A/N: This is a modernized Persuasion. This is the story that Anna Eliot was writing in Much More Than a Fairy Tale. I don't own Persuasion.

Summary: Gregory Fenton and Meghan Walsh are the Romeo and Juliet of the political world. He writes one of the premier Republican blogs while she is the daughter of one of the most powerful Democrat senators. Modernized Persuasion

Rating: T for language and themes

Chapter One

To have met Gregory Fenton was an honor and a shock. Most Americans are familiar with Gregory's weekly column, Vox Populi. It was published every Tuesday on his website, and in various conservative newspapers. All I knew about Gregory was that my dad, like most Democrats, abhorred him. And his picture next to the column was of a young, good-looking man. He had bright blue yes and wavy brown hair. His face may have been too angular, as my young sister Rebecca, the future CNN political analyst of the family liked to comment. Rebecca knew plenty about men and politics. Daddy never knew about the relationships she carried on with other senators' aides behind his back. But that's not my point. We can talk about Becca later. Right now we're here to talk about Gregory J. Fenton. He was an angular, tall, skinny man. But there was something appealing about his eyes, and his smile. But when your father has been a Senator for 27 years, men from the other side of the aisle are off-limits.

I'd been secretly reading Gregory's column during my second year of college. It was the spring before the famous Bush-Gore election of 2000. I was moved by what his young lawyer from Connecticut was saying and while I might not agree with everything he said, he definitely had an impact on my political beliefs. And so in November of my junior year at Notre Dame, I filled in the box for Ross Perot. My father was Senator James Jefferson Walsh, Democrat from Illinois, and I could never vote for a Republican. But Gregory Fenton had convinced me that I could never vote for Al Gore. And I did something rebellious, for the first time in my life. So I kept reading Vox Populi.

Four years later, the fall of the Bush-Kerry election, I was standing in front of my first grade classroom greeting my new students. And there he was; Gregory Fenton was walking towards me holding the hand of a little girl wearing a bright red dress. And then he spoke to me. "This is Audrey Murphy."

I bent down to her level. "Hi, Audrey," I said, reaching my hand out to shake her small one. "My name is Miss Walsh and I'm going to be your teacher this year."

"Do you have chocolate milk?" Audrey asked as she shook my hand.

"Audrey!" Gregory Fenton exclaimed to his maybe daughter.

"Sorry, Uncle Greg," she whispered. Then, louder, she said to me, "I really like chocolate milk, I can read Curious George, and I know how to count to 100."

"Audrey really likes to talk, Miss Walsh," the uncle said. Then he extended his hand to me. "I'm Gregory Fenton, Audrey's uncle. I'm helping watch Audrey for a couple of days."

"My mommy just had a baby!" the niece pronounced. "She's a girl and her name is Katharine Elizabeth. I also have a brother named James. He's three and he's having breakfast with Nana Fenton while Uncle Greg takes me to school."

"That's exciting, I replied as Gregory grimaced. "Don't worry, Mr. Fenton. Most girls this age talk my wear off the first day of school."

"See, Uncle Greg? I'm normal!" Audrey exclaimed as her uncle smiled the same amazing smile that sat next to his column every Tuesday.

"I think you'll find Audrey will talk your ear off every day of the year," he told me.

She pulled on his arm. "Uncle Greg, can you leave now? I want to play with the other girls."

He smiled and kissed her cheek. "I'll see you after school, okay?"

Audrey nodded and hugged him. "Good-bye, Uncle Greg. Have a good day."

"You too, bella," he said. "I love you."

She ran into the classroom and he smiled. "She's growing up too fast."

I laughed. "It happens to all of us. It was nice meeting you, Mr. Fenton."

"Please, call me Greg," he replied. "And it was nice meeting you too, Miss Walsh."

"It's Meghan," I said with a smile. "And I suppose I'll see you at three o'clock."

"I'll see you then," he said with the same amazing smile before walking away.

I spent that day with thirty rowdy first-graders. Some of them wouldn't stop talking and others wouldn't start. But that was what the first day of first grade was like. Some of them were afraid to ask permission to go to the bathroom and barely made it there when I figured out what was going on. But after a few years teaching first grade, I've become aware of the ways little kids will do when they want attention or they need to pee. They were rowdy and energetic but they were so much fun. Sometimes it was hard to get them to behave, but it was worth it. As a teacher you could easily tell which kids were spoiled brats and ran the show at home. You could tell which kids were well-disciplined and which ones weren't. People who had been teaching longer than I had said you could even learn to tell which kids came from dysfunctional homes just by their behavior. I wasn't that good yet. But I was getting pretty good at telling where kids fell in the family order. Oldest children were always extremely confident. Only children were used to having everyone cater to their every whim. Middle children were used to being overlooked or put upon. Youngest children were either incredibly wise or extremely spoiled. And then there were some kids who defied those stereotypes. But in general, they worked. Audrey Murphy definitely acted like a typical oldest child with her confident, commanding personality.

