He asked when he was going to see you next.

You shrugged. You didn’t know, you said, but it could be a while given that you were going to be doing your regular governing work along with your reelection campaign, and that’s when Greg Tampico had actually started to fucking cry, and suddenly the walk-up in Alexandria with all his weird African masks and African prints and the gigantic stuffed aardvark that was always looking at you with the oddest expression?

It creeped you right out.

You would call him, you said, maybe next week, and did not look at his face as you walked out the door because you could not have gotten out of there fast enough.

So you could not have known how Greg Tampico collapsed on his bed. Or how hard he sobbed when he heard you sprint all the way down the three flights of stairs, knowing, at that moment, that he would never see you again, and that’s why as the news sinks in you feel bad about it, but mostly you feel lighter, unencumbered, if truth be told, and you’re even breathing differently now, like the news moved the lungs in your chest.

You signal the Tahoe and make a uwee toward home. Because the fact is, you rarely think about Greg Tampico at all when you are out of that apartment, and you are now growing just, like, incredibly relieved that you never brought him to 2486 Asher Place. It means Greg Tampico never saw your canary-yellow velvet Victorian sofa just like the one Reagan had in Images of Greatness, or your growing wardrobe of clothes just like Reagan wore. Or Reagan’s original American flag cuff links, which you bought at an auction for a whopping $5900 and break out just for debates.

He never knew that you once even put in a bid to buy a vial of Reagan’s blood from when Hinckley shot him, nor that your anonymous bid was in the tens of thousands before news of the auction was leaked to the media and shut down from “poor taste,” and you assure yourself that, in general, you cannot feel all that bad about Greg Tampico’s suicide because Greg Tampico never really knew you, never knew the full depth of your ambition, the lengths to which you know you will have to go to get reelected, to start getting serious, which is why upon hearing the news about Greg Tampico, you decide your staffers are right. It’s time to get serious.

It’s time for Congressman Alexander Paine Wilson to Find A Wife.

* * *

Enter Kensington, half of the Royal Borough of West London, shared with Chelsea. Enter the excellent road Gloucester Walk, nestled between two verdant parks, Holland and Hyde. Enter Rebecca Ostlet’s modest two-bedroom flat, which suits her because the parks are where Rebecca goes walking in the afternoons with her three rust-colored Irish setters named after the Brontës—Anne, Charlotte, Emily.

“Come in, come in!” begs Rebecca, and Titus Downing, dressed head to toe in his black wool even though it is a brutally hot day in August, steps into Rebecca’s abode exactly like a ghoul into a garden.