Donna had been given Louisa D'Amato's name by Kate Harper after the explosion in Gaza two years before. She'd spoken briefly with a psychologist in the hospital in Germany, and a couple of times with another at National Rehab in Washington when she came home. But those had been pro forma visits: brief, perfunctory, and not particularly useful, except that she'd been given a list of symptoms to watch out for, and the reminder that she should seek more extensive professional help if they surfaced.
When they did, it was Kate she turned to first, because Kate was the one who noticed how she was looking and offered her a chance to talk about it. It had eaten her up that it was Kate who saw what she needed, not Josh. "Invisible," she'd thought to herself. "That's what you are to him—invisible. That's what you've always been."
She knew that wasn't really true, and yet it felt true. For every time he'd flirted with her, every time he'd done something unexpected that suggested he felt something for her—every Inaugural Ball, every day in the hospital in Germany—there were twenty other times he'd made it clear that, whatever interest in her he occasionally showed, it was superficial and passing, and nothing he was ever going to act on. And then there was the question of her career. . . .
Kate had provided a surprisingly sympathetic ear. Between her own experiences and her friends', she knew quite a lot about trauma—and quite a lot about men, too. Donna didn't want to talk about Josh to Kate, but Kate asked a few oblique questions and seemed to get a pretty clear sense of how frustrated Donna was in her job, and how annoyed with her boss. Like Donna's mother, she seemed to think at first that Josh's trip to Germany indicated something profound about the nature of his feelings for his assistant. It was easier to disabuse Kate of that idea than it was her mother.
Donna couldn't bring herself to repeat everything C.J. had said before she left for Gaza, but the humiliating words were so burned into her mind that she couldn't help echoing some of the more innocuous comments—the ones about her career—and Kate, who'd had to fight her way tooth and nail over seemingly unscaleable walls thrown up by men's egos and indifference and outright sexism to get where she had, had sympathized more fulsomely than Donna had ever expected when she first let the bitter words out of her mouth.
If Kate guessed that Donna was feeling more in that department than just career frustration, she had the tact not to pursue it. Her advice was to get a good therapist and a new job. She'd heard that Will was hiring. And she had the names of two or three professionals with plenty of experience working with trauma victims, and with women who were having trouble dealing with the men who were holding them back in their careers, too.
The professionals were all women, and had all helped women Kate knew—in the Army or the Navy, the NSA or the CIA. And they all charged considerably less than the only other trauma specialist Donna had any experience with, which was a good thing. She'd seen one of Stanley Keyworth's bills once, when she was straightening up Josh's desk, and had been shocked at what he'd had to pay. His insurance had covered part of it, of course, but what they hadn't would still have made a sizeable dent in Donna's bank account. And Josh had been diagnosed with something that showed up on an HMO-approved list of conditions requiring psychiatric treatment, whereas she was pretty sure she wasn't suffering from anything nearly so severe.
Josh, of course, had been going to the guys at the very top of their profession. He'd said once that the trouble with therapy was finding someone who was smarter than you were, and Donna had snorted and rolled her eyes; only Josh would think it was hard to find a psychiatrist who was smart enough to work with. Donna had no trouble accepting someone lower down on the payscale.
Louisa D'Amato had recently retired from the military and gone into private practice. She was fifty-ish, divorced, with a son in high school and two younger daughters, and something about her reminded Donna of a college professor she had particularly admired. She seemed like the sort of woman who didn't put up with any nonsense from anyone, and yet she projected an air of approval that was very reassuring. Donna always came away from their sessions feeling that really, anything was possible, if she would just take control of her life and move forward, the way Louisa was encouraging her to do.
They talked at length about Gaza—about the stress Donna had been feeling since the explosion there, the fear and guilt and grief—but Donna found herself opening up about other problems, too. If she occasionally felt a pang of guilt about some of what she said—or what she didn't say—about Josh, she told herself it served him right and she didn't care.
It was her therapy, after all; she was the one he had brushed aside and refused to give serious work to and then sent off to be blown up, and if she wanted to let off steam about that, she had every right to. She was speaking in confidence; nothing she said would ever go outside Louisa's office, Louisa had assured her of that; she could say whatever she wanted to and not have to worry about the consequences, because there couldn't be any. And she was enjoying it. It surprised her, how much she enjoyed letting out some of her frustrations with Josh, and finding a sympathetic woman listening and nodding and telling her that she was perfectly entitled to those feelings.
