IX

"Mr. President." The assembled staff shot to their feet as he and Leo walked into the room. Jed quickly waved them back into their seats.

"Morning, everybody." He took a seat of his own. "I think we can guess why you're all here."

On a normal day, someone would have made a quip.

On a normal day, he wouldn't be standing here contemplating how to tell his staff that his doctor recommended he resign.

Recommended. That was the key word. Recommended.

He said it would be better for me if I did. Didn't say I had to. Didn't say I needed to.

I promised Abbey.

Yes, he'd promised Abbey, but the deal had fallen out of date, the deal had been set aside. They'd never spoken of any new terms, never made any agreement other than if he had to step down, he would.

But she trusts you.

Abbey trusted him... but so did his staff. He saw them arrayed before him now, the mingled hope and desperate anxiety in their eyes. It wasn't just his own life's work he would be tearing down, but theirs, too. How could he do that to them, throw away all their good work on just a maybe?

They had three more years of changing the world still in them. How could he deny them that on what was basically nothing more than a gamble? Resigning now might make him less likely to get worse.

How could he justify to his staff such a self-centred shot into the wind?

How could he justify to Abbey not doing everything within his power to be the best husband and father he could?

The staff were waiting for him to speak. He took a breath. "As you know, yesterday the First Lady and I went to see a Dr. Joseph Keeble, who is probably the closest thing the medical community can provide to an expert on MS. He... took some scans, and we discussed my symptoms."

Nobody in the room was quite ready to interrupt the President of the United States with an impatient "And?" but it was a pretty near thing.

He hesitated. "It is the medical opinion of Dr. Keeble that my MS has not progressed beyond the relapsing-remitting stage."

The joint exhalation of relieved breath filled the room. Josh and Sam smiled in delight and CJ looked relieved, but Toby met his eyes. "Mr. President..." He rubbed his forehead. "Then the health problems you've been experiencing-?"

"Are MS-related, yes."

The level of joy in the room dipped noticeably. And, God help him, he couldn't help but try to lift the looks of concern from those faces. "The truth is, I have been a bit run-down lately, but the important thing is that my MS still follows the relapsing-remitting pattern. MS can be... complicated. Symptoms can linger between attacks, it's not always cut and dried."

And he wasn't lying, he wasn't telling them anything that wasn't true. Was it his fault if they just assumed that meant he would make a complete recovery?

Sins of omission, Jed? Boy, that's never got you in trouble before...

With his usual sense of timing, Leo stepped in and shifted the room's attention his way. "Okay, folks, everybody get back to work. Josh, you've got the Commerce Committee. Toby, CJ, go with Sam. The press are gonna keep hounding him until he speaks up; best we get a statement on our terms instead of theirs."

Sam nodded quickly, looking tense, and the staff headed off their separate ways. CJ lingered after the others were gone.

"CJ?" Jed stood up to meet her.

She looked him worriedly. "Sir, are you... I mean... you're gonna be okay?"

And when he spoke it wasn't a lie, any more than he could have considered it a lie if it had been one of his own daughters asking. He smiled gently. "I'll be fine."

CJ smiled back, looking a little tearful, and surprised them both by giving him an abrupt hug. He briefly squeezed her arm in understanding. "It's okay, CJ."

"Okay." She grinned tentatively, beginning to look embarrassed.

"Go on now," he reassured her. "Sam's gonna need all the help he can get."

"Yeah." Quickly recovering her equilibrium, she left. Jed felt his smile fade as he watched her go.

When he looked up, Leo was watching him intently. But neither of them said anything.

"Hey Zoey."

"Hey." Zoey's voice on the other end of the phone was tentative. Charlie really couldn't blame her after the way he'd unceremoniously run off after their dinner yesterday evening.

"Listen, I'm really sorry about last night. I was having kind of a stressful day, there was all this stuff going on at work... I was a jerk. I'm sorry."

"Good start," she noted, and he was relieved to hear a small spark of humour in her voice. "Now make with the sucking up."

He leaned forward in his chair and smiled into the phone. "Well, it just so happens that there were some Saturday tickets floating around for a certain show somebody wanted to see, and-" He was briefly deafened by Zoey's squeal.

"Am I forgiven?" he asked playfully.

"Are they front row tickets?"

"Four rows back."

"Then there'd better be ice-cream in the interval." He pictured her mock-determined expression, lower lip stuck out the way she always did, and smirked.

"I'm sure that can be arranged."

"Well, okay then. And I expect flowers."

"And that'll make us even?" He rolled his eyes.

"Depending on the quality of the ice-cream. And the imaginativeness of the flower selection."

Charlie made a mental note to pick up something other than red roses. "You're a tough woman to please, Zoey Bartlet."

"Well, we Bartlets are used to the best."

"Oh, is that why you picked me?"

"Yeah." She giggled, and his heart was lightened.

He was forgiven.

CJ could see Sam's jaw tighten with every point that she or Toby made. He didn't like being spun - well, fine, did he think they liked spinning him any better? But this was politics; this was media perception. And the press didn't give a damn how right you really were, only how right you could make yourself sound.

"Sam..." She rubbed her forehead and sighed. "You've got to let us help you. Please, could you just... let us help you?"

"CJ, this is my life here!" he objected. "I shouldn't need to, to edit myself and justify my choices in neat soundbites!"

"You shouldn't... You do," Toby summed up succinctly. Sam shook his head defiantly.

"I'm just... I'm just gonna go out there and tell the truth. I don't care about the spin. I'm just telling the truth."

"Sam-" CJ groaned.

"That's what Josh did about the PTSD," he reminded her. "And it worked for him."

CJ tried to remember if there'd ever been a time when she'd been able to put all her faith behind the magic power of The Truth. It led her to the depressing realisation that she'd been a cynic for a long, long time.

"Josh had... media sympathy," Toby pointed out. "He was the guy who got shot in the chest. It was easier to make him a hero than break him down for public entertainment. They're not going to do that with you. They don't want to stand you up there and applaud you, they want to drag you down into the gutter and make you look like sleaze, because sleaze is more interesting than guys who stand up for their principles."

"I don't care." Sam looked them both in the eye, jaw set. "I don't care how they try to make this sound, because I'm right, and I'm going to go out there and be right, and I'm not going to play their game."

CJ could see nothing more they could say would get through to him. He was standing there, fists clenched, eyes alight with the righteous fire of knowing he was doing the right thing. A picture of the white knight, ready to go into battle with nothing but truth and justice for his weapons.

And when she put him out there in her press-room, he was going to get torn to shreds.