Conley leaned back when the feed ended. “They wanted an angle,” he said. “They wanted to push us. They thought this would rattle donors, unsettle influence. We gave them smoke and they tried to spin it into fire.”
I felt the relief and the anger mix. My body buzzed. We were winning the hunt, but the cost was a story—the idea that our private lives were negotiable. It cut deeper than the practical worry. It touched the place where intimacy and dignity lived.
That night, when we allowed ourselves space to be only the three of us rather than the machine, the domestic scene felt brittle and fragile. Angel joined us in the drawing room unexpectedly; she’d come to offer a statement at a staff meeting to support the staff’s morale. She sat between us, not stiffly, but with an ease that read as
