"So, Mr. President—"

"We haven't got Harrison yet?" Matt interrupted his Chief of Staff. "You've got Sam on it haven't you? And Amy? What's the matter with them—I'd thought we'd have this in the bag by now!"

Matt could hear the pettishness in his voice, but he didn't care. They had to get through this, damn it; they had to get it out of the way so they could get on to other things. There was so much to do. He'd lain awake most of the night thinking about how much there was to do: about all the chinks in the walls, all the places where something might go wrong and leave him exposed and vulnerable, the way he'd been two weeks ago. FEMA—were they really sure about Goldsmith, the man they'd put in charge there? Kazakhstan, the mess he'd never wanted to be involved with—China and Russia staring each other down, and the United States right in the middle between them. Terrorism, immigration, school shootings—he'd been quizzing Josh about a staggering list of issues all morning, throwing off one question after another on seemingly unrelated issues till any normal man's head would have been spinning. Josh hadn't given any indication that any of it fazed him, but Matt was still aware of that tension in his Chief of Staff's face and voice and posture, and thought Josh probably had no more idea what to do about any of this than he did. He could feel the same tension in his own body, hear it in his voice. He took a deep breath, and raised a hand to rub the back of his neck. It was aching. There was a kink in it that was annoying the hell out of him, and his head was throbbing. And Helen had taken the children and left for Camp David that morning; there wasn't going to be anything relaxing to look forward to tonight . . . .

"Are you all right, sir?"

Josh's voice was quiet, but there was a touch of warmth in it that Matt would have welcomed yesterday. Today he was too tired to think of anything except the fact that he was letting his guard down. If he was going to get the job done, he couldn't afford to let anyone think he wasn't up for it, let alone the man in front of him.

"Of course," he answered, not managing to keep the irritation out of his voice. Josh's face tightened, and his voice, when he answered, had gone cool and neutral again.

"You've been looking pretty . . . tired, for the last few days, sir."

"I'm fine." Damn it, why couldn't he make himself sound fine? This wasn't what he needed, this grilling about himself this morning; he just needed to find out what was going wrong with Harrison and then get on to the next problem before something happened. . . .

"Are you getting enough sleep, sir?"

"For God's sake, Josh," Matt exclaimed, crossly, tossing the paper across his desk. "I said I'm fine. What the hell business of yours is it whether I had my beauty sleep last night or not?"

"I'm sorry to have to ask, sir," Josh said, his voice still quiet, his tone level. "But if I'm your Chief of Staff, it is my business to make sure you're well enough to do your job."

Matt felt the heat rise in his face. "Are you suggesting that I'm not fit to do my job, Josh?"

"No, sir, of course I'm not. But it's my job to make sure you stay fit to do it, and if I think you're getting too tired, it's up to me to do something about it. I can change your schedule today if you need it, let you take a break, get a nap."

Matt knitted his brows together.

"I'm not a two-year-old child or a doddering old man, Josh, and I don't have MS. Bartlet might have needed this kind of coddling; I don't. And I don't do naps."

"Take some time with your family then, sir? If I cleared your schedule you could leave for Camp David this afternoon instead of tomorrow. We could take care of most of what we need to do there, after you'd had a break. Or you could come back earlier than you'd planned, on Sunday."

Matt sighed. Josh was right; he WAS tired. More than tired. But a break wasn't what he needed; he needed to work harder. There was so much to do, so much to get on top of, if he wasn't going to make another mistake like he had a couple of weeks ago.

"I'm fine," he said again, more brusquely than he intended to. "So will you stop acting like my nanny and tell me what's going on with Harrison?"

Josh eyed him for a long minute. "All right, sir," he said, quietly.

It struck Matt as both odd and irritating that Josh Lyman, of all people, should be suggesting that he take time off. As if Josh would ever willingly take any time off himself unless Sam or Donna forced him to. As if Josh didn't have bags under his own eyes, and look as if he could do with a little more sleep himself.

oooooo

Donna still felt good an hour later, when she and Helen had made their way back to the lodge. They heard the children before they saw them; they were outside playing what looked like touch football with their Secret Service agents.

"Mommy!" Miranda called out. "I want Mommy on my team!" She ran over and grabbed Helen by the arm, tugging her towards the game.

"Oh, Miranda," Helen said, laughing. "I'm sure Donna doesn't want to play."

"I don't mind if you don't," Donna said.

"We haven't had a chance to play outside like this for ages," Helen said, apologetically, following Miranda. "You really wouldn't mind?"

"Can I be on your team, Peter?" Donna asked.

He nodded, one of the agents tossed the ball, and they all played happily, running and shouting with excitement, until a middle-aged man came out of the lodge, smiling, and said the children's dinners would be ready soon. Donna followed Helen into the house and supervised the hand-and-face-washing, while Helen found the children some clean clothes. Then they left Miranda and Peter having their dinners in the kitchen under the indulgent eye of the chef and his assistant, a young woman who promised Helen she wouldn't let them make nuisances of themselves. Donna heard her asking them if they wanted to help make chocolate-chip cookies after dinner, and smiled. Yes, this felt good, she thought. Helen was her boss, but she was starting to feel like a friend, too. A good friend. Not quite the sort of friend you think of as family—not yet—but for the first time Donna thought that maybe, someday, the First Lady might start to seem that way to her.

oooooo

Josh briefed Matt on the state of the education bill and Harrison, and left the President with a stack of folders to peruse. Matt sat at his desk and thumbed through them. After a while, when he'd absorbed everything he needed to, he got up to stretch. He stood for a minute at the window again, looking out at the grey sky and the few flowers that were trying to struggle into bloom, and sighed. Thoughts flitted briefly across his mind: about the weather, about the reasons for it, about his Chief of Staff and the tension he sensed whenever the man was in the room, the feeling he couldn't help getting that something was stretched almost to the breaking-point between them and could snap at any minute.

