Page 34 of The Shield
“You have a city that just watched you stand in the rain and give them the list that matters,” he said. “That’s a start.”
From somewhere behind him, a familiar voice boomed through the weather. “If you two are going to stage a coup, invite your granddaddy.”
Butch Kennedy, of course.
There he was. Linen jacket damp at the shoulders, expression split between pride and mischief, umbrella carried like a scepter. He’d either watched the live or felt the gravitational pull of a crowd from two blocks away and come to feed it.
“Natty-girl,” he said, loud enough for the apologies to hear. “You just made half this town get off their sofas.”
“Then you won’t mind calling the council president and telling him to open the Emergency Operations Center,” I said before I could second-guess myself.
He blinked once, then laughed like I’d handed him a firearm with his name engraved. “Hell, I’ll call him and tell him you already opened it.” His eyes narrowed at my face, going softer when they landed on whatever they found there. “Haven’t seen that look since your daddy told me he was opening an art studio instead of going to Columbia to learn how to shake hands.”
“What look?” I asked.
“The one that says you’re done asking for permission.”
The line hit and set—like a stamp in wet clay, and suddenly the shape of me made sense.
I hadn’t stopped thinking about Ethan. He wove through the edges of everything. The memory of his hands flickered in warm aftershocks even as my brain slid back to tides and drains. It didn’t feel like a conflict. He’d told me to do my job. That clean, steady trust loosened something I hadn’t known was clenched.
My phone buzzed. One text from him:You on TV?
I snorted, then wrote:Internet’s cheaper.
His reply:Looked like a mayor to me.
Heat skittered under my skin.
Me:I’m a planner.
A beat.Him:Planners make the best leaders. You see the whole board.
I read it twice and had to look away from my own smile reflected faintly in the glass of City Hall’s door.
I didn’t know what I was thinking. But maybe I wasn’t crazy. Not completely.
The Public Information Officer jogged up with a camera crew in tow and an expression that said he had decided to co-opt what he couldn’t control. “Stand with me?” he puffed.
“Only if you say ‘do not drive through standing water’ in the first thirty seconds,” I said. “And ‘activate the Emergency Operations Center’ in the second.”
He winced. “We’re activating ‘functionally.’”
“We’re activating,” I repeated, and stepped to his left.
We did the hits. We did them again for a different station. We sent people to sandbag sites—we had sand, we had bags, we had a dozen volunteers by the time we named the corners on camera. I watched comment counts spike in real time:Where do I park on higher ground? What garage is safe? How do I clear a drain?Kimmy fed me answers and links like candy. Huck texted a photo of the Emergency Operations Center room with lights coming on and people rolling whiteboards into place. Informally, my ass.
Another hour later, as the light went sallow and the tide started its shove, I stood on the City Hall steps and watched the first true pond gather in that deceitful dip by the Market. A sedan nosed toward it, then veered away at the last second, the driver glancing up—at us, at the cameras, at the city looking backat itself. I felt a pure, ridiculous surge of love for that stranger like I could have hugged their Toyota.
Owen bumped my shoulder with his. He read my mind. “You’re thinking it.”
“Maybe I am,” I said, and the words came out soft, not performative. “I want it. Not because of the chair. Because of the people in front of it.”
“Then say it out loud to someone besides me,” he said.
I looked left. Butch was holding court by the rail with three men who would have sold their grandmothers for a committee chair. He caught my eye, read everything in it, and sobered—not a thing he did often.
“You run,” he said later, quiet enough that only we heard it, “you do it your way. Don’t ask me for my playbook. It was written for a city that no longer exists.”
