“Oh, Cat, yes! I knew you’d understand. But first, tell me you love me. Please, sweetheart. I need to hear you say it. I need to see those perfect lips of yours form the words.”
“With a gun to my head, Colly? Really?”
Colleen giggled. “Oh, sorry! I forgot!”
She pointed the barrel of the gun at the bathroom floor. She took a step back, and Cat came forward, her fingers around the girl’s neck, caressing her skin. She leaned in, her lips breathing warmly on Colleen’s mouth.
“I love you,” Cat said.
“I knew you did. I knew it. Say my name.”
“I love you, Colly.”
“Yes, oh yes, kiss me. Kiss me.”
Colleen closed her eyes, waiting breathlessly, hungrily. Cat brushed her lips against the other girl’s mouth, and Colleen sank backward on weak knees. This was the moment.
With a hand on the girl’s cheek, Cat slammed Colleen’s head into the metal wall of the stall as hard as she could.
Blood flew. Bone cracked. Colleen unleashed a guttural scream of pain and rage.
Cat spun around, unlocked the door of the stall, and ran.
35
Devin Card stared at the unruly crowd, the way he had hundreds of times in his career. The supporters tried to drown out the protesters, and the protesters raised their voices in response. Card tightened the knot in his tie, smiled, waved, and walked from one end of the stage to the other, bending down to shake hands. Town halls fed his ego, regardless of whether people were cheering him or screaming at him, but tonight he was nervous. He wondered if it showed on his face as he sweated under the bright lights.
For the first time in his career, he didn’t know what to say. His entire future hung in the balance in the next few minutes, and the pressure weighed on him. Every word, every expression, every twitch of his mouth or blink of his eyes, would be analyzed and reanalyzed by the press in the months ahead.
Come November, he would either be Senator Devin Card, or Devin Card, private citizen.
Devin Card, rapist.
He stepped up to the microphone in the very center of the stage and held up both hands for quiet, but that didn’t work. The roar became rhythmic chanting. Loyalists shouted his name: “De-vin, De-vin, De-vin, De-vin.” He grinned, soaking it all in. When he glanced to his right, he saw Peter Stanhope and several of his senior aides waiting on the far side of the stage. They smiled back at him and gave him the thumbs up. But they were nervous, too.
“Hello, Duluth!” Card bellowed into the microphone, his voice booming through the convention center.
The crowd wouldn’t let him talk. The noise got louder.
“It’s great to be back home in the Zenith City!” he said, trying again, smiling as the shouts drowned him out. He raised his hands to settle them down, and he repeated his greeting multiple times. It took several minutes before the deafening tumult in the ballroom began to fade, like the keynote at a political convention.
Finally, he had the floor.
“Hello, Duluth!” Card said again, trying to sound casual and relaxed. “And thank you to everyone for showing up here tonight, with your questions, with your encouragement, with your support. And yes, with your opposition, too.”
A small spat broke out in the crowd but was silenced. Card used the pause to focus on the faces nearest to the front of the stage. In his mind, he isolated the women who were the right age and tried to read their eyes. He tried to see what they were thinking as they looked at him. Was she there? Was the woman looking back at him right now? He needed to decide how to react when she stood up and announced herself, and he still didn’t know.
What to do. What to say.
His staff had told him: Wait.
Don’t bring it up. Wait until the woman comes forward. Maybe she won’t show. Maybe this was all a ruse, another chance to change the subject from politics to his past. Until there was a real human being to put a face to the accusation, he should pretend it didn’t exist.
He took a deep breath. He launched into his remarks, using the script his staff had worked up for him. The teleprompter scrolled the words, and he followed the plan.
“An election isn’t about me,” Card told the crowd. “It may be my name on the ballot, but elections are about all of you. They’re about making choices. Making sacrifices. Deciding the kind of life we want for ourselves, for our families, for our friends and neighbors, and figuring out how to lay the groundwork for the next generation. We don’t always agree about the best ways to do that, but that’s okay. As long as we listen to each other, disagreement makes us stronger. Addressing the concerns of our opponents makes our plans better. That’s why I’m here. To talk about those things. To listen to you. To hear what you think, what you have to say, what you like and don’t like, what you’re afraid of, and what you’re excited about.”
Card stopped.
He had a lot more to say, but he let the silence draw out. The teleprompter froze where it was, waiting for him to continue. His staff exchanged uncomfortable glances. So did the people in the crowd. The longer he stood there without speaking, the more people began to shuffle on their feet and wonder what was going.
“Okay, look,” Card told them, going off the prepared script. He took the microphone off its stand and walked to the front of the stage. “Here’s the thing. I really believe elections are about you, but this town hall, right now, right here... well, let’s face it. We all know it’s about me. It’s about an anonymous accusation from back when I was in college. An accusation that I have said over and over is not true. But you’ve seen what they’re saying in the media. So have I. Supposedly, the person who made that accusation is here tonight. Some people have suggested that I should pretend like this situation doesn’t exist, but I’m not going to do that. I want to talk to this woman directly. If you’re here, I invite you to come up here on stage and say what you want to say. Let’s not wait. Let’s deal with this right now.”
People began to look around, and an expectant hush fell across the crowd.
“I get it, you may be reluctant to do that,” Card continued. “I’ve said harsh things about this accusation in the past, and that’s not because I don’t believe women. It’s because politics can be an ugly business. When you’re accused of something but you can’t put a name to the person behind it, well, you start to wonder if it was all made up just to tear you down. Believe me, there are radicals on both sides of the political aisle who will do those things. It happens. Still, I understand. If you’re sincere, if this was a genuine accusation, then you’re probably thinking to yourself: He knows who I am. He knows what he did. All I can tell you is, I really don’t. I’m not diminishing whatever happened to you or saying I don’t believe you, but I think there has been some kind of terrible misunderstanding here, and I’d like to clear it up. This may not be the best forum to do that, but here we are. So if you’re in this room, please, come up and talk to me. You talk, I’ll listen. The stage is yours.”
Devin put the microphone down and looked out across the crowd. He waited.
Everyone waited.
It was now or never.
Stride felt his phone vibrating. He stood on a corner of the stage and backed up into the shadows as he pulled it out. Outside, the storm raged on, lightning flashing on the tall windows, thunder making the building shake. The entire room seemed to be holding its breath.
He checked the caller ID.
“Mags,” he whispered into the phone.
“I’ve been calling you for half an hour and couldn’t get through,” she told him.
“Signal’s terrible. What’s going on?”