Meeting Meghan Walsh was a shock. I was fairly familiar with Senator James Walsh of Illinois. He had been a Democratic senator from Illinois for 27 years. While claiming to be devoutly Roman Catholic, Walsh was so liberal that his conservative rating with three percent. Walsh has four children and two stepchildren. His first wife, Maureen Conley, had died of breast cancer shortly before their fifteenth wedding anniversary. He had remarried about six years later, to British writer Ellen Parker-Daniels, who was divorced from her first husband with whom she had two children. I also knew that Walsh's biological children were Connor, Meghan, Rebecca, and Benjamin. Ellen's children were Jillian and Natasha. You saw pictures of the gorgeous, smiling family every time Walsh won an election or was making a public appearance where it would be good to have his photogenic family behind him. I knew that Meghan was a teacher while most of her siblings were involved in politics in some way, shape, or form; I'd heard far too many speeches in the past year or two that involved the line "My daughter, Meghan, is a teacher in Chicago and she says…" I also knew that Meghan was always towards the back of the photos of the smiling Walsh family.

And then one day I had to drop my niece, Audrey, off for her first day of school. My older sister, Michelle, had just given birth to a baby and so needed some help with her children. When I dropped Audrey off at the school, I learned that her (very pretty) teacher's name was Meghan Walsh. I wasn't sure if she was the senator's daughter but she was gorgeous. She had beautiful dark brown hair that hung down to her shoulders and bright green eyes.

When I picked Audrey up that first afternoon, I had to go back to the classroom again. Miss Walsh was waiting with numerous six-year-olds running around her. On her desk, there was a small glass vase filled with dandelions. The next thing I knew there was a red blur flying at my legs screaming, "Uncle Greg!"

"Hi, Audrey," I said, stroking my niece's head. "How was your first day of school?"

"I like Miss Walsh. She smells like sugar cookies and you should marry her."

I laughed as the supposedly sugar-cookie scented woman in question approached us. "Audrey was an angel today," she told me with a bright smile. And that lively smile was what inspired me to ask Miss Walsh for her phone number while my niece ran to get her Little Mermaid backpack. I'm not sure what her inspiration was, but before I left that room I had a pink post-it note with "Meghan Walsh 708-555-3016; Call after 6pm" written on it.

I waited a day before I called her. I'm not sure that was intentional but whatever. But she answered the phone and three days later we met for coffee. We hit it off right away. We both ordered a tall caramel macchiato and a blueberry muffin. And it was history from there. We had so much more in common than I could have ever imagined. She was Senator James Walsh's daughter, but she wasn't like him. "My older brother, Connor, is a registered member of the Republican party," she told me. "And I'm following in his footsteps."

"Have you registered yet?"

She shook her head. "I'm still working on exploring the beliefs of the party. I'm not going to just jump ship on my dad without exploring the new ship."

"That's reasonable. After all, you were raised as the poster child for the perfect Democrat family."

"Yeah, we lived in a mansion and summered on the Costa del Sol or the French Riviera," she snipped back. She ran a hand through her dark brown hair and smiled. "Dad loves making people think that he's such a great man of the people, but he really has no clue what life is like for his constituency."

"Does Senator Walsh know that you feel this way?" I asked her.

"Are you asking as a friend or as the author of your blog?"

"Smart girl," I replied with a smile. "I'm just a curious friend. I'm taking a break from picking on Senator Walsh so I can expose CNN and their biased reporting."

"Intriguing," she replied. "I'd like to read that one."

"It's going to be a multi-part series. It'll be on my blog."

"Very interesting," she replied.

I smiled. "So back to my original question, does Senator Walsh know about your feelings about his relationship with his constituency?"

She laughed. "Of course not; I'm not stupid. I know what to tell my dad and what not to tell him. You have to be careful with his ego and stuff."

"Feeding the senator's ego," I remarked. "That could make an interesting column."

She covered her face with her hands and sighed. "He would try to have you destroyed."

"I'm not afraid of him," I told her.

"Ah, but I am," she replied. "And I don't trust him."

"Well, he's a politician. Lots of people distrust politicians."

Meghan laughed. "But how many people distrust their parents?"

