Chapter One

…vial of poison.

Elizabeth

6:54 AM

The cold yellow glow of the street lamps had flickered out when the sky groaned into daylight, but other than that the street was exactly the same as when Elizabeth had left it just over three hours before. All except for the grey, three-door hatchback with its tinted rear windows and the busted front bumper that had been patched up with duct tape which had seamlessly migrated fifteen metres further down the street—just as it had done every morning that week.

The breeze ruffled against the half-dried film of sweat that stuck to her skin, and its subtle sting crawled up to where the strands of her hair had escaped her ponytail and plastered themselves to the nape of her neck. A shiver delved deep into her shoulders, and caused them to tense. There was nothing unusual about the car itself, and perhaps it wouldn't have bothered her at all had it not looked exactly like the car she had learnt to drive in just a year after her parents' crash, tinted windows aside; the same car that Will had written off two years later, the summer before she went up to UVA. After all the effort she had put into keeping that beat-up old car running, after all the sacrifices she had made to care for Will and to make sure that at least he would keep some semblance of a childhood, and he went and tried to throw it all away in one stupid stunt. Of course, he walked away without a scratch: he always did.

Or perhaps, in truth, the car was just another distraction; a distraction that she would not have noted—would not have needed—had she not spent the last week running from that dream.

Elizabeth placed the powder pink pastry box she had picked up from the bakery down on the console table in the entrance hall—its ghostly reflection hung beneath the glass—and she thumbed through the pile of unopened letters. One of the envelopes bore the silhouette of a tree in the upper left-hand corner. She discarded the rest and carried bill from the stables along with the bakery box through to the kitchen. The slight chill that drifted in the air prickled at her damp skin.

She flipped the switch on the coffee machine, and as the machine clunked and then whirred into life, she padded through to the den and slipped the letter into her handbag where it slouched on one of the chairs at the kitchen table. Just another task to add to the list. It didn't feel like a month had passed since she paid the last fees, but what with the fallout from the nuclear de-alerting and now the ongoing talks with Russia over the Bering Strait Region, if she so much as blinked, she could lose a whole day.

"Hey."

Elizabeth startled, and the box containing the last muffin jumped from her grasp and clattered onto the table. She spun towards the couch, one hand clutched over her heart as it slammed against her ribs. "Jesus, Henry. Are you trying to give me a heart attack?"

"Well, good morning to you too." Henry eased up to sitting and massaged his shoulder before stifling a yawn in his fist. He was still clad in his pyjama bottoms and an old National War College tee that had faded from too many wears and too many washes.

"Sorry." She leant over the back of the couch, and draping her arms around his neck, she pressed her lips to his temple and breathed him in. "Good morning." She ran one hand through his already disheveled hair as she drew away again. "I didn't think you'd be up this early."

"I could say the same about you." He stood up and stretched, and then followed her into the kitchen. His gaze clung to her, a jarring presence against the back of her neck while she poured two mugs of coffee from the pot. When she turned and handed him one of the cups, a pinch had nicked the middle of his brow. He took a tentative sip, his gaze never leaving her, and then he cradled the mug to his chest. "I make that at least four predawn runs in the past week."

She shrugged, and she hid her lips behind her own cup. "Need to fit the exercise in somewhere…unless you really do want me to have a heart attack." She sent him a sharp smile, but when he didn't return it, just continued to stare at her with that pinched frown, it withered like a daffodil that had blossomed in a false spring.

A knot gathered at the centre of her chest, and she brushed past him and retreated to the den.

"Elizabeth," he called after her, his voice harsh in the surrounding hush.

She set her coffee down on the kitchen table and ran her fingers along the edges of the cardboard bakery box.

"Elizabeth…we need to talk."

She turned her chin to her shoulder. "Well, that sounds ominous. Hope you're not thinking about trading me in for a younger model." It was meant to be a quip, but something in her tone dragged and the words strained from her tongue.

"I'm serious." The clunk of his coffee mug against the kitchen counter echoed through the room. "I'm worried about you. You're not sleeping, you're—"

Take my hand. Take my—

She pressed the pads of her thumbs against the corners of the box until they throbbed with a dull sting. "I bought the guys muffins from that bakery on the corner. There's one left—one of those walnut ones. I was going to save it for later, but if you wanted to…"

She trailed off as he stepped up behind her, his chest as close to her back as possible without actually touching, and something about that presence—there but not—made it all the more intimate, as though it primed her for his touch and heightened her senses. His body heat radiated through the pores of her running gear and washed over her; it felt like hot stones soothing away the tensions of a lifetime of running. Her eyes slipped shut. She could just give into it, let herself sink back and give into him. But, as a masseuse once told her, once those knots have been released, toxins flood the bloodstream.

