The President's Queen

Bleeding. Three points in ten days, and the memo saying so is curling at the corner where she gripped it too hard on the walk down the corridor. *Your numbers in Iowa are bleeding, Julian. Three points in ten days.* Charlie sets it on the edge of his desk. Six in the morning, and the fluorescents in campaign headquarters hum like a trapped insect, casting everything in the particular shade of despair she has come to associate with democracy in action. Julian Croft does not look up from the speech he is marking. His pen scratches across the page. A strike-through, a marginal note, the kind of disciplined revision that served him well in the Senate and will get him slaughtered in a primary. *I'm not bleeding points because of my message. I'm bleeding because—* He is wrong about why, and she knows exactly why, and telling him means telling him something about herself that she has kept out of three background checks. They have eleven weeks to the caucus, a war chest with a hole in it, and an opposition researcher who has already found the thing Charlie moved states to get away from. She has a plan for it. The plan involves telling Julian nothing at all. What follows: the lie she has built her life on, a door she swore she would never open, a promise that costs everything, a breakdown nobody planned for, a memory that will not stay buried, a wound she has never let anybody see, a brother who carries too much, and a kiss that sells both of them out. *Aldrich had lied about filing the request.* He looked at her the way he had on the bus that night, when he kissed her and said he did not care about any of it. Charlie set a memo on a desk and said his numbers were bleeding. By the last chapter he is the one holding a piece of paper, and the thing that is bleeding is not a poll, and she is the one who will not look up.