Page 79 of The Senator: Raphael

“She can always say she lost them and have new ones made. It’s not rocket science,” he spits, and for the first time I don’t recognize my best friend. He’s mean and angry, and it has nothing to do with my campaign.

“Stop the car!” I shout at Dave who looks puzzled but finds a spot to safely park.

“What are you doing?” Matthew asks as I bend over him, struggling to reach the door handle and open it.

“Get out of my car. I don’t know what your problem is, but I don’t want you here,” I hiss, and he looks at me wide-eyed.

“We’re miles away from the office! Are you crazy?”

“If you keep talking like that about Silver, I don’t want you near me, or her.”

“It’s fake, Raphael. Did you forget that this is all a fake relationship, a fake wedding? Did you miss that memo?” he hisses angrily in my face as Dave turns around, unbuckling his seatbelt, ready to intervene if this fight escalates to something more physical. He has no idea how close I am to punching Matthew in the face right now.

“It doesn’t feel fake to me!” I shout in confession, and this shuts him up.

We stay silent for a long moment and Matthew lower his gaze to his lap. “I know,” he whispers. “Trust me, that I know.”

“So, why are you fighting it so much? Why are you pushing her away?” My voice comes out broken.

He takes a deep, long breath and then raises his face to the ceiling, resting his head on the headrest. “Because I loved Kelsey and Alba, and you’re forgetting them,” he confesses, breaking my heart.

“It’s been fifteen years, Matthew. Fifteen years. You can’t stop living for that long. At some point, you have to move on.” The pleading in my voice is loud and clear.

“It hurts. It hurts to move on. It seems like everything we worked for these fifteen years, all the plans we made to do good, are losing their meaning. We had a purpose, we wanted justice for Kelsey and Alba, and we wanted it on a completely other level. We wanted to change the world,” he says quietly.

“The plan hasn’t changed. We still want to change the world.”

“Now you have Silver.” He looks at me for the first time and I see the defeat in his eyes.

“So what? That doesn’t change the fact that we’re going forward with our plan. If anything, she can help us carry it out. She has pretty strong motivation to give us a hand,” I point out.

He nods and smiles sadly. “Yeah, she’s pretty cool,” he admits, and I finally understand where his anger is coming from.

Matthew, like Harrison and me, is still hung up on a past that haunts us after fifteen years. We were a tight group; we grew up together, and when Kelsey and Alba died, they took a little part of us that never came back. Every one of us copes in our own way. Matthew doesn’t like the fact that things are changing. We’ve been so stuck in this loop of chasing our dream, we didn’t notice life was going on around us.

Silver did this for me. She forced me to look outside that loop and find other ways to reach my goal. But Matthew is still there, stuck in that reality, running in circles like a hamster unable to jump out of that wheel he’s comfortable with. And when he didn’t see me on that wheel next to him, he lost his balance and stumbled out into a world that’s different, and in some aspects, scary.

I failed Matthew. I failed to save him in the ways I’m trying to save everyone else, and my heart bleeds for him.

***

I enter the Hunting Club and head to the cigar room. It’s noon, but when I called Harrison, Aaron, and Leonard, they immediately dropped everything they were doing and booked the room for a private event. I don’t often ask to meet them in the middle of the day, not wanting to take advantage of their time and friendship.

I sit down on the leather armchair under their worried scrutiny.

“Silver disappeared yesterday,” I blurt out.

They stare at me in silence, like I just told them I killed someone. No one talks for several minutes and I’m almost worried they didn’t hear me or I didn’t say it out loud.

“What do you mean she disappeared? How? Why?” Harrison is the first to break the silence.

“Yesterday morning she walked out of our home and didn’t come back,” I announce, and then I explain everything that’s happened since the beginning. How I met her, the proposal, the sex, everything I’ve hidden from them.

They suspected something was going on but say nothing. Besides Harrison, who already knew most of the details of the situation, they listen to my story, eyes wide and perfectly still, gripping their glasses of liquor and taking in every crazy detail.

“Fuck,” Leonard breathes out after I finish. “Fuck,” he repeats without adding anything else.

It’s rare when he has much to say. But very few things render him completely speechless, and apparently this is one of them. He’s always calm and collected, accustomed to functioning in high levels of stress and nothing unsettles him.

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