him nothing but kindness. The notion that he’s complicated Mrs. Fitz’s life, that he has somehow tarnished her reputation, that he may have betrayed her faith in him—these accusations burn the blood around his heart. He takes a deep breath, struggles to cool his rage. It is the same rage he felt at the peg-legged man, at his gleeful colleagues, at her decision to reassign Indianapolis, but, if he’s being honest, it’s mostly the rage he feels toward himself.
Mrs. Fitz, seventy-something years old, her pantsuit the shade of red wine, wastes no time. “Our internal polling had your candidate ahead by twelve points. Twelve points. You could have won in a landslide. And, bright boyo that you are, you decide to do what? You decide to run up the score. To go after the opponent’s family. For the love of God, what could’ve possibly possessed you?” When Mrs. Fitz gets angry, she prefers to ask and answer her own questions. Andre adores this about her. “I’ll tell you what possessed you. Your pride. You wanted bragging rights. Wanted to come back here a hero, to strut around this office like—”
“Excuse me, ma’am. My ego is not that fragile.”
“Don’t interrupt me again,” she says. “And your ego is precisely that fragile.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I know you want to make junior partner,” she says. “I want that too. But when you make reckless mistakes like this, you don’t make it easy. I mean really, Dre. Really. Thoughtless. Lighting a fire that you couldn’t extinguish. Did you not think of that? No.”
She throws up her hands, plops into the chair beside his desk. He worries about the strain that creases her face. When he’s her age, he’ll have the good sense to retire. She’s accomplished so much, a trailblazing career: aide to Bobby Kennedy, counsel to Teddy, deputy White House chief of staff—then there are the six sons she’s raised and the two husbands she’s buried. She should be living in Miami, angry at squirrels that invade her bird feeder. Instead she runs a political consulting firm that bears her name, trying her best to get the right people elected, she says, comfortable with the reality that she’ll get the wrong people elected along the way.
He says, “I’ll clear out of here in an hour.”
She dismisses his resignation with a wave.
“I don’t want to cause you any more trouble.”
“If you didn’t want to cause me trouble, you wouldn’t have hashed it up in the first place.”
“Ma’am, I know. I—”
“Stop trying to be noble,” she says. “It’s tacky.”
Andre reads her expression, and, for the first time, he clearly sees the predicament. He suspects she’s already called around town, trying to find solid ground, a comfortable place for her protégé to land. But finding him another job, he now recognizes, presents challenges even beyond her influence. To begin with, she has few friends among the Republicans who control both the White House and each chamber of Congress. But even if she could find a quiet, out-of-the-way post—a press secretary to a friendly senator, an advisor to a politically ambitious NGO—she still would have to convince the firm’s two other founding partners not to invoke the ironclad noncompete, the clauses of which would prohibit Andre, for one federal election cycle, from lobbying, campaigning, or pursuing any paid political activity, a nebulous phrase whose meaning could be decided only by an arbitrator of the firm’s choosing. And if, by some miracle, she overcame the arbitration obstacle, a herculean task at which others have tried and failed, he’d still be a thirty-five-year-old black man with a criminal record, four felonies the court long ago sealed but that still appear each time he Googles his own full name. Toussaint Andre Ross. He sits behind his desk, changes his socks. “So what do we do?”
She points toward a manila envelope on his desk: Carthage County.
He skims the executive summary: $250,000 in dark money to pass a ballot initiative in the boondocks of South Carolina. Secret corporate-financed campaigns keep this firm afloat, but everything about this specific assignment is offensive: the puny budget, the insignificant location, the utter lack of prestige. Worst of all, no bonus if he wins. And though he knows this assignment is beneath him, Andre will not be ungrateful. He realizes that to save his career, his patron has had to horse-trade, sacrificing something she valued to soothe the angst of others. So, for her, he will not whine; he will not complain; he will not act like a