His hand shook once.
“You happy?” I asked.
He put the pen down.
“No.”
“You spent two weeks trying to make me quit.”
“I spent two weeks trying to find out whether you would make bad decisions because you wanted this too much.”
I laughed bitterly.
“Congratulations.”
He took that without flinching.
“Yes,” he said. “Congratulations to me.”
That was not the answer I expected.
He sat across from me.
“I crossed lines with you.”
I looked up.
“Which ones? There were a few.”
His mouth tightened.
“The comments about you occupying a man’s position. The mommy garbage. None of that was instruction. It was me deciding humiliation was useful because I survived it when I was a candidate.”
“You think?”
“I know.”
He rubbed both hands over his face.
“And then today I was on my knees with a shotgun against my head, hoping the candidate I’d spent two weeks calling weak was somewhere in the trees.”
I said nothing.
“You didn’t hesitate.”
Seattle pressed against my ribs.
“I did before.”
“Not today.”
“That doesn’t erase before.”
“No. It doesn’t.”
For the first time, I understood that Vance was not offering me the cheap gift I had secretly wanted: a declaration that Seattle no longer mattered because I had succeeded once.
He was refusing to lie to me.
