XIX

Leo headed outside to get some air, and there she was, both achingly familiar and far out of his reach. He offered a sad and frozen smile as she approached him. "You're going home now?"

"I've called a cab." The smile Jenny gave him in return was genuine enough, but brittle.

Leo nodded slowly to himself. "Okay."

There was a long, familiar sort of awkward silence, and they both spoke at once. "I should-"

"I-"

He inclined his head politely, letting her talk first. She hesitated, drawing her coat closer about her. "I... I wanted to apologise to you."

His brow crinkled. "What-?"

She looked him in the eye. "I- I know I haven't always been there for you. Things were- I could have been more supportive than I did."

Leo was shaking his head. "No. No-"

"I..." She looked down. "There were times when I... I reviled you for your problem, when I could have been helping."

He closed his eyes briefly in dismay, then looked back up at her. "I had no right to ask or expect anything of you after what I put you through. I didn't deserve any of the kindness you showed me."

Jenny smiled a bittersweet smile, and touched his arm. "Leo... somehow I never got around to telling you this but... I'm so very proud of you."

"I love you," he said softly, and meant it, in however faded and beaten out a way.

"I love you too." She pressed her lips to his cheek for just long enough to leave a lingering sensation, and then she was gone. He stood watching after her, the coolness of the New Hampshire night wrapping itself around him.

The door beside him creaked open, and he looked back to see Jed. His old friend stood beside him for a moment, and then slipped a warm arm around his shoulders. "Come on, Leo," he smiled gently. "Let's get back inside."

"Charlie and Zoey are leaving," Leo pointed out. Jed watched them from across the room, hand in hand and trading bright-eyed glances at each other, and glowered.

"Probably going up to their room now," Leo added, when he didn't respond.

"Where they will be spending the whole of the night talking and playing video games," Jed said sharply, lowering his eyebrows and daring his old friend to try and puncture his shield of denial. Leo just chuckled to himself.

Jed looked across at him. "Are you okay?" he asked softly. Seeing his estranged ex-wife - a situation Jed couldn't even begin to comprehend from his own life experience - could never have been the easiest ride in the first place. Add onto that Leo's insistence on extracting the maximum amount of blame from his brief lapse back into drinking... He laid a comforting hand on his old friend's sleeve.

Leo gave him a long-suffering look. "I'm fine."

"Good, now the truth," he said without missing a beat.

He rolled his eyes, but sighed to himself and held it for a few moments before answering. "I'm... I'm okay."

He nodded to himself as he said it, and looking him in the eye, Jed thought that this time, he could believe it.

Leo raised an inquisitive eyebrow at him. "You?"

Damn this culture of reciprocation. But he felt obliged to do Leo the courtesy of giving the question the same consideration.

He thought about Ellie. They'd talked for what felt like - but might not have been - a long time. It had still had the typically dancing nature of their conversations; one step forward, two steps back, and a few sideways shuffles out of territory they both found uncomfortable. It had been, really, no easier than it ever was... but at least she hadn't run away from him.

He knew Abbey had followed her outside to talk with her; he wasn't sure what had been said. Whatever words his wife had found to get some way through to her, he was grateful for them. Or maybe it was partly down to the wedding - they always seemed to bring out funny moods in women.

Hell, in him too. It had been a long, exhausting, rollercoaster of a day; pride, delight, nostalgia, highly strung emotions, and a descent into the maudlin mood that had been plaguing him of late. He was dwelling too long and too deeply on things that were buried way back in the past, and should have had the decency to stay there.

He realised Leo was still waiting for a response. "I'm good," he nodded. "I'll be better in the morning," he admitted, "but... I'm good."

"Okay." Leo accepted that. "I'll drop by in the morning before you get on the plane?"

"Yeah."

They both left the reception hall.

"CJ, what's this about?" Donna asked nervously. She shifted her feet uncomfortably. "'Cause if this is something Josh doesn't know, I'm not-"

CJ gave her as much of a reassuring smile as she could muster. "It's... not really on Josh's radar." Not yet, anyway, although she had the uncomfortable feeling it was going to bleed over into everybody's job description once the bombshell hit. "It's more of a PR matter. It shouldn't be, but it is."

Donna was opening her mouth, no doubt to wonder again why CJ was talking to her, so she forged ahead.

"There's going to be a book released in a couple of months. About the president's childhood. And it's going to raise some... uncomfortable stuff."

Donna looked at her, eyes wary and dismayed. "What kind of- CJ, what kind of stuff?"

She sighed, as much out of struggle with the question as despair. Where did you begin?