"Elizabeth."

Her eyes snapped open, and she pressed herself closer to the back of the chair, expanding the pocket of space between them. Just enough to feel the brush of cool air, just enough to breathe once more. "Have you—" Her voice caught, and she cleared her throat. "Have you noticed that car that's been parked outside all week? The grey one with the busted bumper."

"No." He reached around her and plucked the box from her grasp; as he did so, his chest bumped against her shoulder, and she tensed. He pushed the box to one side and then skimmed his hands down the outside of her arms and laced his fingers through hers. His breath ruffled over the shell of her ear, and caused the back of her neck to tighten. "But I haven't been getting up at three AM each morning, I haven't been dragging the DS guys out on two-hour-long runs, and I haven't been buying them muffins to make up for it because deep down some part of me knows it isn't right to be asking that of them when they've been tasked with protecting me."

She squeezed his hands. "Henry…I'm fine." And then she let go and twisted around to face him. She met his eye with a forced smile. "Really. I just have a lot going on."

He searched her eyes as though he were scanning the fine print of one of those religious texts that crammed onto the bookshelves of their bedroom and imbued the air with their musty scent, as though he were looking for the truth between the lines, faith in the unwritten.

His look sharpened. A flash. "It's the falling dream again, isn't it?"

She pursed her lips, and dipping her chin, she broke away from his gaze. The strands of hair that had escaped her high ponytail swayed forward to frame her face.

He tucked the strands back behind her ear, and then let his hand linger there, his palm warm against her cheek. Too warm, too close. "Do you want to talk about it?" He swept his thumb over her cheekbone.

Her throat bobbed with her swallow. "It's not falling. It's like I'm on the cusp and maybe I'm flying or maybe I'm falling…I don't know…"

Take my hand. Take my—

She shook her head to herself, and then turned away from his touch, in need of the space. "But it doesn't matter anyway. It's just a dream."

She snatched up her coffee mug from the table and grabbed one of Alison's glossy fashion magazines from the pile on the floor next to the armchair, and then she settled on the cushions at the corner of the couch, her legs tucked beneath her. She flicked through the pages as she sipped on her coffee, but the images were just a blur of muted colours, the coffee a bland warmth on her tongue—only Henry, stood in the periphery of her vision with his arms folded across his chest and a frown heavy on his brow, held focus.

"So…you don't think it's at all significant that this dream comes back at the same time every year…or whenever you're worried about Will?"

Her muscles tensed, and the page she was turning snagged and ripped at the top, just next to the central margin. "I'm not worried about Will."

"Oh really…?" His tone drawled with scepticism.

She ignored him, whilst the tension deepened to a smouldering beneath her skin.

"So, the vivid dreams, the going out running at ridiculous hours, the spying on our neighbours and obsessing about their cars—"

The smouldering flared, too quick to smother. She chucked the magazine down onto the cushion so hard that it skidded across the fabric, spilled over the edge and crashed to the floor. She twisted around to face him. "I'm not spying, it's not ridiculous, and I'm not obsessing."

He held up his hands. "Hey. I'm just—"

"And you know what? I resent you trying to psychoanalyse me. I'm not broken or damaged, and even if I were, it's not your job to fix me. I'm your wife, Henry. Your wife. Not your patient, not your case subject, and certainly not some responsibility you have to deal with. So just fuck off."

The silence that followed rang out with a high-pitched whine and the words floated to the floor like flaming tatters in the aftermath of an explosion. Henry reeled, and his arms fell to his sides, his hands empty and exposed, whilst a sheen of hurt veiled his eyes.

She turned her shoulder on him, and taking sips from her coffee cup, she dulled both the throb of anger that pulsed through her bloodstream and the sting of guilt laced beneath it, as though the caffeine were an antidote to that particular vial of poison.

She shouldn't have said it—any of it. She was an ingrate. After all, how many people could honestly say their husband cherished and supported them like Henry cherished and supported her? He was only trying to help. She wished she could blame the outburst on lack of sleep—if only that wouldn't prove Henry's concerns to be well-founded—but in truth, it was more than that. There was something about his questions and his analysis, his insistence that he had godlike perspective when it came to her thoughts and feelings, that irked her; perhaps, in some small part, because it left her feeling as lost and as ignorant as she had done on that first day at Houghton Hall, when the school nurse had handed her a medical form and a rollerball pen and had left her with instructions to 'fill it all out'. She was only halfway down the first page when she froze. There were all these questions about vaccination dates and family history and childhood illnesses, all these questions that she had never thought about and had no answers to and—now—had no one to ask. How long she had sat there, she couldn't say, but by the time the nurse came back, the ink had flowed out from the nib of the pen and spread across the page like a miniature Rorschach. God only knew what a psychoanalyst would make of that.