I didn't always distrust my dad. When I was a little girl, my dad was a warm, friendly person who loved spending time with his kids. He was a politician but he always put his kids first. There's a picture someplace of him at the Democratic National Convention giving a speech while holding Rebecca. Back then, the smiling family photos weren't perfect. There was a photo taken in the late eighties; I can't remember why it was taken but Rebecca has chocolate all over her face and Dad is just laughing. Connor's hair was a mess and I was clinging to Mom because I was scared of the cameras. And my mom was holding a sick and screaming baby Benjamin. But my dad didn't complain. I remember him telling us at the time that he was just happy that he had his family with him, supporting him.

Then when I was eleven, almost twelve, my mom died slowly and painfully of cancer. When Mom died, Dad completely changed. The fun loving family man became a workaholic his focus was always on politics and pleasing his constituency. His children slipped into the background. We were dragged out for photo ops and to remind voters that he was a father and a widower. He used us time and again to play the sympathy card. When I was eighteen, Dad married Ellen Parker-Daniels and I acquired a stepmother and two younger stepsisters. Ellen paid attention to her four new stepchildren but for Connor, the damage had already been done. Connor was twenty and a junior at Notre Dame and I was starting my freshman year there. Rebecca and Benjamin were still living at home and bonded more with Ellen and her daughters, Jillian and Natasha. But Dad was still struggling to be a good dad. Politics had consumed his life. He lived most of the year in the Beltway while Ellen lived in Chicago most of the year. She was from England but Dad wanted her to live in the U.S. as much as possible to ensure American voters that he and his family were committed to them.

Connor rediscovered Catholicism while at Notre Dame and decided that he'd had it with Dad's pick-and-choose Catholicism. Instead, he threw himself into conservative Catholicism with a passion I'd never seen in him up to that point. My older brother moved to New York after he graduated from ND and went to law school. And then he joined the Republican Party. There was an article about his "jumping ship" in Time magazine, if you can believe that. And we had five thousand family arguments about it. My dad liked to send out family emails after elections asking us all who had voted for. Connor, who wasn't afraid of my dad, always told the truth. I told the truth but tried to delay telling him how conservative I was becoming as long as possible; the year I voted for Ross Perot I told the truth. He sent back an angry email expounding upon the so-called "virtues" of Al Gore. In a rare fit of courage, I replied to tell him he couldn't tell me who to vote for. We had an email fight that became verbal at Thanksgiving dinner. Thankfully, my stepmother intervened and told him to let his children live their own lives.

I grew further and further from my father as I grew up. I didn't mind terribly but I think Ellen did. She wanted to keep our family together as much as possible. So I talked to my siblings. And Connor and I were as close as ever. But Dad and I grew apart as I grew older and developed more of my own thoughts and opinions. It got to the point where we barely spoke at family events except to exchange simple pleasantries. But my stepmother was glad that we were all at least speaking. Connor and I grew more and more alike. I grew closer to Jill and Tasha as they grew older. Rebecca grew closer to Dad for some bizarre reason. And Ben was usually pretty loyal to anything that Connor did because Connor, who was about ten years older than Ben, had basically raised our younger brother. There was never a clear political schism in our family, especially since Ellen, Jill, and Tasha were still British citizens, but by 2004, it was highly likely that more of Senator James Jefferson Walsh's children would be voting Republican than Democrat. Getting those perfect happy family photos was getting harder and harder. We were all as photogenic as ever. But we weren't quite as close or happy with each other as we'd once been.

My family life was almost the opposite of Meghan's. In 2004, my parents celebrated their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary. I was their oldest child, born nine months after their wedding. I had four younger sisters, all of whom were married by 2004. But my parents wanted me to marry and provide them with a grandson to carry on the Fenton family name. I think my mom just wanted me married so she didn't have to worry about me being alone in my apartment in Hartford. I was a grown man but my mother was still worried about me. Of course, she was Italian; her parents were born in the old country and my nonna had taught my mother how to worry. She had four daughters who were married with children she could have worried about but instead she worried about her unmarried son.

I grew up in a suburb of Hartford, Connecticut where my dad wrote for the Hartford Courant. I had four sisters, as I mentioned earlier. Michelle is two years younger than me. Juliana came along three years later and was followed two years later by the twins, Elizabeth and Karen. Now, Michelle was thirty-two, married with three children, and living in Chicago. Julie is twenty-nine, married, and living in Hartford with two children. Liz and Karen are twenty-seven. Liz lives in San Francisco with her husband and their baby while Karen is in London with her husband and two daughters. And I was in Hartford, single, and writing political columns for whoever would read them. That was until my niece Katharine was born. I went to Chicago with my mom to help Michelle out with her older kids, Audrey and James. That was when I met Meghan Walsh. She was twenty-four years old and she came from a dysfunctional family. While my family gatherings went until two in the morning, hers were over by ten o'clock. And The Fenton family managed to get together at least five or six times a year in addition to Christmas, Easter, and Thanksgiving, except for Karen who only came for Christmas, but the only times the Walsh family was together was Thanksgiving and Christmas as well as every six years on Election Day, the Illinois Democratic Convention, and whenever their dad needed to prove how much of a family man he was.