Matt wasn't overly given to analyzing the reactions of people around him—he was usually too focused on moving ahead and getting things done to waste much time on feelings and emotions—but some feelings were too strong to be ignored. Something had gone wrong between him and Josh, he knew that, and he knew he hadn't done much to patch things up between them earlier. But damn the man, did he have to sound so much like a mother hen? Get more rest, take a break—he didn't need a nap, damn it, and he didn't need a break, not right now, not when there was so much to learn, so much to get on top of. Nobody knew what it was like, nobody could know, to sit in this chair and be the one making these decisions, to be the one responsible when those decisions went wrong. He'd known he'd have to do that, of course, and he could do it. He'd been a Marine, a pilot, a mayor, a Congressman—he was used to taking responsibility and shouldering blame.

What he wasn't used to doing was making mistakes. He really hadn't made a lot of them in his career up to now, not the kind that ended up costing people their lives when, if he'd just done something else, they wouldn't have lost them. Not—and this was the part he was finding so hard to deal with—not children. Not little children, little girls. He thought of Miranda when she had been two: her sweet voice lisping a little as she began to put sentences together; her big eyes wide with wonder at some new book or toy she hadn't seen before; her rosebud mouth turned up to his for a kiss; her soft, still-almost-baby skin—he choked back a sob. If anything had happened to her—it was unbearable. Unbearable.

Things happened to children every day, he knew that. Things were happening to children somewhere in the world, right now, right this minute. And it was his job to stop them. He was a soldier, a Marine, a practiced politician, he could do this; he had to. He had to put these thoughts behind him; he had to focus, to keep on top of things, so it wouldn't happen again. But it would happen again, he knew that. What he didn't know was how to bear that. How did a man live, how did a man sleep, when he carried this kind of responsibility? He'd thought he'd imagined it before he decided to run; he'd thought he'd imagined it during the campaign; he'd thought he understood it after the election, and on the day he took his oath of office. But he hadn't. No one could imagine this, no one could understand this—no one who hadn't stood and watched a mother crying for her daughter and known that it was his fault, that if he had just done things differently. . . .

Josh certainly couldn't. Take a nap, indeed. Spend some time with your family. What did Josh Lyman know? He'd never had children; he never seemed very interested in them when they were around; he probably didn't want them, and never would. He might have a girlfriend now, but he still lived for politics—or politics and sex, anyway—what man didn't want sex? He supported Matt's education plans, but he could hardly feel the passion about them that Matt did: he was from Connecticut, for God's sake, from Westport, where you'd be hard put to it to find a house worth less than a million these days, and where the worst thing the kids ever had to deal with was not getting the ponies they wanted for Christmas—or Hannukah. Though most of them probably got the ponies, and nice little sports cars later on, too. Josh had gone through Harvard and Yale and had, Matt was quite sure, never had to work a day in his life to pay for either one of them. His father had been a partner in a big New York law firm, a litigator; Josh would have gone into politics because that's one of the things smart young men with good degrees and plenty of money and connections did to make a name for themselves.

He was good at it, of course. He cared about the right things, but not for the same reasons that Matt did. He was driven—Matt didn't think he'd ever seen a man more driven than Josh Lyman—but it was obviously ambition that drove him, ambition and ego, the need to climb the career ladder and get to the top, even though it was the staffing ladder and not the ladder of elected offices that he'd chosen for his particular demonstration of skill and success.

He couldn't be impelled by the same things that drove Matt, who was intimately acquainted with poverty and, having lifted himself out of it, had always felt that burning need to help the people who were still trapped in it, so their children wouldn't have to go through what he had and so they could enjoy some of the same things he did now. He didn't blame Josh for having had a better childhood than he'd had; he respected the man's commitment to liberal ideals and he needed the political savvy that Josh's years in the House and the Senate and Bartlet's White House had brought him, but he knew there was no way Josh could help him with this part of the job. Josh with his comfortable, wealthy family background, his Ivy degrees and his whiz-kid, golden-boy, single and single-minded Washington career could never understand the burdens that he, Matt Santos, who had children and loved them and had built his career on big ideas to help them and feed them and educate them, was carrying right now. Had been carrying for the past two weeks, since he had seen that mother crying for her baby at the Red Cross shelter after that damned volcano had erupted. Would always carry, as long as he was in this office, sitting behind this desk, making these decisions.

If he couldn't sleep right now, he couldn't sleep; that was his problem, and no concern of Josh's. There was nothing anyone could say or do to help, least of all Josh Lyman. And it wasn't something Matt could talk about to Helen, either—Helen who, though she was beginning to adapt to his new job on the surface, was still unhappy underneath it all at the upheavals Matt had introduced into their family's lives. Matt was just going to have to get through this on his own. . . .

oooooo