Page 8 of Swerve
“And go where?”
“I have a place.”
“Why doesn’t that surprise me?”
She holds his look then, as if acknowledging the next play is his.
He removes her hand from the front of his pants, holds it for a moment in clear indecision. She pins his gaze, as if she knows he is wavering.
He laces their fingers together. She smiles and says, “Follow me.”
At the door, she drops his hand, and they walk through the lobby, two people simply going in the same direction. Until they reach the taxi. He opens the door, and she slides in, giving the driver the address.
He hesitates, and there is a moment when they both recognize it as an opportunity to change their minds. “By the way, I’m Savannah.”
“Knox,” he says.
“Come,” she says.
His life has already included a very long string of turning point moments. He realizes this could be one of them. But he also has ample evidence of the fact that doing the right thing doesn’t guarantee a good outcome. He’s all but sure it doesn’t make any difference at all. And without giving himself time to reconsider, he gets in, and the taxi speeds off down the city street.
The Senator
“The universe is a vast system of exchange. Every artery of it is in motion, throbbing with reciprocity, from the planet to the rotting leaf.”
—Edwin Hubbel Chapin
TOM HAGAN WATCHES the video of his wife getting into the taxi, noting the tall, wide-shouldered man getting in behind her. Ex-military. You could spot it a mile away. It wasn’t just the build or the haircut. It was the way he held himself, straight, alert, as if he’d prepared his entire life to sense when danger was around the next corner.
He plays it through again, noting the smile of invitation on his wife’s face, then sends a text to the assistant who had messaged him the video.
Find out who he is.
A second later:
On it.
One o’clock in the morning, and he’s wide awake. He sits down at the desk in the middle of the Hart Senate Office Building and pulls a bottle of Glenfiddich from the side drawer. He picks up a glass from the round tray at the corner of the desk and pours himself two inches.
The single malt Scotch burns going down, but he relishes the sensation and the alcohol’s almost immediate ability to smooth the edges of his anger.
Does he have a right to be angry?
By a normal husband’s expectations, yes.
But then he isn’t exactly a normal husband. Hasn’t been for a very long time. And they don’t exactly have a normal marriage.
Although it had started out that way.
They’d met in college, both in law school at the University of Virginia. He’d gone to undergrad on an academic scholarship and used college loans to get his law degree. She’d attended as the daughter of one of the university’s most noted donors, her family name featured on a plaque on one of the academic buildings.
They’d had absolutely nothing in common other than a passion for the club where they’d met, theVirginia Law Democrats. They’d met at a meeting where students had volunteered to work on a pro bono case for an undocumented family facing deportation. Until that point, their lives could not have appeared more different.
He takes another sip of his Scotch, remembering how passionate they’d both been about winning that case, how it had planted the seed for his own desire to get into politics where he could actually make a difference in the laws that affected such things.
And God, she’d been beautiful. Fresh and full of life. He remembers the first time he realized she was flirting with him. How he’d hardly been able to believe it. Because why would a girl born to everything she’d been born to even look at him?
She’d told him later that it was his passion for the law and his desire to right the wrongs that other people accepted as part of life. By other people she meant the family she had rebelled against, the father she hadn’t spoken to in a year.
