My father is watching the screen. Gerald has moved closer and is watching it too.
"My cousin and him," I say, and I let my voice crack on it beautifully. "I have seen them together so many times and I wanted to let it go, I begged her, I told her I knew she liked him and I said please, please just let me have this one thing, just let me do this one thing for our family, but she wouldn't—" I stop and press my hand to my eyes. "She just wouldn't."
Gerald is looking at me in disbelief but I keep my eyes on my father.
"Last night," I continue, dropping my voice to something smaller and more frightened, "I went to the bathroom and when I came back they were gone. Both of them. I looked everywhere and then I decided to wait and I must have fallen asleep and I woke up to your calls." I look at my father with the eyes of someone absolutely devastated by the injustice of it. "I don't know whythey are lying, no one else was with us. I don't know why they would make up something like that about this man and me, I have never even met." I let my voice rise slightly on the last words. "Unless they just want to cover up what they were doing."
My father stares at me and I stare back at him letting a tear run down my face without wiping it.
My father turns to Gerald, something passes between them and then he turns back to me and he asks, his voice fractionally softer, "Then why are you only coming home now?"
I look at my hands. "I was afraid," I whisper. "I knew you'd be angry and I just— I couldn't face it. I sat in the hotel lobby all night." I look up at him with an expression of absolute terrified contrition. "I'm sorry. I should have come home immediately. I'm so sorry, Dad."
My father looks at me and I hold his gaze and I keep my chin trembling just enough and I wait.
Then he says in the fake soft voice that I have been able to identify since I was seven years old, "I trust you. But you understand that regardless of all this, you'll need to go and apologize to the Hartley family. Make this right."
He didn't ask if I was alright. He didn't ask whether I had eaten or whether I had been frightened. I finally understand, with a clarity that has no grief left in it, that I have been trying to fill a space in this man that he sealed shut long before I was old enough to understand what I was pressing against.
"I'll do whatever you need," I tell him, and I mean it in a way he will never understand. "I want to help your campaign. I'll marry him. I'll do everything right, I promise."
Something happens in my father's face that I have spent twenty-three years trying to produce and have never managed until this moment. His eyes open slightly and he says, "There's my good girl."
I smile at him. I feel absolutely nothing except the faint and distant urge to be sick.
I let the smile waver and I look down at my hands and I do the hesitation, the small performance of someone working up to saying something difficult, and my father notices and asks, "What is it?"
"I'm worried," I say quietly. "About my cousin." I look up at him with carefully constructed concern. "I know you care about her and I know her father is important to you and I would never want to cause problems in the family." I pause. "But she really does have feelings for him and I think, for now, it would be better if she were kept a little distance from us. Especially from James. We can't risk another scandal. Not with everything at stake."
"We just need her somewhere else for a while," I add gently. "That's all."
"Of course," he says.
Of course. What couldn't he sacrifice for the right outcome?
He turns to Gerald and begins issuing instructions and then he turns back to me with a smile that doesn't reach his eyes and tells me to go up and rest.
I walk down the corridor until I am around the corner and out of sight of the office and I stop and I take out my phone and I make the call.
It picks up on the second ring.
"I'll send you the details," I say quietly, my back against the wall, my eyes on the corridor. "I need two people taken in."
I end the call.
I look back at my father's office door. All these years of trying to be enough for someone who had decided that I was not worth the effort of pretending.
I put my phone in my pocket. Everything he sacrificed for her, every vote and every headline and every alliance and every deal.
I am going to burn it to the ground.
* * *
It took a month for James to leave the ICU, only then did Senator Hartley agree to sit across a table from my father again.The meeting is arranged for Thursday afternoon, when my father will take me with him to grovel for power.
Senator Hartley opens the door himself, which tells me how much he wants this resolved, because men like Senator Hartley do not open their own doors unless the situation requires the performance of accessibility.
"Phillip," he says. His voice was warm now that the terms are favorable.
