Daniel POV
The healthcare bill is falling apart on his screen.
Daniel stares at the numbers like they might rearrange themselves if he glares hard enough. Eight months of work. Countless meetings with insurance companies and hospital administrators. Arguments with senators who cared more about profit than people dying because they couldn't afford medicine. And now the entire bill is collapsing because three Democrats switched sides.
He should be angry. A year ago he would have been.
Now he just feels empty.
"You're doing that thing again," Grace says.
Daniel looks up. His chief of staff is standing in his office doorway holding two coffee cups like she's prepared for war. Grace is the kind of beautiful that makes people underestimate her until she starts talking. Mixed-race woman with her hair braided and pulled into an updo. Brown eyes that see everything. Sharp voice that cuts through nonsense in seconds.
She's been with him for two years and somehow knows him better than he knows himself.
"What thing?" Daniel asks.
"The thing where you disappear inside your own head and forget that the rest of the world exists." Grace sets a coffee on his desk. Black. Exactly how he likes it. "You look tired. When's the last time you slept?"
"Last night."
"You're lying. Your eyes say you haven't slept in a week."
Daniel forces a smile. The kind he uses for press conferences and photo ops. The kind that says everything is fine and Daniel Hart is exactly who everyone thinks he is. Strong. Focused. A senator who's going to change the world.
What they don't see is the broken part underneath.
"Just stressed about the bill," he says.
Grace moves into the office and closes the door. That's never good. Closed doors mean Grace is about to say something real, and real is the last thing Daniel can handle today.
"It's not about the bill," Grace says. She sits down across from him like she's settling in for a conversation he didn't agree to. "It's about something else. Something from before."
Three years of knowing Grace and she still does this. Still tries to dig into the places Daniel locked up and threw away the key.
"Grace..."
"Don't Grace me. I see the way you look at your phone sometimes like you're waiting for someone to call. I see the way you stare out the window during meetings like you're looking for someone specific in the crowd. I see a senator who's twenty-nine years old and acts like he's already dead inside."
Daniel's hands clench into fists under his desk.
"There was someone," Grace continues. "Three years ago. Before you became this. Before you became a politician. There was someone and they broke you."
"It doesn't matter."
"It matters because you're letting it destroy you." Grace leans forward. Her voice gets softer which somehow makes it more dangerous. "You threw yourself into this career like it was medicine for a wound that never healed. But medicine doesn't work if you don't actually treat the wound. It just lets it get infected."
Daniel stands up. He needs space. Needs air. Needs to get away from Grace's eyes that see too much.
"My personal life isn't relevant to my job."
"Your personal life is why you're failing at your job." Grace stands up too. "You're making decisions like someone who doesn't care if he lives or dies. That's not leadership. That's self-destruction wearing a suit."
"I'm doing fine."
"You're not. And whoever he was, whatever he did, you need to either forgive him or move on. Because right now you're stuck in the middle and it's eating you alive."
Daniel walks to the window. His office overlooks the city from the capitol building. Hundreds of thousands of people down there living their lives. Some of them happy. Some of them broken. Most of them just trying to survive.
He used to think he could help them. Used to think that if he just worked hard enough and cared enough and wanted it enough, he could actually change things.
Then Rowan left and Daniel realized that sometimes the things you love most are the things that destroy you.
"The vote is tomorrow," Daniel says quietly. "If we lose this bill, people die. People without insurance die because they can't afford medication. People with insurance die because their company denies coverage. This bill would have saved thousands of lives."
"And you're letting it slip away because you're not present," Grace says. "You're not fighting for it. You're just letting it happen."
She's right. Daniel knows she's right. But fighting requires energy and hope and all of those things require believing that tomorrow matters. That his life matters. That anything matters when the one person he ever truly loved walked away without explanation.
Grace leaves him standing at the window. She doesn't say goodbye or see you later. She just leaves him alone with his thoughts and the city spreading out below him like a promise he can't keep.
That night Daniel's apartment is quiet except for the hum of the city outside.
He orders Thai food from the place two blocks away. The delivery guy doesn't recognize him, which is a small blessing. Sometimes Daniel just wants to be a person ordering dinner instead of a senator or a face on the news or a disappointment to people who believed in him.
He eats on his balcony forty-two stories above the street.
The city lights spread out like a map of possibilities. All those buildings. All those people. All those lives happening simultaneously without any connection to his. Sometimes Daniel envies that. The ability to exist without mattering. Without carrying the weight of expectations.
The wind is cool. The air tastes like possibility and exhaust and the kind of emptiness that comes from knowing you're alone even when surrounded by millions.
Daniel sets his food down and just watches the city breathe.
He doesn't notice the figure in the building across the street.
Doesn't see the binoculars trained on his position.
Doesn't feel the weight of someone's complete attention focused on his every movement.
Doesn't know that across that stretch of air and concrete, someone has been watching him for three years. Watching to protect him. Watching to keep him safe. Watching in a way that's part love and part obsession and entirely dangerous.
Daniel just stands there on his balcony, eating cold Thai food and thinking about the bill he's going to lose tomorrow and the man he loved three years ago who probably never thinks about him at all.
Then his security system alerts him.
Not a soft chime. A hard alarm.
Motion detected in the main foyer. Multiple unauthorized entry points. System breach initiated.
Daniel's heart goes cold.
The alarm cuts out.
Someone just disabled his security system.
Someone is in his building.