained with her. By morning, she surrendered to her failure. Because she couldn’t forget—not in her gut, or her heart, or her head—the kinds of things that her father had done to people who had stood in his way before. If Frank seemed to be losing a political fight to someone connected to Darby, it would make him look malleable and weak. It would give him incentives to go beyond fighting the lobby as a whole, to make an example Dewey and Rowe specifically. It would be a signal that nobody—not even somebody close to his own daughter—could undermine his power, and that there would be consequences for anyone who tried.

  But there was more. For as much of a shiny little bubble her relationship with Michael existed in, researching him had caused her to face a hard truth. That she knew only parts of Michael, the parts that he wanted her to see. That the parts of him he wanted her to see were narrower than she’d believed. That there was too much she didn’t know about the man who, for all intents and purposes, she was dating.

  Darby had trouble accepting this. This was a man who had kissed her to within an inch of her life at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve two weeks before. A man who had given her free rein of his apartment. A man who was hiring a private investigator to solve her work problems. A man who was rooting for her. The fact that she had never pressed him to share anything he didn’t want to rarely made her feel that she didn’t know him. But the truth was, she didn’t. And the worst part of all of this was that he knew her.

  He knew all her problems with Huck, and about her strained relationship with her father. He had met her friends, and been to her work functions and visited her at her job. He knew about her grief over her dead mother and had given her one of the most cathartic experiences of her life when he’d taken her to the Art Institute. Later that night, he had tasted every inch of her body. When it came to Darby, Michael knew everything.

  The thought was crippling, not only because it called into question everything they shared, but because it challenged their agreement. They had said that when it got too complicated, when someone grew feelings or things got even just a little bit messy, that one of them would pull the plug.

  Now, here she was, feeling wounded about being left out of parts of Michael’s life that he had never agreed to share, feeling guilty about being the reason her father would come down so hard on his firm. This wasn’t what either of them had signed up for. And she couldn’t deny it anymore. The day to end it had come.

  Now, all she had to do was say it.

  Snapdragon.

  Darby tapped out the word on the screen of her phone, punctuating it with a period, as if to underscore just how final it was. Her fingers still felt stiff and frozen from having spent so much time outside. She stood at the busy corner of Michigan and Chicago Avenues. People rushed by her as she stood still, having ignored the crossing signal that had already told her to walk three times. Her thumb itched. In an instant, it would be over, if only she pressed ‘send’.

  But it felt wrong. Even though stopping things in exactly this way was what they had agreed to, it suddenly seemed like the stupidest idea Darby had ever had. She knew they couldn’t be together anymore, but she didn’t want to sever ties to him either. Even if this was getting messy, it didn’t mean she never wanted to see him again.

  Her thumb moved, but not to the ‘send’ button, to the backspace key. She erased the word completely and tapped out something different, something that wouldn’t throw away what they had together as if it were trash, something that felt more humane.

  We need to talk.

  She cringed, because that sounded awful, too. But there was no elegant way to do this. And she could do this. She had to do this. And with just a little bit more courage, she would.

  She pocketed her phone again and finally crossed Chicago Avenue, telling herself she could at least wait for a decent hour before she sent the text. Michael was in Sydney, where it would be midnight. She would wait until the next day. But not a full minute after she’d resumed walking, her phone buzzed in her pocket. When she pulled it out, she saw that it was him.

  Stopped again, now on the sidewalk, she stared at her phone, not knowing what to do. Not knowing what she was feeling, but knowing she wasn’t ready to face him, she slipped the phone back into her pocket. It was the very first time she had ignored his call.

  “Hey.” He breathed the words in a tone that sounded relieved as he pulled her into his arms for a very long hug. Even through both of their heavy coats, his warmth reached her. She had suggested that they take a walk on the running path on Lake Shore Drive at the entry point closest to his building. Tears stung her eyes from how good he felt, how much like home he smelled, and from the realization this might be the last time.

  “Hey.” She managed a weak smile. She could tell that she didn’t fool him. His plane had landed two hours earlier. After her vague text and her refusal to discuss what was on her mind over the phone, he’d insisted on meeting as soon as he got back into town.

  He took her hand and they began to walk south, toward the empty marina.

  “Sorry,” she said with genuine regret, knowing that she should say something. “I didn’t mean to alarm you, but I thought we should talk face-to-face.”

  “What’s going on?” His question was cautious. It took her a minute to answer.

  “There’s a lot we don’t talk about, isn’t there?”

  “So, let’s talk,” he replied after taking in her words. That was Michael. Perfectly reasonable. Perfectly rational. Ever-approachable. But they weren’t going to be able to talk their way out of this. “What happened?”

  “My father happened,” she said, steeling herself. “He’s going to announce anoth
er run. They’ve already started to pry into your business—”

  “Who’s they?” he interrupted gently.

  “So far, it’s my father’s research team,” she explained evenly. It took effort to calm her voice. “They’re stress testing what would come out as part of a real campaign.”

  “And they found something on me?” he asked, sounding almost amused. “I’m a boy scout.”

  “A boy scout whose work in South Side neighborhood development has been so effective that it’s threatening the senator’s campaign.”

  He stopped walking but his hand stayed firm on hers.

  “It’s getting complicated,” she said, launching into the speech that she had carefully prepared.

  “Is it a problem for you that I’m on a different side than your father’s?”

  “No, it’s not that,” she said. “You know I am, too.”

  “Then it’s not complicated.” He resumed walking.

  “He needs this win. He’ll do anything to get it. Even if it means blackballing his daughter’s boyfriend’s firm.” She could see his surprise at the use of that word. “He’ll make sure that projects Dewey and Rowe touches never get another building permit again, and that all of your construction and engineering partners refuse to do business with you. It’ll get you off his back and it will send a signal to everyone else who’s boss.”

  But Michael shook his head.

  “He’s an incumbent senator with a weak democratic opponent. This issue isn’t big enough to be a threat to his reelection. He’s already won it. He doesn’t need to play hardball on this.”

  This time it was Darby who stopped. “I only said he’s running…not that he’s running for re-election.”

  His confusion was only momentary. Soon understanding dawned on Michael’s face.