The Tartan Vow

Eleanor

The best part of my day began at the corner of Wisconsin Avenue and M Street with a caramel latte and ten uninterrupted minutes of peace.

Washington had already been awake for hours by the time I reached Georgetown. Staffers hurried along sidewalks with phones pressed to their ears, tourists clustered outside cafés with guidebooks and umbrellas, and traffic crawled through intersections with the kind of stubborn impatience only D.C. could produce before nine in the morning.

Once I turned onto the quieter side street leading to Hawthorne & Reed Publishing, the city seemed to loosen its grip on me.

The publishing house occupied the third floor of a renovated brick building tucked between an independent bookstore and a café that sold chocolate croissants that could heal generational trauma.

The office had exposed beams, uneven hardwood floors, and bookshelves crowded against nearly every wall. Somebody was always arguing about a cover design, a marketing campaign, or an author who believed deadlines were more of a spiritual suggestion than an actual date.

I loved it.

Publishing was not glamorous, regardless of what people outside the industry assumed. Most days involved revision letters, budget meetings, production timelines, and authors convinced their editors existed solely to ruin their lives. I loved it anyway because the work felt honest. Stories either held together or they didn’t. Characters either earned their endings or they didn’t. A chapter could be messy, but at least it could be fixed.

People were much harder.

The brass nameplate outside my office caught the overhead light as I walked past.

Eleanor Heath

Senior Editor

The sight still gave me a small, private sense of satisfaction.

Nobody at Hawthorne & Reed had hired Senator Whitmore’s daughter. Every promotion, every project, every late-night revision letter belonged entirely to me. The Heath name came from my mother, and using it professionally had become the closest thing I had ever found to freedom.

At work, I was an editor.

A coworker.

A woman who drank too many lattes, color-coded her manuscript notes, and kept emergency Excedrin in the second drawer of her desk because fluorescent lights and stress were a terrible combination.

At work, I belonged to myself.

I balanced my coffee against a stack of pages and pushed open my office door. The manuscript waiting on my desk had consumed most of my week and an alarming amount of my patience. Four hundred pages, almost no plot, and enough unnecessary sunset descriptions to make me personally resent the evening sky.

Dropping into my chair, I opened the document again and tried to convince myself chapter fourteen could still be saved.

Outside my office window, rain threatened from low clouds gathering over Georgetown. A delivery truck blocked half the street below, its hazard lights blinking red against wet pavement.

Normal.

Predictable.

Safe in the way ordinary things sometimes were.

I had just finished marking up a particularly painful paragraph when a familiar knock sounded against my open office door.

Looking up, I found Harper Michaels leaning against the frame with two coffee cups balanced in one hand and an expression that suggested she had already decided I was being difficult.

Harper worked in acquisitions and had somehow become my closest friend over the past four years. She possessed an alarming ability to remember everyone’s coffee order, every office birthday, and every personal detail people accidentally revealed in conversation. Most of the publishing house adored her. The few who didn’t usually found themselves adopted by her anyway.

“Please tell me you’ve eaten something today.”

A smile tugged at my mouth before I could stop it.

“Good morning to you too.”

She crossed the room and deposited the second coffee beside my laptop.

The familiar scent of caramel macchiato drifted up from the cup.

Harper pointed at me. “That is not an answer.”

“It was intended to distract you from the question.”

“It failed.”

“I had breakfast.”

“When?”

I considered lying, mostly out of habit. Harper continued looking at me with the expression of a woman who had watched me forget lunch twice in one week and no longer trusted me with basic survival.

“Yesterday,” I admitted.

Her sigh had dramatic range. “Eleanor.”

“I got busy.”

“You were reading.”

“That counts as busy.”

“That counts as workaholic behavior with better lighting.”

I lifted the coffee she’d brought me. “You’re very judgmental for someone actively enabling my caffeine dependency.”

“I support your dreams. I question your blood sugar.”

She dropped into the chair across from my desk and surveyed the manuscript pages scattered around me. Her gaze lingered on the sticky notes, the highlighted passages, and the legal pad already covered in revision notes.

“How bad is it?”

“The main character spent twelve pages describing a sunset.”

Harper’s face tightened with immediate sympathy. “Twelve?”

“Twelve.”

“Was it at least a meaningful sunset?”

“He compared the sky to an emotional lasagna.”

Harper stared at me.

I stared back.

