A Special Place for Women, Laura Hankin [brene brown rising strong .txt] 📗

and we stared at each other for a moment before he turned aside and stuck his arm out for a taxi.

“We need to forget this happened,” he said. “Please.” I nodded dumbly, and then a cab pulled up. “Look, you take this home and go to bed.” He opened the door for me, and I scooted inside. Before he shut the door, he leaned against it for a moment. “We just stayed out too late and got too drunk, that’s all.”

“Yeah,” I said.

He closed the door. I gave the driver my address and we pulled away. I watched out the window as we sped down the street, Miles growing small, then indistinguishable behind us.

•   •   •

Now, a month later, as Miles stood up to go, I looked down at my notebook in a panic. We’d made a mistake, but he was my one contact. And we could keep things professional, if only I had something worth changing his mind. I flipped some pages—hadn’t I had a million ideas over the last few weeks?—and looked at my ramblings from the subway the other night, after Raf’s opening. Raf’s going to get eaten alive at Margot’s party, I’d written in a near illegible scrawl.

“Nevertheless!” I blurted.

Miles paused, in the midst of buttoning his peacoat. “What?”

I squared my shoulders. “I have an in at Nevertheless.”

He furrowed his brow and gave his head a little shake, as if to clear it. “How?”

“I met Margot Wilding at my friend’s restaurant opening. We bonded, because she lost a parent too. She basically begged me to come to this party she’s having this week, where all her Nevertheless cronies will be.” The words were coming faster now, a flood of bullshit that I almost believed myself. Miles slowly sat back down. “I could . . . infiltrate. Get invited to join, and then report from the inside.”

“You can’t just sign up like it’s a membership to Costco. They only invite the elite. No offense. So how exactly are you planning to infiltrate?”

“I can make up some influential aunt who was on the feminist frontlines, or some project I have in the works that’s going to make my name, and get my fancy restaurant friend to back me up on it.”

“And if they do any kind of Google search on you, they’ll know you work in media, and run in the other direction. They’d never invite a journalist. They probably think we’d sell out all their secrets. Which is fair.”

“I’m not in media anymore, buddy.” I crossed my arms and sat back, cocking an eyebrow coolly. “After getting so unceremoniously let go, I’m disillusioned and using my talents in other fields from here on out.”

He laughed, almost against his will. “I’m not sure how convincing that will be.”

“Wouldn’t you love to know what that clubhouse looks like on the inside? Who’s a member? Wouldn’t the readers eat up ten thousand words about the way that these women put on a performance of concerned feminism while walling themselves off from any real risks because of their privilege? The hypocrisy of them all, saying that they need a safe space just for women while excluding all the women who need sisterhood the most?”

“Sure, that sounds interesting. But it also sounds high risk for potentially low reward, a little too ambitious—”

“What if I could prove that they’re the ones who brought down Nicole Woo-Martin?”

He got very still. “What do you mean?” It was difficult to talk about Nicole even now. The disappointment stung, like a cut that hadn’t scabbed over yet. She was supposed to be a hero, an icon, to do a term or two as mayor and then run for president. Instead, she’d fallen off the grid, walking in the woods somewhere, thinking about all that she’d lost.

Because shortly after Nicole started making moves to enact her most ambitious policy plan—a wealth tax on the city’s richest residents—a bombshell dropped: she’d been having an affair with one of her staffers, a twenty-five-year-old boy with the face of a Kennedy (John) and the common sense of a Kennedy (Ted). It was a terrible abuse of power, particularly from someone who was supposed to be so good.

Still, she might have been able to come back from that. Other politicians had. Maybe, just maybe, she’d exercised poor judgment, but the two of them had been truly in love.

The publication of their text messages put the nail in her coffin. The most explosive ones received endless coverage. Everyone read Nicole’s dirty talk. And everyone read Nicole’s threats. You should stay away from those women, Nicole had texted the staffer, or you’ll get yourself into trouble. She’d sent him a few variations on that theme: Seriously, are you going to see her again? I wouldn’t if I were you.

At first, Nicole claimed that she was making a reference to something they’d discussed in person, that she was trying to protect him from getting mixed up in some “bad crowd.” But the staffer solemnly denied it. She was threatening his job, he said, if he paid attention to other women. After that, she had no choice but to resign.

“Those text messages she sent, the threatening ones,” I said to Miles. “They just came out of nowhere and never felt quite right, did they?”

“Well, no,” he said.

The unabridged text messages made the rounds among journalists, and I’d read them all. Miles had too. Before the threats, everything was endearments, banter, and yes, the aforementioned dirty talk. And after the first threat, the staffer had written hah, okay, and then they’d gotten right back to banter. It was totally possible that he was just protecting himself, sure, but there was another piece of it that had never sat quite right with me.

“Do you remember her tweet? The one she deleted almost immediately?” I asked Miles.

As the scandal was unfolding, Nicole had tweeted, Forces are trying to stop our promise of change. Nevertheless. Despite unfounded rumors, I will keep fighting for you. A photo accompanied the text—Nicole beaming at that Women Who