The Measure(23)

At church the following Sunday, they gave thanks for their good fortune and asked for guidance on the long campaign ahead. Katherine even wore her lucky suit—a crimson skirt and matching blazer that complemented the color of Anthony’s favorite tie and made her look like a young Nancy Reagan. It was the same outfit she had worn on the cold morning in January when Anthony had been sworn into Congress, and the same one she sultrily peeled off whenever the two of them role-played as Mr. and Mrs. President in bed.

As the man at the pulpit assured his congregation that God would lead them through this tumultuous time, and Katherine dutifully nodded along, Anthony sent up a prayer of his own—that their two long strings were just the beginning, a harbinger of even greater things to come.



Throughout March and April and May, Anthony’s small campaign staff continued to canvass and tweet and poll voters, while most of the world was busy deciding how to react to the irrevocable changes around them. And, despite the underwhelming turnouts, Anthony insisted on continuing his rallies and engagements. (After all, it was his wife’s family signing most of the checks.)

Anthony had married his college sweetheart, Katherine Hunter, on her family’s three-hundred-acre estate in Virginia nearly twenty-five years earlier, when he was just a young prosecutor in the District Attorney’s Office and she was a new board member of the Daughters of the American Revolution, both equally hungry for something bigger.

And now they were on the cusp of it.

Anthony and Katherine didn’t have any children, but ever since the campaign’s kickoff back in February, members of the Hunter family had attended nearly all of Anthony’s events. (It was especially helpful whenever Katherine could convince her camera-shy nephew, Jack Hunter, to appear with them onstage, sporting the crisp-cut uniform of a twenty-two-year-old army cadet and reminding voters just how strongly Anthony supported the troops.)

But even with the Hunters’ help, Anthony knew his campaign was still struggling to be heard over the commotion of the strings and the voices of the better-known candidates, and as the spring pressed on, Anthony waited for something, anything. The catalyst his campaign desperately needed.

At the end of May, he got it.

One of the campaign volunteers, an older woman named Sharon, told her supervisor that she needed to speak with Anthony and Katherine directly.

When they gathered in an office, Sharon explained that her daughter attended college with Wes Johnson, Jr., the nineteen-year-old son of Ohio senator Wes Johnson, Sr., who happened to be the candidate currently polling just ahead of Anthony.

“Small world,” said Katherine, intrigued.

“Well, my daughter is friends with Wes Junior’s girlfriend, and that’s how she heard Wes’s father is close to the end of his string,” Sharon said. “Wes is devastated. The son, not the father. Although I imagine the father must be devastated, too.”

Anthony’s eyes narrowed, already running through the options in his head. “Obviously that’s terrible news,” he said soberly.

“Tragic,” said Katherine.

“But we appreciate you sharing it with us.” Anthony shook Sharon’s hand.

Once Sharon and her supervisor left, Katherine turned to her husband. “I don’t know about you, but I think we have a duty to inform our fellow citizens that if they elect Wes Johnson as president, he may very well die in office.”

“We’ll have to tread carefully here,” Anthony cautioned. “But once this gets out, Wes will surely have to withdraw.”

Katherine wrapped her arms gleefully around her husband’s waist. “You were right, honey,” she said. “God’s on our side.”





Ben




Ben was finally able to concentrate on work again.

Perhaps his friend Damon was right, and the support group had given him the outlet he needed, a way to compartmentalize his life. On Sunday nights, Ben was a short-stringer, but from Monday to Friday, safe inside the glass walls of his office, he was still the rising architect he had always been before the boxes arrived.

On Monday morning, Ben walked past the scale model of the university science center, soon to break ground, and he sat down in his private office with all the trappings of success: the ergonomic chair, the adjustable-height desk, the view from the twenty-seventh floor. Ben had a team of eager young architects working underneath him, hoping to become him in five years’ time. And everything he had done to get to this place—drilling the multiplication tables in the kitchen with his dad, leaving the bar before ten p.m. to finish grad school applications, even the many hours he spent alone with his childhood sketchbook—had all been worth it. If Ben had been asked in an interview where he wanted to be by age thirty, this would have been his answer.

But it was strange for this one piece of Ben’s life to feel so together, triumphant even, while the rest of his life had crumbled. The top of his desk still felt bare, now that the framed photo of him with Claire wasn’t sitting there anymore. Sometimes Ben thought he saw the phantom picture at the edge of his vision: the two of them smiling, naively, on the pier at Coney Island.

Ben leaned under his desk and pulled out a sheet of paper from the inner sleeve of his briefcase, pressing it between his thumbs. It was the letter that he and Maura had discovered at the back of the classroom the night before, with the mysterious reply from “A.”