He sighed and spent the rest of his ten minutes of silence playing a game on his phone, his one real guilty pleasure. At exactly ten minutes, he threw his door back open.

“Okay, who goes first?”

As he’d known would happen, Kara, his chief of staff, walked into the room. Kara had been by his side for three years now; he’d hired her to run his campaign for Senate in the early days, and he’d managed to convince her to come to DC with him after he won. Everyone had told him it was a bad idea to make your campaign chief of staff your Senate chief of staff, but he didn’t listen; he’d known from the first time he met her that he and Kara would work well together. And he’d been right not to listen—she did a great job steering his ship, and any bad decision he’d made so far in the Senate was his fault, not hers.

“You’re in a bad mood today, sir—were the hearings as boring from inside the room as they seemed on TV?”

He laughed. This was also why he liked working with Kara; she could come right out and say he was in a bad mood. All of his other staffers were too polite and formal with him; he still wasn’t used to it.

“Even more so, if possible,” he said. “Sorry for snapping at everyone, it’s been a long week.”

Kara shook her head.

“Sir, it’s Wednesday.”

In his first year in the Senate, he’d tried to break Kara of her habit of calling him “sir,” but to no avail. She’d told him that he was just as worthy of respect as all the older senators were, and she wasn’t going to let anyone think he wasn’t, down to what she called him. He’d given up, but it still felt weird to him. Wes was one of the only people in this whole city who called him by his first name.

He sat down at his desk and picked up a pen.

“Okay, what’s on the agenda?”

Kara looked down at her notebook.

“You asked me to check in with my contacts with leadership about your criminal justice reform bill, and … it’s not great news. Unfortunately— ”

He sighed.

“In an election year, when some of the people who would vote for the bill are fighting tooth and nail for their seats, we don’t want to give their opponents ammunition,” he finished her sentence. “Is that it?”

They both knew he was quoting her own words back to her. She’d said that to him months ago, when he’d told her he wanted to push this bill now, this year. She’d tried to get him to wait until the following January. But he hadn’t listened.