Not that they got into all Donna's feelings about Josh. Louisa probably suspected that a man who occupied so much of a woman's thoughts wasn't there in a purely professional capacity, but Donna rather hurried over the question of what else besides career advancement she might want from Josh, preferring to dwell on his failure to recognize her real abilities at work and his willingness to use her as a dry-cleaning and food-delivery service instead of promoting her into the kind of responsibilities she knew she could handle.
His trip to see her in the hospital in Germany somehow never got mentioned at all. It wasn't something Donna really wanted to talk about; it made her head ache even to think about it. Her mother still talked about it all the time, and Donna was sick to death of trying to explain that it hadn't meant what her mother thought it had at all.
If it had meant that, Josh would have done something by now, and he hadn't. Since the day he'd wheeled her back into the White House, he hadn't given much indication that he was really aware of her at all. He'd given her a pen. But he hadn't noticed that she was coming into the office snappish and cross, with bags under her eyes because she was having trouble sleeping; he hadn't considered that she might still be needing help. He couldn't even remember that she liked white wine, not red. And he couldn't let her make her own decision about whether or not to give a press interview; he snatched the phone from her hand and yelled at the man on the other end and hung up, as if she had nothing to do with it at all.
Rude, Louisa had agreed. More than rude: controlling, domineering, completely lacking in even the most basic respect for her. No, Louisa had told her, it was not at all likely that a man like that could be expected to change. There was nothing to be gained from staying in a job with a boss like that; questions of loyalty to the administration were irrelevant; she was being crushed, and she had to look out for herself, to put herself first. The best thing to do was simply to get another job.
Talking to Louisa was a refreshing change from talking to her mother. Louisa didn't insist on anything except Donna's need to put herself first and make decisions that would move her life forward. She was entirely in Donna's camp, which Donna often felt these days her mother wasn't.
Of course, she wasn't paying her mother to be her sounding-board, and her mother knew a good deal more about both her daughter and Josh than Louisa did. But just because her mother knew things didn't mean she understood them, and Donna was fed up with hearing her talk about how wonderful Josh had been after Gaza, how he had arranged her mother's trip there and how good he'd been about sorting out the insurance details afterwards, and what it meant that he'd come to Germany himself and what her mother was sure he was feeling for her, when he obviously wasn't feeling those things at all and never would be, no matter how much she'd always wanted it.
C.J. had pointed out how hopeless that wish was, and she'd been right. Josh must have come to Germany because Leo had wanted him to, because she worked for them and someone had to be there to talk to the doctors, and her father couldn't travel anymore, and Leo had probably realized that her mother would be too upset to deal with all that on her own; there might have been liability issues involved—or just Leo's fatherly kindness. Every time her mother mentioned Josh in Germany, Donna wanted to cry. It was really easier not to talk to Louisa about any of that at all.
Easier not to talk about it, easier not to think about it. Easier just to stick with the obvious—that Josh was her boss, that he'd ignored her and dismissed her whenever she'd tried to take steps to increase her responsibilities and advance her career, that he'd sent her to Gaza on a meaningless make-work assignment, and because he'd sent her there, she'd been blown up. She should never have been there; she should have been doing something more significant back in the White House, or somewhere else in D.C.
C.J. Cregg had said so, after all, and she was a very accomplished woman with a very important job; she should know. Kate Harper—whose job was, if anything, more responsible than C.J.'s—had clearly agreed. And Louisa did, too. Three intelligent, successful women had all said the same thing: "Think of yourself, Donna. You've got to look after yourself. Nobody else is going to do it for you—he's not, is he? Put yourself first, for a change. Put yourself first. Put yourself first. . . ."
