CHAPTER FOUR
MERRITT
The congressional reception was one of the events I usually enjoyed least anyway, three hours of standing in a marble room making conversation with people who wanted something from Whitaker and were too polished to ask for it directly, so when he brought it up over breakfast, I didn't think much of it at first.
"Tamsin thinks it might be smart if you sit this one out," he said, not quite looking at me, buttering toast with more attention than toast usually required. "Thursday's reception, the one with the appropriations committee."
"Why?"
"Reporters are looking for any angle into the family right now. If you're standing next to me in a room full of the people deciding our contract, there's a chance somebody asks you a question about your dad instead of asking me about Fenner, and suddenly the story's about you instead of him."
"Do you think that's actually a risk?"
"I think Tamsin thinks it's a risk, and given everything else going on, I'd rather not test it." He finally looked up. "It's one reception, Mer. It's not a big deal."
He was right that it wasn't a big deal, not that Thursday.
I'd stood in that same marble room a dozen times over the years, and if I was honest with myself, an evening at home with a book sounded considerably better than another three hours of small talk with appropriations staffers who called me "Whitaker's wife" as though I hadn't been introduced with a name of my own.
"Do you agree with her?" I asked. "Or is this just something you're going along with because it's easier than arguing?"
"I think everyone needs to be strategic for a few weeks. All of us. Fenner included, believe it or not, though God knows he's not acting like it."
"Okay," I said. "I'll stay home."
"Thank you for understanding."
It was such a small thing, that phrase, and it barely registered, not that morning.
It slid past the way ordinary sentences do, absorbed into the rhythm of a marriage where gratitude got exchanged over breakfast the same way plans did.
Thank you for understanding. I would hear that sentence, or some close cousin of it, perhaps a dozen more times over the following weeks, and each time it would cost me a little more to hand over, though I couldn't have told you that yet, not on a Tuesday morning with toast crumbs on the counter and my husband already reaching for his phone.
Thursday came. I stayed home, made myself a real dinner instead of the usual grazing I did when Whitaker traveled, watched half a documentary about coral reefs, and told myself the evening was, if anything, a small mercy.
I saw the photographs the next morning anyway, the way you see anything you've told yourself you won't look for.
A society page ran three pictures from the reception, Whitaker shaking hands with the appropriations chair, Orson deep in conversation with a senator I recognized, and Fenner, tall and easy and smiling in a room full of the exact people his own conduct had put the entire company at risk with, standing at Whitaker's elbow like nothing at all was wrong.
Fenner had attended.
I sat with that for longer than I meant to.
The whole premise of my staying home had been that a Bellamy near a reporter right now was a liability, and yet the Bellamy actually responsible for the scandal had walked in the front door with a drink in his hand and his photograph taken three separate times.
I told myself there had to be a reason. Maybe his absence would have looked worse, an admission before any charges existed.
Maybe Tamsin had a strategy I wasn't seeing all of.
Whitaker managed risk for a living, weighed variables I didn't have access to, and I had spent nine years trusting that when he made a call, even one I didn't fully understand, there was a logic underneath it that would eventually reveal itself as sound.
Whitaker came home that evening later than usual, tie already stuffed in his jacket pocket rather than around his neck, and dropped into the chair across from me at the kitchen table with the particular heaviness of a man who'd spent the day fielding questions he didn't have good answers for.
"Long one?" I asked.
"Every day this week has been the long one." He rubbed his eyes. "How was the coral reef documentary?"
"Surprisingly upsetting. Bleaching is worse than I thought."
"Everything's worse than we thought lately." He said it lightly, a joke aimed at himself, and reached across the table for a piece of the bread I'd left out, and for a moment I almost let the evening close there, easy and uneventful, the way most of our evenings had always closed.
Instead I found myself turning my water glass slowly on the table, working up to the question the way I'd worked up to very little in our marriage before that week. "I saw the photos from the reception."
Something in his face went carefully neutral, the same expression he wore in meetings when he didn't yet know which direction a conversation was about to move. "Yeah?"
"Fenner was there."
"He was."
I waited for him to say more, to offer the explanation I'd spent all afternoon assuming existed, and when he didn't immediately fill the silence, I felt the question rise in my throat, sharp and specific.
Why him and not me. What was different about his risk and mine.
But I looked at him across the table, exhausted in a way I'd rarely seen him exhausted, and I swallowed the question instead of asking it, because some other part of me had already decided that whatever answer he gave, I didn't want to be the reason he had one more thing to manage tonight.
"I'm sure there was a reason," I said instead.
"There was," he said, relief flickering across his face too plainly for me to miss it, though I told myself I'd imagined that too. "It's complicated. I'll explain the whole thing once this settles down a little."
"Okay," I said, and reached for the bread myself, and let the conversation move somewhere easier.
I didn't mention the photographs again after that.
I told myself it wasn't worth the argument, not during a week already this hard, and some part of me, a part I wasn't proud of later, also didn't want to hear an explanation that might not satisfy me.
It was easier to let the question sit unanswered in a drawer somewhere than to open it and find nothing inside.
Hollis called that afternoon, the way she called most Fridays, and asked how I was holding up.
"Fine," I said. "Staying out of the spotlight for a bit. Tamsin's orders."
"Tamsin who?"
"Crisis manager. She thinks reporters will use me to get to Whitaker."
There was a pause on the line, the particular silence Hollis used when she was deciding how bluntly to say something. "And Whitaker's fine with that?"
"He thinks it's smart, for now."
"Huh," she said, and left it there, and I was grateful she didn't push, because I didn't yet have an answer I trusted for the question underneath her huh, which was whether I was fine with it too.
I told myself I was. A reception was a small thing to give up.
A single evening, easily returned once the news cycle moved on to something else, and news cycles always moved on to something else.
I had given up plenty of small things over the years without losing anything that mattered, learned which topics to avoid at Sabine's dinner table, learned which dress read as appropriate and which read as trying too hard, and none of that accommodation had ever cost me anything I couldn't spare.
I didn't yet understand the difference between adjusting yourself and being removed.
I would learn it soon enough, one reception, one interview, one calendar invitation at a time, each one small enough on its own to seem unworthy of an argument, until their combined meaning became impossible to ignore.