She blinked first. “That has to be a crime.”

“I’m checking with Legal.”

Her laugh warmed the office in a way that made my shoulders loosen. That was one of Harper’s gifts. She entered a room and somehow reminded people they were allowed to be human inside it.

For a while, we talked about manuscripts, impossible authors, and the acquisition meeting everyone seemed determined to dread. The conversation drifted easily from one subject to another, and somewhere along the way I stopped thinking about the rest of my life.

The campaign dinners, the charity events, and the photographs that always seemed to appear online before I even made it home belonged to a different version of me. Inside Hawthorne & Reed, surrounded by books and deadlines and people who knew me as Eleanor Heath, they felt far away enough to ignore.

My phone vibrating against the desk shattered that illusion.

I glanced down automatically, and the moment I saw the name on the screen, a familiar knot tightened low in my stomach. A faint pressure started gathering at the base of my skull, subtle enough to ignore for now but familiar enough that I knew what it could become by dinner if the evening went badly.

Father.

Across from me, Harper’s expression changed almost immediately.

“What happened?”

I hadn’t said anything, but four years of friendship had made Harper alarmingly good at reading me. She recognized the shift before I accepted the call.

The phone continued vibrating in my hand.

Part of me considered letting it go to voicemail. The thought lasted only a moment before common sense intervened. Ignoring my father never prevented a conversation. It only delayed it.

Drawing in a quiet breath, I answered.

“Hello, Father.”

“Eleanor.”

His voice carried the same controlled authority it always had, polished smooth by decades in politics. He didn’t ask how I was. He didn’t apologize for interrupting my workday. Formalities served no purpose when he already expected compliance.

My fingers tightened around the phone.

“Is everything alright?”

“I need you home tonight.”

The request landed with the weight of a command.

I turned toward the window overlooking Georgetown, watching the first drops of rain streak across the glass. Around me, the office continued moving through an ordinary Thursday morning. Someone laughed down the hall. A printer hummed nearby. Harper waited silently across from my desk.

“What time?” I asked.

“Six.”

The pause that followed told me something was coming.

“Is there a reason?”

“There is.”

Nothing more.

Of course there wasn’t.

My father treated information the way other people treated currency. He spent it only when it served his interests.

“Alright.”

“I’ll see you this evening.”

The call ended before I could say anything else.

For a moment I simply sat there looking at the dark screen while the pressure at the base of my skull pulsed once, a warning my body understood before I did.

Experience had taught me not to ignore that particular warning. If I caught it early enough, there was a chance I could stop it before it became a full migraine. If I didn’t, the pain could steal entire days from me.

Opening the second drawer of my desk, I reached for the small prescription bottle tucked behind a stack of sticky notes and shook one tablet into my palm. The medication rattled softly as I screwed the cap back on. One swallow of coffee later, I leaned back in my chair and closed my eyes for a second.

The doctors called it fibromyalgia.

My father called it being dramatic.

Harper leaned forward slightly.

“What happened?”

I glanced around my office at the bookshelves lining the walls, the manuscript waiting on my desk, and the caramel macchiato growing cold beside my laptop. A few minutes earlier, I had been worrying about an author’s inability to write a coherent third act. Now a familiar sense of dread had settled beneath my ribs.

“The senator has summoned me.”

Harper’s mouth tightened. She was one of the few people at Hawthorne & Reed who knew who I really was, and she had never once made me regret telling her.

“That bad?”

I managed a small smile.

“Ask me tomorrow.”

She didn’t smile back.

“Ellie.”

Concern sat in my nickname, soft and careful. Harper had learned over the years to be careful with questions about my father. She knew enough to worry and too little to understand the full shape of it, which was probably my fault. I gave people pieces of the truth the way children fed birds from their palms, a crumb at a time, always ready to pull back before anything could be taken.

“I’m fine,” I said.

Harper’s expression said she didn’t believe me.

The problem with lying to people who loved you was that sometimes they heard the lie and stayed anyway.

She rose after a moment and gathered her coffee.

“Text me after?”

“I will.”

“I mean it.”

“I know.”

Harper lingered near the doorway, clearly wanting to say more. In the end, she only gave me a look I couldn’t quite hold and left me alone with my manuscript, my cooling coffee, and the growing unease sitting heavily in my chest.

I tried reading the next chapter three separate times.

By the end of the afternoon, I still couldn’t remember a single word of it.