And now to have someone who knew her—someone who she could turn to for the answers—was a precious thing. But having to turn to someone, being such a stranger to herself… It didn't make her feel more informed; it felt like cheating, and it begged the question: how much did she really know about herself—or anything—at all?

The cushion sagged as Henry perched beside her. Hunched forward, he held his head in his hands and ruffled his hair. A minute or two must have passed before he turned and looked at her, though the depth of that silence made it feel more like hours. When he did, the dark purple circles that drooped beneath his eyes spoke of his own sleepless nights. She had taken care not to wake him when she picked up her trainers and slipped out of their bedroom each morning, but that didn't change the fact that each morning she had found him awake upon her return.

She slid her hand across the cushion and bridged the gap between them.

He stared down at her gesture, as though examining the olive branch for hidden thorns. Then he looked up to her face again. Hurt still clouded his eyes.

She eased her hand closer still, and when he didn't pull back, she tangled her fingers through his. "Henry, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have—"

But he shook his head. "I shouldn't have pushed you."

"Even so. It wasn't called for, and it wasn't fair." She tugged at his fingers. "Forgive me?"

"You're my wife." He squeezed her hand. "I'll always forgive you." Then he leant back against the cushions and opened his arms to her. "Come here."

She plucked at the front of her running top, releasing a fresh sting of sweat, and she wrinkled her nose. "I'm all sweaty."

"Since when has that ever bothered me before?" His smile glimmered in his eyes.

She resisted an eye roll, and then tucked herself against his side, her head rested to his chest. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, and as his scent and warmth infused her, she drew idle patterns over the cotton of his t-shirt, circles that expanded and softened as they spread further and further away from their focus.

He pressed a kiss to her crown, gathered her even closer to him, and rested his chin against the top of her head.

Her fingers stilled. "Maybe I am worried about this lunch with Will, about what he'll say…"

"You really think he'll be opposed?"

She pursed her lips. He might not like it—secretary of state had been a hard sell—but would he seriously say no? "I don't know. He never really liked being Lizzie Adams's little brother, but I'm guessing he'd take that over President McCord's little brother any day."

"I'm sure being the president's brother comes with some perks."

"Being Lizzie's brother had its perks too."

"How so?"

"If you're a fourteen-year-old boy at a co-ed boarding school, having an older sister in the girls' dorms is like having an asset infiltrate the highest levels of a foreign government. He thought he had an instant in with my 'hot friends'."

Henry chuckled. "Did it work?"

She drew away from his chest and arched an eyebrow at him. "What self-respecting sixteen-year-old girl would go out with a normal fourteen-year-old boy, let alone Will?"

He pondered that for a second, and then conceded it with a mouth shrug. "True."

"If I hadn't been there to convince them that he was pretty much harmless, he would've been known as Lizzie Adams's pervy little brother."

He laughed. A moment later, his expression softened, and he squeezed her thigh. "You're a good sister to him."

She looked down at the coffee cup still clutched in one hand. "Yeah, well, try telling him that." Her gaze flicked up to meet Henry's eye. "You know the first thing he said to me when I told him I was taking this job? Not 'Congratulations', or 'Is that safe?' given what happened to Marsh; he just said 'Well, it had better not interfere with my work.'"

His mouth tensed, and something in his eyes darkened. But then he shrugged and the darkness, or whatever it was, swept away again. "Things have changed since then."

"Exactly. We're finally in a good place, and if I do this—"

A door slammed upstairs and the sound juddered down through the walls of the house.

She glanced over the back of the sofa, towards the staircase, and then lowered her voice. "—if I run, everything will change again. For you, for the kids, even for Will. And I don't want to force that on anyone."

Henry stared down at where his hand rested against her thigh. Something about his expression, the gentleness around his eyes, reminded her of how they had sat side by side on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, and how—in the heady glow of that artificial light—she had been so certain that she wanted to run. How long had passed since that night? And how much more complicated was the decision when illuminated by the veracity of dawn?

"You know it's okay for you to want this." He looked up at her again. "And if Will's not on board, that's his problem, not yours."

"But it is my problem, Henry. He's my brother. I need him on my side."

"So, if he asked you not to run…you'd seriously consider it?"

"After all the times I've gone on about putting family first…? Yeah. I'd have to." She sipped on her coffee and examined him over the lip of the mug. "You think I'm crazy."

He chuckled and shook his head. "Of course not. I think that there's a lot riding on your relationship with Will, and although I don't think it'll be an issue, I can understand why it's bothering you. Any change is difficult, it puts pressure on relationships, and this is a big change." He swivelled around on the cushion to face her fully, one leg folded in front of him, and he rested his arm along the back of the couch. "Let's say, hypothetically, that Will did have a problem with it. Would it really be so bad for you to put yourself first for once?"