The Walsh family was dysfunctional and very different from my family. While family dinners at the Walsh family house were reminiscent of the Civil War, my family's dinners were more like a mall the day after Thanksgiving. They were loud, chaotic, and more fun than you could imagine. My mother's Italian family was always eating, talking, and trying to fix everyone's problems-and all at the same time. Meghan was slightly scared the first time I took her to meet them. All the women talk constantly. My sisters have mastered the art of carrying on five conversations at once. And there were only four of them. Don't ask me how they do it. I can only carry on two conversations on it at a time. Meghan told me once that she can only carry on one at a time; multiple conversations are not a gift the Irish have, according to her. I'd argue with that; I always though they were supposed to have the gift of gab. Meghan told me that she wasn't expressing that part of her Irish heritage.

"I'm not much of a talker," I told Gregory on our first date. "I talk a lot at work. But other than that, I prefer quiet. I think it's from growing up with my father giving speeches all the time. I'm used to letting other people do all the talking. My dad loves to talk and Rebecca, my younger sister, never shuts up. So I learned to keep quiet and just listen."

"I grew up with four sisters who never stopped talking so I just learned to talk over them," he told me. "I was louder than they were and that helped me survive."

I smiled. "The Walsh house isn't like that. If you're too loud, the others tell you to be quiet. It's all about being respectful."

"So Senator Walsh likes to be in charge of things?"

"Greg, don't use me for information about my dad. I like you; you're a great guy and I enjoy spending time with you. But I'm not going to spill information to you about my dad just because you're one of his enemies. I'm not a vengeful teenaged girl; I'm simply a jaded daughter who has accepted the truth about her father."

He looked at me with a firm, unwavering gaze. "I'm not digging for information about your dad. I don't like him. But I'm not going to use you for information about him. I'm almost positive I could learn his deepest and most horrible secrets from your older brother without any trouble."

That was probably true. Connor lost no love on Senator James Jefferson Walsh; he maintained that our father had died with our mother and was buried under her tombstone. His body kept living as that monster, Senator Walsh. But I wasn't just about to admit those sorts of things about Connor. My brother wasn't public about his feelings towards our father. He was always civil and playing the good loving son when the public eye was around. He didn't want the media or my dad's constituency to know the truth about their relationship. "Connor thinks that it isn't anyone's business what our family life is like behind closed doors."

"But your dad has chosen to live a public life."

"That's true," I replied. "But Connor hasn't made that choice. He's a lawyer in private practice with a wife and a child. He and Jessica have not chosen to live a public life. They, like me, have chosen to live a private life."

"What would you do if you married someone who lives their life in the public eye?"

"Scream," I replied with a smile.

"What if it was someone who wasn't going to drag you into things?"

I blinked. "How would that work?"

"Well, for example, I travel around the country speaking to various groups like local branches of the Republican Party or pro-life groups. But I'm not hugely famous and I don't think I'd ever have to drag my wife and children into all of that. I'm not sure I'd want to."

"I wouldn't want that. My ideal would be a nice quiet life with my work, my husband, and my kids."

He smiled. "Is your husband allowed to work?"

"Of course," I laughed. "I'm secretly a very traditional woman. But don't tell my dad. Or my stepmother, she doesn't believe that women should ever be stay-at-home parents. She thinks that children should always be raised in day cares or by nannies. She has some pretty interesting ideas about childrearing and family life in general. She also believes that marriage is merely a social institution that we have evolved beyond and that the sooner we accept that fact, the better off this world will be. She is opposed to gay marriage for the same reasons. She doesn't think gay people should marry because she doesn't think that anyone should get married."

"Isn't she married?"

I sighed. "My father explained to her that there was no way someone of his political caliber could live with a woman without marrying her. He also told her that he publicly claims to be Catholic so she had to concede to that too. But she's actually pretty much anti-organized religion. She has very open-minded views on the world and society."

He smiled. "So she doesn't believe in marriage or organized religion. What does she believe in?"

"Don't ask me," I told him. "She likes people; she loves shopping and socializing. She's an amazing hostess and she loves causes; she's great at fund-raising and other philanthropic activities. She hosts wonderful fundraisers for my dad during campaigns. And she is a nice person."

"They say Hitler was a nice person," he replied.

"Who is they?" I asked. "I've never heard that one before."

A/N: Please review! I really want to hear people's opinions.