Chapter 2: Late Night Confessions
The study was a pocket of quiet rebellion against the storm. Here, the thunder was a muffled growl behind thick walls and layers of books. The air smelled of old paper, polished oak, and the faint, clean scent of the lemon oil used on the furniture. Leia hovered near the door, her portfolio a rigid shield against her chest.
“Sit,” Governor Pritzker said, not looking up from her memo. He was scribbling in the margin with a red pen. “Anywhere.”
She chose the worn leather armchair by the bookshelf, tucking her feet beneath her. The chair enveloped her, its creaks comfortable. She watched him read, her own words being absorbed line by line. It was more intimate than she’d expected. Her stomach tightened.
He finished a page, flipped it. “The 2019 waiver precedent. Your interpretation is aggressive. The legal counsel will hate it.”
Her heart sank. “I know. But it’s correct. The statute is poorly worded, and the legislative intent from the committee hearings supports a broader application. They were sloppy. We can use that.”
He glanced up, a flicker of amusement in his eyes. “We?”
Heat bloomed on her neck. “The office, I mean.”
He hummed, returning to the memo. A particularly violent crack of lightning lit the room in a sudden, blue-white flash. Leia flinched, her fingers digging into the leather arms. The subsequent thunder was a physical punch against the building.
His eyes lifted again, noting her reaction. He laid the pen down. “Tell me about the first placement. The one you reference in the third footnote. The sibling separation.”
The question was so direct it stole her breath. It wasn’t asked with therapist-grade gentleness. It was the question of a policy maker who needed to understand the mechanism of a broken system. It demanded the truth.
She looked at the fire, its embers pulsating like a heartbeat. “I was seven. Me and my brother, Ben. He was nine. They said it was temporary. A thirty-day emergency hold.” Her voice was flat, rehearsed from a thousand invisible retellings in her own head. “The social worker had a cold. She kept sniffing. She promised. Thirty days. They put us in separate cars. I watched his car turn left. Mine went right. I never saw him again.”
The room was silent save for the rain and the soft hiss of the fire.
“What happened to him?” JB’s voice was quiet, steady.
“Aged out. Maybe. The file said ‘whereabouts unknown’ when I was adopted. My parents tried to find him later.” She shrugged, a small, helpless movement. “The data point you’re looking for is on page twelve. Sixty-three percent of temporary sibling separations become permanent due to administrative backlog and funding per child. The thirty-day promise is a statistical lie.”
He didn’t write it down. He just looked at her, his face grave. “I’m sorry that happened to you, Leia.”
“Don’t be.” The words came out sharper than she intended. She softened them. “Sorry doesn’t fix it. Policy fixes it. That’s why the waiver structure is key. It keeps the funding stream attached to the sibling group, not the individual child. It makes bureaucracy work for them, not against them.”
A slow smile touched his lips, though his eyes remained serious. “You’re terrifying, you know that?”
She blinked. “What?”
“Nineteen. And you’ve weaponized your own trauma into a legislative strategy so efficient it’s borderline cruel. In a good way.” He leaned back, the chair groaning. “Marcus couldn’t have conceived of this if he’d studied for a decade. He doesn’t have the vocabulary for this kind of pain.”
The mention of Marcus was a cold splash. “What happens to him?”
“He’s no longer an intern in this office. Effective immediately.” JB stated it as simple fact. “The Chief of Staff is dealing with it. He’ll get a letter of completion, no recommendation. A soft landing, but an exit.”
Leia absorbed this. No drama. No scene. Just a quiet excision. The justice of it was clean, surgical, and left her feeling oddly empty. The monster wasn’t slain; he was just shown the door.
“You’re not celebrating,” he observed.
“It doesn’t feel like winning. It just feels… late.”
“Most justice does.”
He picked up the memo again, turning to the appendix. “These executive order drafts. The second one. It’s more viable, but it’s political dynamite. It would bypass the legislative ethics committee.”
“It would also get shelters heated within six months instead of two years,” she fired back, leaning forward. “You can use the emergency infrastructure clause from the 2021 disaster relief act. It’s not a perfect fit, but it’s a legal crowbar. And sometimes you need a crowbar.”
He laughed, a real, surprised sound that warmed the room. “A crowbar. Christ.” He rubbed his forehead. “You see why I can’t have you hidden away fetching coffee? You’re a secret weapon.”
The compliment settled in her, warm and solid. “So use it.”
Another lightning flash. This one closer. The thunder was instantaneous, a deafening detonation that shook the windowpanes. Leia gasped, jerking backward into the chair, her eyes slamming shut. For a split second, she was seven again, in a strange, dark room, counting the seconds between flash and bang, utterly alone.
