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He skims the first few lines.
“Oh my God, Bug,” he says. “I— Oh my God.”
“Do you like it?” She looks a little nervous. “I was trying to capture, like, who you are, and your place in history, and what your role means to you, and—”
She’s cut off because he’s scooped her up in another bear hug, teary-eyed. “It’s perfect, June.”
“Hey, First Offspring,” says a voice suddenly, and when Alex puts June down, Amy is waiting in the doorway connecting the balcony to the Oval Room. “Madam President wants to see you in her office.” Her attention shifts, listening to her earpiece. “She says to bring the donuts.”
“How does she alwaysknow?” June mutters, scooping up the plate.
“I have Bluebonnet and Barracuda, on the move,” Amy says, touching her earpiece.
“I still can’t believe you picked that for your stupid code name,” June says to him. Alex trips her on the way through the door.
The donuts have been gone for two hours.
One, on the couch: June, tying and untying and retying the laces on her Keds, for lack of anything else to do with her hands. Two, against a far wall: Zahra, rapidly typing out an email on her phone, then another. Three, at the Resolute Desk: Ellen, buried in probability projections. Four, on the other couch: Alex, counting.
The doors to the Oval Office fly open and Nora comes careening in.
She’s wearing a bleach-stainedHOLLERAN FOR CONGRESS ’72 sweatshirt and the frenzied, sun-blinded expression of someone who has emerged from a doomsday bunker for the first time in a decade. She nearly crashes into the bust of Abraham Lincoln in her rush to Ellen’s desk.
Alex is already on his feet. “Where the fuck have youbeen?”
She slaps a thick folder down on the desk and turns halfway to face Alex and June, out of breath. “Okay, I know you’re pissed, and you have every right to be, but”—she braces herself against the desk with both hands, gesturing toward the folder with her chin—“I have been holed up in my apartment for two days doingthis,and you are super not gonna be mad anymore when you see what it is.”
Alex’s mother blinks at her, perturbed. “Nora, honey, we’re trying to figure out—”
“Ellen,” Nora practically yells. The room goes silent, and Nora freezes, realizing. “Uh. Ma’am. Mom-in-law. Please, just. You need to read this.”
Alex watches her sigh and put down her pen before pulling the folder toward her. Nora looks like she’s about to pass out on top of the desk. He looks across to June on the opposite couch, who appears as clueless as he feels, and—
“Holy…fuckingshit,” his mother says, a dawning mix of fury and bemusement. “Is this—?”
“Yup,” Nora says.
“And the—?”
“Uh-huh.”
Ellen covers her mouth with one hand. “How the hell didyougetthis? Wait, let me rephrase—how the hell didyouget this?”
“Okay, so.” Nora withdraws herself from the desk and steps backward. Alex has no idea what the fuck is happening, but it’s something, something big. Nora is pacing now, both hands clutched to her forehead. “The day of the leaks, I get an anonymous email. Obvious sockpuppet account, but untraceable. I tried. They sent me a link to a fucking massive file dump and told me they were a hacker and had obtained the contents of the Richards campaign’s private email server in their entirety.”
Alex stares at her. “What?”
Nora looks back at him. “I know.”
Zahra, who has been standing behind Ellen’s desk with her arms folded, cuts in to ask, “And you didn’t report this to any of the proper channels because?”
“Because I wasn’t sure it was anything at first. And when it was, I didn’t trust anybody else to handle it. They said they sent it specifically to me because they knew I was personally invested in Alex’s situation and would work as fast as possible to find what they didn’t have time to.”
“Which is?” Alex can’t believe he still has to ask.
“Proof,” Nora says. And her voice is shaking now. “That Richards fucking set you up.”
He hears, distantly, the sound of June swearing under her breath and getting up from the couch, walking off to a far corner of the room. His knees give out, so he sits back down.
