Vanessa came along when Walsh thought she needed to be there. One would never suspect from watching her that she had any reservations at all about the future her husband had chosen for the both of them. At home, nothing changed. She remained consumed by her grief, so she did not seem to miss my company.

The inner circle was not much different than the one Arch had started with when he ran for mayor: Walsh, Lonnie, Jim. I’d been hanging around forever but had never been a part of things in this way. Arch brought in another experienced political operator to run his campaign: Andy Goldberg, late of Virginia, where he’d flipped the governor’s office for the GOP. He had much in common with Averett, but his penchant for fast food, beer, and strip clubs made him an unlikely candidate to replace his predecessor in the more compromising capacity.

The other new addition was Marcus Hughes, a kid Arch had recruited from Terrence’s after-school program for admission to Yeatman. Marcus had been given a special leave of absence from school to work as an intern. Yeatman benefited from the optics almost as much as Arch. This sort of shameless tokenism was not perceived as such by the voters of Tennessee.

Goldberg loved the idea.

“We need a little something to offset all those shots of Dan Baird hugging little Africans,” he said.

Marcus didn’t seem to feel used. He couldn’t have been more eager. I saw a great deal of myself in him. He had been plucked up and set down in a den of opulence and power. Arch treated him as Jim had once treated me, though with even greater attention and affection. Other, more typical interns were given menial tasks, verbally abused, ignored unless needed to do something no one else wanted to do. Marcus got nothing but smiles and warm words. No one even sent him out for coffee or told him to empty the trash.

He was bright and curious, quick-witted, and self-possessed, and quickly picked up, as I had, how to dress the part: the chinos, the button-down oxfords. I knew from experience that these qualities had not endeared him to the boys he’d grown up around. To them, he was an Uncle Tom, an Oreo, a sellout. I suspect Marcus had not survived the junior school at Yeatman unscathed by the sort of ugliness that finds its most honest, unfiltered voice in the mouths of pubescent boys—but he struck me as the type of kid who cared less about fitting in with his peers than about earning the praise of adult authority figures. He so delighted in Arch’s attentions that he could not possibly have recognized himself as a prop. And I liked him too much to disillusion him.