When she opened her eyes, he was there.
He had moved from behind the desk and was now perched on the oak coffee table in front of her chair, close. Not touching. His presence was a wall between her and the window.
“Breathe, Leia,” he said, his voice low, the same anchor from the elevator. “It’s just sound. It can’t hurt you in here.”
“I know that,” she whispered, frustrated, her hands trembling in her lap. “I know it.”
“Knowing isn’t feeling.” He hesitated, then reached out. His hand, broad and warm, covered both of hers where they were clenched together on her knee. The touch was deliberate, firm, a grounding wire. “Feel this instead. The room is solid. The fire is hot. My hand is here.”
The shock of the contact was absolute. It wasn’t paternal. It was focused, intense. She could feel the slight roughness of his skin, the strength in his grip. Her breath hitched, but the panic ebbed, receding like a tide pulled by the gravity of that single point of contact. Her gaze locked on their hands, then travelled up to his face. He was watching her, his expression unreadable, a quiet storm in his own right.
The moment stretched, thickened. The crackle of the fire was loud. The rain softened to a steady drum.
He should have let go. He didn’t.
“You have a picture of my journal,” she said suddenly, the words tumbling out to break the silence.
His thumb shifted, a barely perceptible movement against her knuckle. “I do.”
“On your desk. With the speeches and the red pens. Why?”
“Because it’s art. And politics is rarely art.” He finally released her hands, the absence of his touch feeling like a new kind of exposure. He didn’t move back, though. He nodded toward the shelves. “I have a first edition Prisoner of Azkaban on the third shelf. It’s crooked. Drives my OCD staff insane.”
She followed his gaze. There it was, its spine slightly off. A personal, imperfect detail in a room of state power. “Your favorite?”
“It is. The theme of wrongful imprisonment. And the introduction of Sirius Black. A good man trapped in a bad narrative.” He looked back at her. “What’s yours?”
“Order of the Phoenix,” she said without thinking. “Everyone thinks she’s crazy. She knows a terrible truth no one believes. She has to build her own army in secret.” She realized what she’d said and colored. “That sounds… melodramatic.”
“No,” he said softly. “It sounds true.”
He stood up then, returning to the safety of his desk chair, putting professional distance back between them. The air still hummed. “I want you to present this memo. To me and the senior policy team. Tomorrow. Four p.m.”
All the air left her lungs. “I… Marcus was right about one thing. They don’t want context from an intern.”
“They’ll get it from the expert who wrote it. Or they can explain to me why they’re rejecting the best piece of actionable policy they’ve seen all year.” He picked up the red pen again, becoming the Governor. “Be ready. They’ll come at you hard. Especially on the crowbar part.”
She stood, her legs steady. The storm was now a distant rumble, a problem for the outside world. In here, there was only the scent of oak and fire, the memory of a firm hand on hers, and a battlefield drawn. “Let them come.”
He smiled, a real one that reached his eyes. “That’s the voice I’ve been waiting to hear.”
“That’s the voice I’ve been waiting to hear.”
He stood, the meeting clearly concluded. The storm had quieted to a persistent, gentle patter against the glass. The world outside was a washed-out palette of grays and dark greens. The fire had burned low.
“Go home, Leia. Get some rest before tomorrow.” He was already shuffling other papers, the Governor again, the moment of shared silence receding like a wave. “Use the stairs.”
She gathered her things, the leather portfolio now imprinted with the memory of her own clenched fingers. “Thank you, Governor. For the… for everything.”
“JB,” he corrected, not looking up. “After hours, in this room, it’s JB. Now get out of here.”
The corridors were hushed, empty. Her footsteps echoed. The grand staircase felt different descending—less an escape, more a return. The Capitol’s majestic silence felt heavier now, a cloak she wasn’t sure she’d earned.
Her car, a secondhand compact, was alone in the vast underground garage. The sound of the drizzle was amplified here, a steady drip from concrete seams. She drove through Springfield’s emptied streets, the streetlights smearing orange on the wet asphalt.
Her apartment building was a bleak, square thing off Jefferson, a temporary holdover between student housing and a real salary. The stairwell smelled of stale cigarette smoke and disinfectant. She unlocked three separate locks.
The inside was a study in controlled chaos. Books were stacked in orderly towers against the wall. A large, professional bulletin board dominated the living space, but it wasn’t for political memes.
It was a map of the Midwest, dotted with colored pins. Printouts of state foster care records, heavily redacted, were pinned beside grainy, aged photos. A flyer for a Carbondale music festival from 2018. A post-it note in her mother Rima’s elegant script: “Sangamon County records check complete. No ‘Ben’ after 2010.”
