THE DEVIL REMEMBERS
Chapter Two: The Washington Protocol
After the coffee at Perch, Charlotte invented what she privately called the Washington Protocol. Alexander Vance and she were colleagues in the policy advocacy community. They would be, occasionally, at the same events. They would speak professionally when they encountered one another, and they would not dwell on the eight months in graduate school, the conversation about how it would all be fine, the eighteen months after that during which it was demonstrably not fine, and then the long silence.
They could text, occasionally, about policy matters. This was permitted. They could have coffee sometimes, during the day, in a professional context. This too was permitted.
They would not have dinner.
The Protocol held for six weeks, which was roughly five weeks longer than Charlotte expected it to hold, and when it broke, it was not a policy event or a professional necessity that broke it. It was a Tuesday evening in October, Charlotte working late at the Meridian offices, when her phone lit with a message from Alexander: I have two tickets to a lecture at the Smithsonian. Bellows, on climate litigation frameworks. I know you're working on the housing brief. You might find the third panel relevant.
She stared at the screen for four full minutes, the cursor of her brief blinking patiently beside her, forgotten.
This is not dinner, she told herself. This is a lecture. On climate litigation frameworks. Which is professional.
This is the Protocol, she told herself, and did not entirely believe it.
She texted back: What time.
Seven-thirty. I'll meet you there.
He was waiting at seven-twenty, because he was always early, a fact she had spent six years failing to find irritating. The lecture itself was genuinely excellent, the third panel landing squarely on the housing brief, and she spent forty minutes taking notes she would have to decode the next morning because she had been writing quickly while also maintaining the baseline discipline of not appearing visibly aware of the man seated beside her, his shoulder a scant few inches from hers, the warmth of him somehow more distracting than anything the panel said.
At the drinks reception afterward they spoke to three colleagues each, made two professional introductions between them, and exchanged exactly one sentence, when he appeared at her elbow and said, "The respondent on the second panel. She was at Georgetown the year before you," and she said, "I know, we had Foundations of Policy together," and he said, "I know. I remembered when I saw her name on the program," and something in the way he said remembered made her chest go tight, because he remembered everything, apparently, including things she had assumed he'd let go of years ago.
In the lobby, on the way out, he fell into step beside her.
"The third panel," he said.
"The property rights framework," she said. "It applies. I've been trying to make the housing brief work within existing statutory constraints, and the litigation angle gives me an approach I hadn't considered."
"The Reyes precedent."
"From 2019. Helena, our housing director, flagged it but hadn't developed the argument. I think I can." She glanced at him sideways, the streetlight catching the line of his jaw. "Thank you for the tickets."
"I thought you'd find it useful."
"You knew I was working on the housing brief."
"I read the Meridian newsletter."
"Our newsletter mentions ongoing projects," she said.
"It does. You're credited on three of the current briefs."
She looked out at the October street, at the lit windows of the Smithsonian behind them, anywhere but at him. "Alexander. You're reading our newsletter."
"I'm in the policy community. I read several newsletters."
"Including the one that lists my name on three projects."
He was quiet a moment. "Including that one."
"This was the third panel," she said.
"Yes."
"And also not just the third panel."
"Also not just the third panel," he agreed, and the honesty of it landed somewhere low in her stomach, a warm unsettled weight she recognized and resented in equal measure.
"Alexander. I need you to understand something."
"Tell me."
"I'm not..." She stopped, started again. "I'm not the person I was in graduate school. I'm not twenty-three." She pressed her lips together. "The eight months were very good. You know they were."
"I know."
"And then they were very not good. And I spent a significant amount of time being not fine. I am fine now. I have been fine for a long time."
"I know," he said. "You seem fine. More than fine."
"I am. And I don't want to be not fine again."
He was quiet, and when he spoke again his voice had dropped, careful in a way that made her want to lean toward it rather than away. "Charlotte. I know I have no right to... I'm not assuming anything. I'm not expecting anything." He looked at the street rather than at her, which she understood, somehow, as its own kind of honesty. "I'm just here. In the same city. Reading your published work. Going to lectures about frameworks I know you'd find relevant." He held her gaze then, and the full weight of his attention nearly undid the careful composure she'd built over five years. "That's all."
"That's all," she repeated.
"For now," he said.
"For now," she echoed, and felt the phrase settle in her like a held breath she wasn't ready to release.
They walked without speaking for a block, the October night cool against her face, the Capitol a pale shape in the distance. "I walked to work this morning," she said, mostly to have something to say that wasn't the thing she was actually thinking.
"You live in DuPont."
"I do. It's forty minutes. I stopped at the usual place for coffee." She paused. "I think about the same things on the way in, most mornings. Policy arguments, mostly. The housing brief. Occasionally other things."
"Occasionally," he said.
"More lately."
He went very still beside her, the kind of stillness that told her exactly how carefully he was listening. "Charlotte."
