The baby is in the press release.

Not the baby baby, of course—God forbid Shiv allow something as sincere as her actual child to be publicly consumed. But there’s a baby. A stock photo. Diverse, well-lit. Cradled by hands meant to suggest Tom and Shiv’s, without legally committing to the reality. “Wambsgans Family Values,” the draft headline reads.

Tom Wambsgans stares at it over his third espresso and lets out a sound somewhere between a laugh and a small, quiet scream.

This is what winning looks like.

ATN is pivoting—slightly, surgically—toward something warmer. He’s still the CEO. He still signs off on headlines that casually upend democracy. But now there’s a vertical dedicated to community outreach. Human interest. Wellness. The rebrand is slow, begrudging, and orchestrated by people who could fake sincerity in a hostage video.

Including her. Or rather—especially her.

She wasn’t supposed to take the job.

She’s qualified, sure. She cares. Which is its own kind of liability. She’s worked for nonprofits that were actually non-profitable. She’s built community programs that didn’t end with ribbon cuttings and NDA-laced apologies. She has a reputation for being… real

And now she’s here. Because she was offered a stupid amount of money, and because—if she’s honest with herself—she wanted to see what it looked like from the inside. To look into the mouth of the machine and try to change its teeth.

Tom meets her on her first day. That’s unusual. Normally it’s a junior exec, a clipboard, a dry PowerPoint. But here’s the CEO himself, adjusting his cufflinks, smoothing his tie, looking at her with that too-white smile that never quite makes it to his eyes.

“Hi,” he says, holding out a hand. “Tom. Obviously. Welcome to… the belly of the beast.”

She blinks. “Are you allowed to say that?”

“Legally? Probably not,” he murmurs, already leading her down a glass hallway. “But who’s gonna stop me? I’m the beast.”

And so it begins.

He shows up at every soft launch. Hovers near her desk when there’s a camera around. Tries to be seen “doing the work,” though he doesn’t always know what the work is. Sometimes he looks at her like she’s holding something he dropped a long time ago and forgot he missed.

And her? She tries not to like him.

She really does.

Because he’s everything you should hate: rich, complicit, stunning in a way that feels engineered by a committee. But then he does something unguarded. Stammers when he means to smirk. Brings the wrong coffee order but gets her name spelled right. Lingers too long at the door when she’s fighting for some underfunded initiative and says, softer than usual:

“You make me feel like a good person. That’s… weird. For me.”

And then he leaves. Before she can ask what the hell that means.

Before she can admit—he’s not the only one feeling it.