Chapter 4: Ophelia's War Room

The office smelled like old coffee and whiteboard markers and the particular exhaustion of a space that had been lived in for years by someone who never fully left it. Ophelia had three locks on the door — Hayden knew this because she had made him wait outside for forty seconds while she worked through them from the inside, which meant she had been expecting him or had been expecting someone and was relieved it was him, and he had decided in the cab ride over that those were not the same thing.

She had not turned on the overhead lights. The room ran on two desk lamps and the glow of a monitor she'd left on at the far end of what had once been a conference table and was now a geography of organized intention — campaign maps she hadn't taken down, legal pads in distinct stacks, a cluster of colored markers arranged by some system he didn't know, and along the south wall, a corkboard dense enough with printed documents and string and index cards that the cork itself was invisible beneath it. He stood in front of it for a moment while she poured water from a pitcher on the credenza.

"That's the Margolis Senate race," she said, without looking at him. "Don't read into it."