The Longer The Fall by Aviva Gat (best new books to read txt) 📗

was beginning to get an itch inside her that she couldn’t scratch away. As her confidence in the FBI agents continued to dwindle, she saw her options bright and clear in front of her eyes. What would happen if this scandal came out? What would happen if her name and naked picture were all over the media? If it came to that, it was only a matter of time before collateral damage began to fall. The itch inside her told her what she needed to do. She needed to make a phone call. She needed to call someone that she hadn’t talked to in a very long time, someone she didn’t think she would ever talk to again. Someone that she probably shouldn’t talk to ever again, but at this point she wasn’t sure what else to do.

Chapter 15

“Hunter Williams, how can I help you?”

“Hunter, it’s Madeline.” Madeline felt as though she were holding her breath as she said it, barely letting out the air needed for the sounds to come out.

“Maddy?”

“Hi.”

“You make your own phone calls these days? You don’t have a secretary or publicist to do it for you?”

“Hunter, please.”

“What’s going on? What brings me the honor of hearing from you today?”

“We need to talk.” Madeline tried not to make her tone sound too dire.

“You know, that’s convenient, because that’s what these telephone things are for. You know the device you’re probably holding to your ear right now, it’s great for talking.” Madeline wasn’t sure if Hunter was trying to joke with her or if his sarcasm came from something more sinister. She decided to respond as though he were joking.

“Oh, really? You know I could never figure out what these things were for,” she said lightly. “I’m so glad I called you so you could tell me.”

“That’s what I am here for, Maddy,” Hunter responded. “You know I’ll always tell you what you need to know.”

“I know,” she responded, the whimsical tone fading away. “I’m going to be in New York next week. Can we meet?”

Hunter hesitated. “I’m not sure that is a good idea.”

“Why? What’s the problem?”

Again Hunter was quiet, as though carefully choosing his words. “Because…” But then his tone shifted as though something had changed his mind. “Sure, just have your secretary or chief of staff or whatever you got these days call mine,” he said. “It’s this same number, I’ll pretend I work for Hunter Williams and will look for a slot in my boss’s busy schedule to fit you in.”

“No secretaries,” Madeline said. “Just tell me when I can come to your office.”

“Aren’t you worried of what people would say? A Republican Senator from California coming to the office of a Democratic city council member from Harlem?”

“It doesn’t have to be a big deal, Hunter. We just need to talk. Besides if anyone asks, you’re the city councilman responsible for my alma mater. It’s not weird.”

“OK, well, I’m usually in my city council office on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Come whenever you want.”

“I’ll see you on Tuesday morning,” she responded before hanging up the phone.

A gush of memories flooded over her as she sat, still hearing Hunter’s voice in her ear. Hearing him speak made her feel like she was being crushed, crushed by the emotions, the regrets and the decisions she’d made in her life. She believed she had made the right decisions for herself, the right decisions for someone of her ambitions, but that didn’t mean she didn’t have a lingering feeling of ‘what if.’ What if things were different? What if she had chosen differently? What if she hadn’t been forced to choose between her life ambitions and young love? She could spend all day thinking of the what-ifs, but she knew that if she had to do it all again, she would make the same decisions, no matter how hard they were.

Madeline first met Hunter when she was a senior at Columbia University. She was on her way home after a long night of studying in the library. In fact, the night had been so long that it was already dawn when she arrived at her old brownstone on the edge of campus. Her parents had hated that she refused to live in the dorms. Instead, she and a girlfriend rented a small two-bedroom together two blocks away from their prestigious university. But while it was only a seven-minute walk to campus, it was a world away. It was Harlem, the neighborhood where young Caucasian females were told not to walk by themselves late at night. But Madeline saw it differently. To her, it was the neighborhood where jazz wafted out of the basement club on her corner and the smell of frying oil greeted her from the street vendor who sold hotdogs near her stoop. She never felt afraid when walking in her neighborhood. How could she be, when her neighbors were so friendly? There was Tom, the elderly retired man who often spent days sitting on a crate watching the sidewalk and smoking his pipe. There were also Dayvon and Daya, the children who lived with their single mother in the apartment under Madeline’s. The kids were often sitting on the stoop outside the apartment building playing with sticks, cardboard or anything else that could be considered a toy. On hot days, Madeline would sometimes take them to the corner market to eat popsicles. Madeline loved her neighborhood and her brownstone there that had a small garden in front. Someone who didn’t live in New York City wouldn’t have considered it a garden. They would have considered it a small patch of dirt the size of a ping-pong table with a few shrubs and weeds somehow thriving without any water and rare sunlight that shone through when it wasn’t being blocked by the surrounding buildings. When Madeline first met Hunter that