And so I chose daylight, all of it, as much as I could pour onto him at once.”

Chapter 22 — The Gala

The following Monday evening, the downtown convention center was filled to capacity for Julian Vance’s formal campaign gala, and I walked into it in my best black dress with a leather portfolio under my arm and my daughter’s whole life folded inside it.

It was a spectacle of money and power.

Crystal chandeliers threw a warm golden light down over five hundred guests, donors and business leaders and reporters, the entire moneyed apparatus of a man on his way to becoming a senator.

Banners hung from the high velvet drapes, bearing his campaign slogan in tall confident letters: Integrity.