They all made it clear they thought Donna should be taking steps to move her career forward, not letting the pathetic crush she suspected they all realized she'd been harboring all these years for her boss keep her from breaking free and doing something more challenging and worthwhile with her life. She only had one life to live, after all, and she'd come close enough to losing it to realize that she couldn't afford to waste any of it. Better to give up her hopes of ever being loved by Josh and create a satisfying career for herself, than waste whatever was left of her life being frustrated in both love and work; and there was, after all, always the possibility that she would eventually find someone else to love her, if she wasn't so busy thinking about Josh that no one else would ever really do.
She wondered sometimes how her mother could be so naive. She supposed that was why she'd been so naive herself; she'd been brought up to it, and even her time with Alan "Freeride" Robertson hadn't opened her eyes. It upset her to hear her own absurd romanticism echoed in her mother's voice. She found herself snapping crossly over the phone whenever her mother asked anything at all about her work or Josh, just to get her to stop. Her mother seemed hurt at first, and then annoyed, and Donna didn't know how to deal with that, because she loved her mother a lot and usually got along with her just fine, but now she couldn't seem to stop being angry with her, because she wouldn't stop talking about Josh.
It was another reason why she had to get away from him; if she had another job, her mother wouldn't have as much excuse to keep bringing him up all the time. On every count, leaving was obviously the best thing to do. If she'd had any question left about it, the cancelled lunches would have been her answer. But really, she'd made up her mind before she'd ever penciled the first one in.
So Donna left and went to work for Will. She called Louisa with tears of joy in her voice just two weeks later, after she'd moved into her first real office of her own, and they rejoiced together in the progress she'd made. A few months later she called the therapist again, this time very close to real tears, after that terrible interview with Josh after the convention, when she'd asked him for a job with the Santos campaign and he'd refused—and again a month or so later, with no trace of tears at all, to report triumphantly that the campaign's communications director had hired her over Josh's objections to join the Santos media team.
And she'd talked to Louisa after Colin Ayres called one day—just after the convention, while she was still working for the Vice-President—and told her that he was planning to mount an exhibition of photographs from Gaza as part of the U.N.'s peacekeeping celebrations, and wanted her to write some short pieces about her experiences there to accompany them; and then later—months later—when, just before the opening of the show, he'd called again to tell Donna more about the pictures he'd selected to exhibit there.
She and the therapist had spent a lot of time discussing Donna's feelings about going to the opening after that. Donna had been upset at first, and reluctant, but in the end, with Louisa's encouragement, she'd decided to go ahead. She'd attended the show's opening in New York in early April, and had called Louisa afterwards to tell her how well it had gone and to thank her for all her help and support.
But somehow Donna had never gotten around to admitting that the boyfriend who had, even if with little enthusiasm, accompanied her to the opening was, in fact, the same rude, controlling, impossible boss that Louisa had encouraged her to walk away from a year and a half before. It was all just too complicated to explain, and since Louisa didn't seem to have seen any of the rumors about Josh and Donna that had made their way into the back pages of the gossip magazines, there wasn't really any necessity to explain anything at all. But now, four and a half weeks later, sitting in Louisa's office shredding kleenex into her lap, her heart pounding in her chest and her mind so overwhelmed she could barely make out what the woman across from her was saying, Donna knew she had to try.
Her voice faltered at times, and her face flushed as she told her therapist about that early morning late in the campaign when the polls had suddenly turned their way and, in a moment of exhilaration, Josh had grabbed her and kissed her and she'd found herself kissing back. She tried to explain what she was sure Louisa had realized long ago: that, for all his faults, Josh was an attractive man and she'd always been attracted to him, even when she'd been angry with him.
She told Louisa how carefully she'd thought about the implications before deciding to let him know that, if he was interested in taking things farther than that kiss and going to bed with her, she wouldn't object. She explained how she'd made up her mind to take charge of the relationship—Louisa was clearly pleased about that—and how she'd told Josh a few days after they'd started sleeping together that he had four weeks to make some decisions about what they were doing and what he wanted, and how he'd ended up asking her to go away with him for a week to lie in the sun in the Caribbean and unwind after the campaign, to have a chance to spend some real time together and talk. And she tried to describe, as best she could, what had happened after that.
But she didn't tell Louisa everything. How could she? There was too much to tell, too many details, all of them tiny and confusing and painful and precious, like shards of some treasured object she had dropped and broken, and was down on her knees now desperately hoping to pick up and somehow piece back together.