"Do I have to?" Mellie complained.
"This book has to be flawless. Every line has to be well-crafted. Every word has to be placed correctly. But sometimes what looks good on paper doesn't translate too well when spoken aloud. You have to."
"There was no doubt after I had received that evidence. My husband: the man I trusted, the father of my children, the President of the United States. Was having an affair. My first feeling was betrayal. And then it was replaced by anger. Definitely directed at him for what he had done: lying, over and over again. We had just lost a child: the miscarriage was devastating."
Olivia swallowed as she tried to push the memory of her visit to Planned Parenthood out of her mind. Mellie continued.
"But then my anger was turned on her. The woman who had figuratively climbed in through the only window I had left open to ensnare the man I loved and wreck my home. She, who could have had any man in Washington, had set her claws in mine. I wondered if she looked at his wedding ring and wondered if he would give her one too. I wondered, if they had children together, if they would be allowed to meet mine. If they would be raised as siblings. I did all of that because somewhere in my mind I knew that Olivia Pope would not be leaving us any time soon. That she was there to stay. An unwanted member of the family. An embarrassment too prominent to deny."
Olivia blinked: slowly. Mellie read on.
"She's a fixer by profession. That's how she met him. She was there to fix him. Instead she twisted him until he became hers. She took him away from me and I had no idea until it was too late. She was so enmeshed in our lives that we could not do without her. And if we let her go, her absence would spell the end of what we had worked on for so long."
Olivia tensed her jaw. They had worked on that part of the book so much that it stopped being emotional after the 17th reading.
"Olivia was like a sex worker in a moralistic patriarchy. Necessary to counter the sexual repression of those who paid for her services, but not given the right to come out into the open and be acknowledged. For indeed, she was-"
"-in power," Cyrus had declared as they stood in the hallway outside the oval. It was the first time Olivia had realized that Fitz had let her run the country. And it felt good.
"-the best fixer around. Unstoppable, intelligent, ambitious. And all Mellie Grant will ever be is the faithful wife who was betrayed. She deserved my anger: my hatred. She still does. But God Bless Her for kicking me out of the White House."
"I'm Olivia Pope," the boss thought to herself, "and I slept my way to the top."
No matter how many times they rewrote Mellie's book: that statement seemed true.