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

Lead gala Miles and I had gone to. In the background, Margot Wilding and Caroline Thompson, the Women Who Lead founder, watched Nicole, their faces partially in shadow.

I’d screenshot it at the time and sent it to Miles, mostly because we’d been there when the photo was taken. But that meant we were two of the only people to notice when she took down the tweet, only a minute after putting it up.

“Nicole never made typos, never used a period when she meant to use a comma,” I said to him.

“Well,” he said, shrugging. “That’s probably why she deleted it, then.”

“Right, maybe she wanted to correct her mistake. But then why, when she put up the new tweet, did she leave out the word Nevertheless and change the picture?” I’d screenshot her revision too, thinking it was strange, and now I pulled up the screenshots on my phone, flipping between the two of them so that Miles could see. The later tweet simply said: Forces are trying to stop our promise of change. Despite unfounded rumors, I will keep fighting for you. The picture that accompanied it was one of Nicole alone, no Margot or Caroline in sight.

He rubbed his chin, momentarily stumped. Miles didn’t get stumped very often. I felt a thrill that I could go toe-to-toe with him like that.

“Why would they want to hurt her, though?” he asked. “The rumors were that they handpicked her for mayor.”

“The affair came out soon after she announced that the main focus of her administration was going to be closing the wealth gap, right?” I said. During the campaign, Nicole’s wealth tax had been just one part of her broad policy platform, easy enough to overlook. My mother had rejoiced at Nicole’s announcement, imagining that maybe their conversation at our door, when she’d told an empathetic Nicole about medical bills screwing us over, had played into the decision. I went on. “Maybe they realized that she was actually going to do something about taxing the rich, and they wanted to protect themselves.”

Miles leaned forward, speaking very quietly. “You really think you could find some evidence for that?”

“I have no fucking idea,” I said. “But this is my chance to try.”

“It’s very flimsy, Beckley,” he said. “Basically a conspiracy theory.”

“Oh, absolutely,” I said. “But every so often, conspiracy theories turn out to be true. Besides, what do you lose if I just try to get into the club and see what happens?” He hesitated. “There’s something going on there,” I continued. “Something bad. I can feel it.”

He chewed on his lip. He wanted to believe, just like I did, that Nicole was simply human, instead of a monster. “An undercover operation would be very difficult.”

“You think that, after the last two years, difficult things faze me in the slightest? I eat difficult for breakfast. Besides,” I said, and stared him right in his beautiful blue eyes, “I can be very persuasive when I want to be. People end up liking me, more than they’re supposed to.”

He stared back. Then he ran his hands through his hair, leaving it sticking up in tufts. “Well, yeah,” he said. “If you could get us something on Nevertheless, of course I would want it.” He shook his head and laughed again in spite of himself. He had that expression on his face that he got whenever someone brought him something that really woke him up, a jazzed, unrestrained grin.

I floated on a wave of adrenaline as he told me to send him a written proposal as soon as I could and waved good-bye. I practically danced down the street as I headed to the subway, resisting the temptation to twirl around lampposts and throw my arms around strangers. This was the kind of story that could help me catch back up and make my name, that could catapult me to a life of credibility and regular assignments, a life where I could finally be happy.

It wasn’t until after I texted Raf that we needed to talk about Margot’s party that I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, wondering how the hell I was going to pull it off.

FOUR

I went to Raf’s apartment in Bushwick the next morning, bearing donuts and coffee, shaky from three hours of sleep. Even under normal circumstances, sleep often eluded me—my mind ping-ponged around from my Greatest Hits of past social miscalculations to my anxieties about the future. And planning to break into an exclusive club wasn’t exactly “normal circumstances.”

“Wow,” Raf said when he opened the door, rubbing the sleepies from his eyes, with gravel in his voice. “Breakfast? What have I done to deserve this?”

“It’s what you’re going to do, I hope,” I said, and he raised an eyebrow, wary. “On the one hand, I need roughly twenty favors. But on the other hand, these donuts are very good.”

“I guess you should come in and sit down,” he said as he took a coffee and knocked back half of it in one swig.

I followed him into his combined kitchen/living room area. His apartment didn’t yet hint at the celebrity he was becoming. No fancy, expensive art on the walls, just photos of his family and a few vintage posters of musicians like David Bowie. (In high school, Raf taught himself guitar. He refused to perform in front of anyone, though, so I didn’t know if he was terrible or a virtuoso.) For a chef, he had a surprisingly small amount of counter space, but then Raf saved his fancy cooking for work and whipped up elaborate meals at home only if he was trying to impress a date. Otherwise, he made himself peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. The couch we flopped onto was the same one he’d bought for his first apartment after college. I put the donuts on the same coffee table we’d been putting our feet up on for years. Someday, Raf would be forced