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Something softens and resolves in her face, and he suspects he’s answered a question for her beyond the one she asked.
She reaches over and covers one of his hands with her own.
“You listen to me,” she says. Her jaw is set, ironclad. It’s the game face he’s seen her use to stare down Congress, to cow autocrats. Her grip on his hand is steady and strong. He wonders, half-hysterically, if this is how it felt to charge into war under Washington. “I am your mother. I was your mother before I was ever the president, and I’ll be your mother long after, to the day they put me in the ground and beyond this earth. You are my child. So, if you’re serious about this, I’ll back your play.”
Alex is silent.
But the debates,he thinks.But the general.
Her gaze is hard. He knows better than to say either of those things. She’ll handle it.
“So,” she says. “Do you feel forever about him?”
And there’s no room left to agonize over it, nothing left to do but say the thing he’s known all along.
“Yeah,” he says, “I do.”
Ellen Claremont exhales slowly, and she grins a small, secret grin, the crooked, unflattering one she never uses in public, the one he knows best from when he was a kid around her knees in a small kitchen in Travis County.
“Then, fuck it.”
The Washington Post
As details emerge about Alex Claremont-Diaz’s affair with Prince Henry, White House goes silent
September 27, 2020
“Thinking about history makes me wonder how I’ll fit into it one day, I guess,” First Son Alex Claremont-Diaz writes in one of the many emails to Prince Henry published by theDaily Mailthis morning. “And you too.”
It seems the answer to that question may have come sooner than any anticipated with the sudden exposure of the First Son’s romantic relationship with Prince Henry, an arrangement with major repercussions for two of the world’s most powerful nations, less than two months before the United States casts its vote on President Claremont’s second term.
As security experts within the FBI and the Claremont administration scramble to find the sources that provided the British tabloid with evidence of the affair, the usually high-profile First Family has shuttered, with no official statement from the First Son.
“The First Family has always and continues to keep their personal lives separate from the political and diplomatic dealings of the presidency,” White House Press Secretary Davis Sutherland said in a brief prepared statement this morning. “They ask for patience and understanding from the American people as they handle this very private matter.”
TheDaily Mail’s report this morning revealed that First Son Alex Claremont-Diaz has been involved romantically and sexually with Prince Henry since at least February of this year, according to emails and photographs obtained by the paper.
The full email transcripts have been uploaded to WikiLeaks under the moniker “The Waterloo Letters,” seemingly named for a reference to the Waterloo Vase in the Buckingham Palace Gardens in one email composed by Prince Henry. The correspondence continues regularly up to Sunday night and appears to have been lifted from a private email server used by residents of the White House.
“Setting aside the ramifications for President Claremont’s ability to be impartial on issues of both international relations and traditional family values,” Republicanpresidential candidate Senator Jeffrey Richards said at a press conference earlier today, “I’m extremely concerned about this private email server. What kind of information was being disseminated on this server?”
Richards added that he believes the American voters have a right to know everything else for which President Claremont’s server may have been used.
Sources close to the Claremont administration insist the private server is similar to the one set up during President George W. Bush’s administration and used only for communication within the White House about day-to-day operations and personal correspondence for the First Family and core White House personnel.
First rounds of examination of “The Waterloo Letters” by experts have yet to reveal any evidence of classified information or otherwise compromising content outside of the nature of the First Son’s relationship with Prince Henry.
For five endless, unbearable hours, Alex is shuffled from room to room in the West Wing, meeting with what seems to be every strategist, press staffer, and crisis manager his mother’s administration has to offer.
The only moment he recalls with any clarity is pulling his mother into an alcove to say, “I told Raf.”
She stares at him. “You told Rafael Luna that you’re bisexual?”
“I told Rafael Luna about Henry,” he says flatly. “Two days ago.”
She doesn’t ask why, just sighs grimly, and they both hover over the implication before she says, “No. No, those pictures were taken before that. It couldn’t have been him.”
He runs through pro and con lists, models of different outcomes, fucking charts and graphs and more data than he has ever wanted to see about his own relationship and its ramifications for the world around him.This is the damage you cause, Alex,it all seems to say, right there in hard facts and figures.This is who you hurt.