"Yes." The answer came without hesitation.

He cocked his head to one side. "Why?"

"Because…" Her eyes bugged as she sought out her response. "It's selfish."

"And?"

"And…" She dragged out the word. "I don't want to be selfish."

"Why not?"

"Because…I just don't."

He raised his eyebrows at her. "Well, babe, I gotta say, if that's how you're planning on answering the questions in the debates, then I really don't think you have anything to worry about after all."

"Shut up." She swatted his chest, but the smile that tugged at her lips crept through.

He caught hold of her hand, pulled her close, and was just about to meet her with a kiss when footsteps thudded down the stairs like the chug of a freight train hurtling along the tracks.

Elizabeth turned towards the staircase just in time to see Stevie barrel down the last few steps into the kitchen. "Hey, baby."

"I'm not here, I'm not here." Stevie ditched her high heels and a pastel pink blazer on the bottom step, and then stuffed her blouse into her skirt and wrenched up the zip.

Elizabeth shot Henry a look before she returned to their daughter with a puzzled frown. "Um…okay? Then where exactly are you?"

Stevie wrestled on her blazer, flipped up the collar and smoothed it down. "I'm at the White House putting the finishing touches on the binder Russell asked me to prepare, which I totally did not forget about until he texted me twenty minutes ago saying he needed it ready by nine o'clock."

"Okay." Elizabeth passed her coffee mug to Henry, and then knelt up on the cushions and rested her forearms atop the back of the sofa. "Well, maybe when you are here, say this weekend, we could—"

"Can't." Stevie clung to the end of the banister and yanked on her high heels. "Russell's got a talk next week and he's asked me to put together the slides for the presentation. And if I mess that up, he will so fire me, that's if he hasn't already fired me today." She grimaced. "God, I'm so dead."

"Oh…" Elizabeth's smile drooped. She fought to revive it. "Well—"

"I've really gotta go." Stevie waved at her parents, blew them a kiss, and then dashed off through the kitchen. "Bye. Bye. Bye. Love you. Bye."

"Bye, baby. Love you," Elizabeth shouted after her.

The house tumbled back into silence.

Elizabeth pulled at the threads of the grey woollen blanket that draped across the back of the sofa. She let out an exaggerated sigh, and then slumped down onto the cushion and sent Henry a sideways glance. "It bothers me that our daughter spends more time with Russell Jackson than she does with me."

Henry shrugged, and then took a swig of her coffee. "She's got a job, babe, and a life."

"I know." She lowered her gaze from his, and instead she examined her fingernails and prodded at her cuticles as she spoke. "But one day I won't be here, and I wish she'd spend a little more time with me before then."

A lull settled over them, and as it did, the ache of Stevie's departure deepened. It diffused through Elizabeth's chest like pressure on a bruise, and it expanded to fill every last inch of space, until space was no longer enough, and so it stretched out through time too.

"You missing them?" His voice was low, perhaps a little tentative after her reaction before.

She tweaked her lips to one side. "Always." Her gaze flicked up to meet his. "Especially all the things I never got to say."

He squeezed her thigh. "You know I'm here if you want to talk, and I'm here if you'd rather not. The same goes for the dream." He searched her eyes, and for one heart-paused second it felt like maybe he could see ripples of the images lurking in the blue. "Next time you can't sleep, wake me up and we'll go for a walk, and I promise I won't ask any questions if you don't want me to."

"Really?"

He nodded, and then he edged closer and cupped her cheek. He stared into her eyes. The hazel of his own eyes was rich and warm, and so forgiving, perhaps more than she deserved. "I'd rather spend all night walking the streets of DC in silence with you than waking up to find that you've gone." Then he pressed his lips to her forehead and lingered there.

She shut her eyes, and laid her hand against his chest, her palm flat to his heart. Its beat thudded against her, so steady, so strong. "What I said earlier—"

"Already forgotten."

"I do love you."

His lips curved in a smile against her forehead. "I know."

And then his touch vanished.

The cushions shifted as he rose from the couch, and she stared up at him with a puzzled expression when he offered her his hand.

He wiggled his fingers. "We've got a while before you need to head into the office."

"And you're planning to take advantage of that?"

"I thought we might see if I can't make you fly…" He tilted his head to one side, and a smirk blossomed. "…or was it fall?"

She snorted. "God, Henry, you're using my dream as a come-on? Seriously?"

"That depends. Is it working?"

She shook her head to herself and bit back her smile. Such a dork. Then she rose from the sofa and took his hand.

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