Well, you'd probably have to begin with a far greater knowledge of what had actually gone on than she ever wanted to. She picked her words carefully. "The president had... a bad childhood. I don't- I don't really know the details." But I do know more than you, and I suspect a whole lot more, I'm just not gonna raise it because I'm a coward. "But there's going to be a book, and it's going to drag it all out in the open and... at the moment, it's literally- it's literally me and Toby and the First Lady and his brother who know this."

And a certain vaguely referenced 'somebody' the president had talked to that she was fairly sure meant Stanley Keyworth. But those were conversations that she had to know nothing of, by a process of wilful ignorance if necessary. If that question ever by some horrific lack of fortuity came up, she had to be able to knock it down with nothing less than unadulterated truth.

CJ had a very nasty feeling that such a question, and many like it, were going to be on the cards in the near future.

Has the president received counselling? Is he seeing a therapist? Is he mentally fit? How can we be sure he won't crack under pressure? Is the administration at all concerned about the studies that show that-?

They said that people who heard voices should worry about their mental health. What did it say when you were carrying around an entire mental press room, its throng of occupants jostling for space and shouting each other down?

Donna's mouth had formed a round 'O' of distress, and in some ways CJ envied her that. Donna wore her emotions nakedly on her face, without the shield of carefully cultivated image and filters of what was and wasn't 'appropriate'. "They shouldn't be able to do that," she whispered, outrage at war with distress. "That's got nothing to do with anything, they shouldn't-"

"I know." CJ closed her eyes. "Yeah, I know."

There was a silence, and when she opened them again, Donna was looking at her. "CJ, I don't- Why are you-? Why not Josh, or Sam, or... does Leo even know?"

Jesus. Did Leo even know? CJ tried to imagine the president having that conversation with even his oldest and dearest friend, and just couldn't do it.

When the truth finally came out, it was going to shake the foundations of everybody's world. Even now, months afterwards, she could sometimes be looking at the president and feel her head begin to swim as everything she thought she knew about him seemed to take on new dimensions.

And that was exactly what he wouldn't want. He met her eyes, sometimes, during those moments of dizzying reflection, and the smile he offered her was sad and heartbreakingly resigned. He knew she saw him differently now, through the lens of a revelation that could be no more put back in the bag than learning that he had MS or that Josh had PTSD or that the Vice President was an alcoholic. Once your view of somebody took on extra layers, you could never peel those layers back and make it what it had been before.

Everybody was going to look at him differently; with sympathy and pity and distress and other things that the Jed Bartlet she knew (but did she really know him at all, really, if she hadn't known-?) had no time for. It was going to hurt, and everybody around him was going to be spinning the story every which way so much that they wouldn't have time to stop and do anything about it.

CJ smiled tiredly at the younger woman. "Donna... when this finally comes out, it's gonna get ugly. We're gonna be out there fighting a battle on God only knows how many fronts, and we're all gonna be giving our all to protect the president."

She nodded solemnly, eyes still big with distress.

"And while we're out there protecting the president... somebody needs to be protecting Jed Bartlet. Donna, when this hits, we're all gonna be consumed by spin and news stories and politics, and nobody's going to have a chance to stop and really look at him and make sure he's okay. Which is why we need you."

She shook her head disbelievingly. "CJ, I-"

"When Toby told you the president had MS, what did you say?"

"I-" She had to think for a moment - although the words Toby had repeated to her, struck by the young woman's response, had stuck with CJ for a long time afterwards. "I asked if, um, if he was sick or in any pain, or-"

She smiled. "Donna. This one's for you."

Donna smiled back, hesitantly, but shook her head. "CJ, I don't... exactly socialise with the president much," she pointed out wryly.

"No, but you see him," CJ said. "And that's the point. You do see him. We... there's all this stuff, with the office and the politics and the spin and- and sometimes, from where we are, it's hard to separate all that out. But you still see him as a man."

She looked her in the eye. "Donna. You care about people; that's the magic that you bring here. Well, you know, that and being able to organise Josh, but that's not so much what I'd call magic as some kind of unholy pact with a power beyond the comprehension of we mere mortals..." Donna mustered a wobbly smile. "And that's what the president is going to need right now. Because the people who usually do that for him, the First Lady, and Charlie-" and Mrs. Landingham, God rest her soul, and God I wish she was still here- "-they're gonna be right in the middle of this just like he is. And so we're gonna need somebody standing on the outside, and watching the president. Looking at him, not at the office, not at the situation, not at our action plan, but just looking at him and making sure he's all right."

She smiled. "We're relying on you to wade in and give us all a good bitch-slapping - and you're gonna need to. Because this is gonna be long, and drawn out, and messy, and sooner or later there's gonna come a time when we're all so bogged down in the process and the details that we just forget to pay attention to what really matters. And when we do, that's when you come after us. Okay?"

Donna's voice was still a little quiet and shaky, but the determination beneath it was iron. "Okay."