Her sanctuary was also her command center. The search was a physical thing here, a wall she faced every night.
She shrugged off her blazer, toes curling in the thin carpet. The apartment was chilly. She flicked on a space heater, its coils glowing orange in the dim room. The quiet was a living thing.
Her phone buzzed on the counter. A text from her dad, Alan: “Heard you had a ‘weather event’. Did you survive? Your mother requests confirmation of life. Also, she found a potential lead in Rockford. Emailed you the caseworker’s name. Tread carefully, little star.”
She smiled, a real one that reached her eyes. She typed back. “Survived. Had a crowbar approved for use by the highest office in the state. Tell Mum thank you. Love you.”
Another text, this time from her brother Malik, a cybersecurity analyst in Chicago: “That name from the old dental records? Hit a wall. Database is a fossil. Working on a backdoor. Don’t do anything reckless.”
She replied: “Define reckless.”
His answer was immediate: “Anything you’d do before calling me.”
She put the phone down, the familial warmth lingering like a shawl. It fought back the room’s emptiness. She walked to the bulletin board, her fingers tracing a line from a Peoria group home address to a vanished job record in Bloomington.
Ben. Nine years old, with a gap-toothed smile and a habit of tearing the crusts off his bread for her. That was her last data point. The system had swallowed him, a statistic aged out into the void.
The Governor’s question echoed. What happened to him? The policy answer was on page twelve. The human answer was this board, this nightly ritual of hope and dread.
She sat at her laptop, the glow lighting her face. She opened her email, found her mother’s meticulously researched message. The Rockford lead was a former case aide who’d worked a short-term shelter in 2015. A long shot.
Leia composed a careful email, adopting the polite, professional tone she used for her bullet journal business. She was a researcher, she wrote, seeking information on historical placement protocols. No mention of a brother. Not yet.
As she hit send, the drizzle picked up again, tapping a lonely rhythm on the window. She leaned back, staring at the pins in the map. Each one was a door slammed in her face. Each one was a reason the crowbar of her policy was necessary.
Her hand, resting on the desk, still felt the ghost of a warmer, larger pressure. A grounding touch in a storm. She clenched it into a fist, then released.
The search was hers. The fight was hers. But for the first time, the weight of it felt different. It felt shared.
She reached for a new pin, its sharp point gleaming in the low light. Rockford was a fresh possibility, a new color on the map. She pressed it into the board with a soft, definitive thunk. The sound was a promise, a tiny declaration of war in the quiet, dripping dark.
The sound was a promise, a tiny declaration of war in the quiet, dripping dark. That promise became an open vein. The email to Rockford was just the start. She pulled the redacted files, the ones Malik had hacked for her last year. She cross-referenced the new name against old digital footprints, her photographic memory overlaying timelines and half-remembered caseworker slang. The space heater hummed. The drip of the rain slowed. Her desk light was the only sun in the universe.
At two a.m., she found a thread. A discharged intake form from a Rockford emergency room, dated three years prior. The patient alias “Benjamin V.” matched a pattern from a Peoria shelter. Age was right. The listed contact was a discontinued prepaid cell.
Her heart hammered against her ribs, a frantic, hopeful drum. This was nothing. This was everything. She fell down the rabbit hole of public records, her eyes burning, chasing the ghost of a nine-year-old boy through the digital rot of a system designed to lose him.
When the gray light of dawn seeped around her blinds, it found her still at the screen. The coffee in her mug was a cold, oily sludge. The bulletin board stared back, a testament to years of maybe. She had not slept. Not for a second. Her body was a wire pulled taut, vibrating with a terrible energy.
She stood. Her joints protested. In the bathroom mirror, her icy blue eyes were smudged with violet shadows, but the gold flecks within them burned bright, fueled by something beyond fatigue. She splashed cold water on her face. The panic from the storm, the lingering shame from Marcus’s theft, the raw hope of the new lead—it all coalesced into a single, sharp point of purpose. She would use it all.
The memo wasn’t just policy anymore. It was Ben’s face. It was the social worker with the cold. It was the left turn his car made. It was every child waiting for a thirty-day lie to expire. She dressed with mechanical precision, smoothed her auburn curls, and walked out into the morning.
The Capitol building felt different. The marble wasn’t just stone; it was an arena. She took the stairs, each step a percussion aligning her thoughts. She arrived at the office an hour early. The bullpen was empty, hollow. She printed fresh copies of her memo, the ink still warm. She annotated the margins with fresh, vehement handwriting, adding two sentences to the executive order section that were pure, unadulterated crowbar.
At three fifty-five, she stood outside the conference room door. She could hear the low murmur of senior staff inside, the clink of a coffee cup. Her hands were steady. The sleepless night was a high-pitched whine in her ears, a constant alert. She leaned into it.