"The Protocol was six weeks."
"Yes."
"I'm still not ready for dinner."
"I know."
"But the Smithsonian wasn't just the third panel."
"No," he said quietly. "It wasn't."
She looked at him under the streetlight, at the line of his throat above his collar, and felt the specific ache of wanting to close a distance she had spent five years maintaining. "Text me about the next lecture."
"Yes."
"Something I'd actually find relevant."
"I would only text you about something relevant."
"I know," she said. "That's the problem."
He studied her, the full attention she remembered, and said only, "Good night, Charlotte," and the sound of her own name in his mouth did something unforgivable to her pulse.
"Good night."
She walked the ten blocks back to DuPont alone and managed not to think about Alexander Vance for the first three of them, which was three more than she managed the following evening.
* * *
November arrived with three things in tow: the housing brief deadline, the semi-annual policy roundtable at Georgetown, and the creeping, undeniable acknowledgment that the Washington Protocol had been, to put it professionally, significantly revised.
There had been two more lectures, one on regulatory frameworks at the Kennedy Center, one on international trade policy at American University, both excellent, both also not just the lecture. There had been two more coffees, both during the day, both technically professionally viable. There had been roughly forty texts about policy matters, three about a biography of a former Treasury Secretary they were both reading, and one about a documentary on the Columbia River he thought she'd find interesting. She had.
There had not been dinner.
She was thinking about dinner.
She was also thinking, more carefully than she had allowed herself at twenty-three, about what she actually wanted, which turned out to be a harder question than it looked from the outside. The thing she wanted, she had established some weeks ago and could not undo, was Alexander Vance. The question that remained was what version of wanting him might actually be survivable.
She was turning that question over at the Georgetown roundtable, where she presented Meridian's position on housing policy reform while Alexander sat in the audience, Harrington being a co-sponsor, listening with the full and undivided attention that made it nearly impossible to keep her voice level. At the break he found her at the coffee station.
"The Reyes precedent," he said.
"I used it. The litigation framework. You were right that it applied."
"I thought it would."
"You were right."
"I'm often right about your arguments," he said, "and wrong about most things that matter."
She studied him. "Alexander."
"Yes."
"Dinner," she said. "This Friday."
He went very still, something flickering behind his eyes that she recognized as relief trying not to look like relief. "Yes."
"My usual place. The Italian on P Street. Eight."
"Yes."
She took her coffee back to her seat and finished presenting the second half of the brief, and told herself she would not look at where he was sitting, a discipline she abandoned within three minutes. He was watching the panel with his customary full attention, and once, when a respondent made a point she found questionable, she saw the small shift of his jaw that meant he thought so too.
He's going to tell me why at dinner, she thought, and found, to her own quiet surprise, that she was already looking forward to it with something closer to hunger than curiosity.
That, she decided, driving home through the November dark, was the honest answer to the question of sustainable wanting. The version where they argued about policy and she knew what his jaw did when he disagreed. The version where she had been counting down to Friday since the word left her mouth.
This, she thought. This is the version.
* * *
She spent an embarrassing amount of Thursday evening deciding what to wear, which was not a thing she did, which was itself alarming. She stood in front of her closet in her DuPont apartment with a glass of wine going warm on the dresser and considered, and discarded, three different dresses before settling on the dark green one she had bought two years ago and worn exactly once, to a gala she had not particularly enjoyed.
It is dinner, she told herself, zipping the dress, feeling the fabric settle against her ribs. It is dinner with a colleague.
She did not believe herself even slightly. Her body had already made its own decision about what Friday was, had been making it for weeks now in small traitorous ways: the quickened pulse whenever his name appeared on her phone, the warmth that gathered low in her belly when she replayed, uninvited, the particular way he'd said that's the problem outside the Smithsonian, as though her wanting him were a fact he intended to keep collecting evidence for.
She caught her own reflection in the mirror and made herself breathe.
You are allowed to want this, she told the woman in the glass, who did not look entirely convinced. You survived it once. You can survive wanting it again.
The thought did not comfort her so much as steady her, which she supposed would have to be enough.
She thought, briefly, of the two careful, kind, insufficiently interesting men she had dated in the intervening years, the ones who had never once made her forget what she was ordering at a restaurant because his attention had fixed, suddenly and entirely, on her mouth. She thought of how safe that had felt, and how thin. Safety, it turned out, was not the same thing as being alive, and she had spent five years mistaking one for the other.
She picked up her phone once more before bed, scrolled back through the forty-odd texts about policy, the three about fiscal framing, the one about the Columbia River documentary that had kept her up until midnight because she had wanted to keep talking to him and had been too proud to say so. She read them in order, like evidence assembling itself into an argument she had been resisting for weeks, and when she finally set the phone face down on the nightstand, she admitted to the dark of her bedroom what she had not yet admitted to him.
I want to be looked at like that again, she thought. I want it to be him.
* * *