CHAPTER GLIMPSE

Tara finished the lunches before she opened the radar again.

Two peanut-butter sandwiches went into the blue box. An apple beside each. Abby’s had a note folded under the napkin—*You know this*—because finals week had reached middle school too, in its smaller and more dramatic form.

Rain ticked the kitchen window. On Tara’s phone, a line of storms had stopped behaving like a line. The cells kept rebuilding over Tippecanoe County, bright reds passing over the same ground while the forecast discussion softened its verbs.

The operations chat added a video from West Lafayette. Water slid across River Road in a thin reflective sheet. Not deep. Not fast. The kind people drove through because they could still see the pavement beneath it.

Her former husband’s thread sat one swipe away. He was usually reliable when she asked. Asking left room for an answer she did not control.

So she sent one text to Megan Kline next door.

**TEXT**

Tara: Can you get Abby after school if this runs long?

Megan: Of course. She can stay for dinner too.

Tara: Thank you. Key still under the blue planter.

Abby appeared in the doorway in socks, hair flattened on one side. “Are you leaving?”

“For a few hours.”

Her daughter looked at the go-bag by the chair, then at the rain. She had learned enough to know that a few hours was not a unit of time.

“Megan has pickup,” Tara said. “Lunch is in the fridge. Your shoes are still on the vent.”

“I know.”

“I know you know.”

Tara kissed the top of her head, took the bag, and left before either of them could make the exchange carry more than it needed.

SERIALIZED POLITICAL FICTION

CONTINGENCY is a cinematic political serial about capable, damaged people and the institutions they strain.

Set in an alternate American political world, it is released ahead of the election cycle it imagines.

A race is never only the people onstage

A presidential race is never only the people onstage. It is staff, party organizations, election law, donors, reporters, families, local leaders, officeholders, and hundreds of decisions that eventually become the public story. A person can be trying to solve a small problem in a room no camera ever enters—and still be part of the larger story taking shape around them.

That is the scale CONTINGENCY follows.

The story moves through the people inside it

Each installment stays close to one person at a particular point in the larger story. They may be an aide, reporter, official, family member, organizer, or another role player whose own history and agency shape what happens around them. No one gets to own the whole picture. The story moves through the people who make a system work, bend, or fail under pressure.

A note from Matt

I have been interested in history, elections, and the strange turns they take for as long as I can remember. CONTINGENCY began with a simple question: could fiction tell the story of an election that sounds impossible at first, yet becomes plausible once you see the people and machinery that bring it into being?

I began by imagining a novel with a handful of points of view. But the world kept opening outward—past the people at the top and into the institutions, relationships, and everyday work surrounding them. A serial gave me room to follow that larger cast without losing the human scale.

My time inside politics also taught me how much of a campaign happens far from the stage: a local party meeting, a difficult staffing call, a reporter’s question, a family conversation, a decision made because someone is trying to do a job well. Those people are not all deciding an election by themselves. They are living their own lives inside a larger story that keeps moving around them.

That is why CONTINGENCY is a serial, and why each installment has a different point of view. The story moves ahead of the real 2028 cycle, in a sprawling fictional world built to show how pressure moves through people and institutions.

The Contingency Almanac is there if you want the deeper public record. The serial is there to tell the story.

— Matt Wittlief

Go deeper without reading ahead

The Contingency Almanac is a companion, not required reading. It preserves the spoiler-safe public record around the story—people, institutions, dates, maps, and other context—without reading ahead. The serial remains complete on its own.

Explore the Contingency Almanac.

Before the story begins

Before launch, Reader Briefings will introduce the world without spoiling the story. The first chapter arrives Friday, January 8, 2027.

The story begins Friday, January 8. Subscribe free.