The door opened. Chloe, looking nervous, gestured her in. “They’re ready for you.”
The room was all polished table and stern faces. The Director of Policy. The Legislative Director. The Chief of Staff. And JB, at the head, looking every inch the Governor. He gave her a slight, formal nod, no warmth in it. His eyes, however, held on hers for a fraction longer than necessary, doing a quick, diagnostic sweep. They narrowed, almost imperceptibly, at the shadows under her eyes.
“Miss Windsor,” the Chief of Staff began, tone dismissive. “You have fifteen minutes to walk us through this… proposal.”
Leia placed the memos on the table. The sound was deliberate. “Thank you. I’ll need twenty.”
She began. Her voice didn’t waver. It was clear, cold, and moved with the brutal efficiency of a surgeon’s scalpel. She cited statutes from memory, quoted budget line items, referenced the flawed 2019 precedent. When the Legislative Director interrupted, scoffing at the “crowbar” clause, she didn’t flinch.
“The disaster relief clause was amended specifically to address systemic failure, not just natural events,” she said, her gaze locking onto his. “A nine-year-old sleeping in a DCFS office because of a funding backlog is a disaster. The law agrees with me. Here.” She slid a printed case summary toward him. “Page four, second paragraph. Would you like me to read it aloud?”
The room went very still. She could feel JB watching her, a silent presence. She didn’t look at him. She fed on their skepticism, their discomfort. It was real. It was the sound of doors being slammed. She’d heard it all her life.
“Your emotional investment is noted,” the Policy Director said coolly, tapping the page about sibling separation. “But we craft policy on data, not sentiment.”
Leia’s smile was thin, a razor-cut. “The sixty-three percent permanent separation rate is data. It’s also a chemical burn on a seven-year-old’s soul. Ignoring the second fact is why your solutions keep failing the first.” She leaned forward, her palms flat on the table. “You wanted innovation. That’s it. You stop pretending the human cost is a separate column on the spreadsheet. It’s the entire equation.”
A heavy silence fell. The Chief of Staff cleared his throat, looking toward the Governor. “Sir, the political risk of the executive order path, even as a backup, is significant. The optics—”
“The optics of children freezing in state offices are worse,” JB stated, his voice final. He hadn’t looked away from Leia. “The memo stands. We’ll pursue the legislative route first, with the executive order drafted and ready in my desk. Miss Windsor will be embedded with the working group to ensure the core mechanisms remain intact.”
It wasn’t a total victory. It was a battlefield concession, but the ground was hers. The meeting dissolved into logistical details she tuned out. The adrenaline began to seep away, leaving the stark, barren landscape of her exhaustion. As the staff filed out, murmuring, she slowly gathered her papers.
“A moment, Leia.”
JB’s voice. The room was empty now. She turned. The Governor’s mask was gone. His face was etched with a deep, unconcealed concern that seemed to age him. He didn’t move from his seat.
“You didn’t sleep,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
“No.”
“Why?”
She could have lied. Said she was preparing. Instead, the truth fell out, stripped bare by fatigue. “I got a new lead. On Ben. I couldn’t stop.”
He absorbed this, his jaw tightening. He looked at the closed door, ensuring their privacy. His voice dropped, rough at the edges. “You’re running on wires. I could see it the second you walked in. They saw a shark. I saw someone about to shatter.”
“I held.”
“You were magnificent. And it scared the hell out of me.” He stood then, walking around the table until he was close. He didn’t touch her. The space between them hummed with the unspoken rule: here, but not here. “Using the pain is one thing. Letting it consume you is another. You can’t fix the whole system in one night. And you can’t find him if you burn yourself to ash.”
The raw care in his words was a different kind of crowbar, prying at defenses she didn’t know she still had up. Her composure cracked, just a hairline fracture. A slight tremor returned to her hands.
“I know,” she whispered.
“Go home. Actually home. Sleep.” He ordered it gently, his eyes searching hers. “That’s a direct order from your Governor.”
The ghost of a smile touched her lips. “And from JB?”
His expression softened. “From JB, it’s a request. From someone who… worries.”
The acknowledgment hung there, fragile and immense. She nodded, clutching the memos to her chest like armor. She turned to leave, her steps less certain than they had been an hour ago.
“Leia,” he called out softly. She paused at the door, looking back. He was still standing there, a silhouette against the bright conference room windows. “The lead. However small. That’s good.”
It was all he said. It was enough. She stepped into the hall, the weight of the day and the sleepless night crashing down at once. But beneath the exhaustion, a new ember glowed. He had seen the shark. He had seen the shattered girl behind it. And he had worried only for her.