XIII

CJ intercepted Sam on his way back from a late-night foray to the White House mess. "Got a minute, Sam?"

"Sure." He allowed himself to be tugged into a nearby empty office.

CJ looked at him seriously. "Sam, I want you to have a word with everybody in the bullpen. Get them to can all the baby chatter, okay?"

He frowned. "Why? I mean, I didn't think it was a big secret or anything, and-"

"It's not. But you guys need to stop chewing the fat in the bullpen the whole time. You're upsetting Toby."

Sam snorted in faint bemusement. "We're upsetting Toby?"

CJ locked eyes with him, dead serious. "He and Andy had a couple of miscarriages before they broke up."

Sam literally took a step backwards as if he'd been struck. "Oh..." He looked up at her, mouth open. "Oh my God. CJ, I didn't- why didn't you tell me?"

"I didn't know. I mean, I knew he and Andy had some kind of a thing going on about kids, but I always thought they were arguing about having them, and you know, and-" She sat down heavily on the edge of a desk. "Hell."

He was still trying to process the information. "He's... I mean, he never said anything about- I didn't- Why didn't he tell anybody?"

"He's Toby, Sam, what do you want from him?" CJ's tone was more biting than she wanted it to be, reinforced with the flavour of her own guilt. How could there be this huge dark blot in Toby's private life, and she'd never known about it? What else didn't she know?

"But I mean- Jesus, this was- was this in the middle of the campaign? This was all going on while we were running Bartlet for America, and he never said anything?"

"Toby doesn't talk about things, Sam. Especially not things that are bothering him."

He was silent for a moment, then he looked up at her, determined. "I'll speak to Bonnie and Ginger, ask them to tone it down around him," he promised softly.

"He'll hate it if he finds out we've done that," she noted.

Sam nodded. "Yeah. And... I don't care."

"Good," CJ agreed. They might not be able to do much to protect Toby from his own painful memories, but what they could, they would. And if he didn't like it... well, they'd go ahead and do it anyway.

"Eleanor." Doctor Kensington smiled at her over the familiar wire-framed glasses, and Ellie wondered if this had all been a big mistake. She always felt ill before visiting her therapist, horrible roiling waves in her stomach and sweaty palms at the thought of being asked to crack open her private emotions in front of the outside world. She'd given up attending fifteen months ago, purporting to be a well-adjusted, self-secure and balanced excuse for a human being.

Total crap, of course, but at least she wasn't bringing herself to the point of throwing up with nerves over the sessions that were supposed to make her feel better.

And yet, here she was again. Same old office, same old slightly musty smell as if the windows were never opened, same old bushy, blunt-leafed plant that she still wasn't sure was either real or plastic. Back on the couch again.

Not that it was actually a couch. A couch would have been good, because then she could have looked at the ceiling and not had to make eye contact. Dr. Kensington was big on eye-contact. Just like her dad.

Look at me, Eleanor. I can't see your face and I can't hear what you're saying when you're staring at the floor like that. Look up at me.

"Well, Eleanor, it's been a while."

"Yeah." She tucked her hands under her legs and mindlessly bumped a heel against the bottom of the chair. What was she doing here?

"Have you come to talk about your father?"

Ellie hesitated, knowing that it wasn't truly the current media storm that was the crux of the matter, but as always tongue-tied, paralysed by the weight of too much attention on her and unable to steer the conversation the way she wanted. "I guess."

"You've spoken to me before about your father being distant to you, not receptive to your problems or your needs. Would you like to talk about that?"

Ellie nearly choked on her own words reflected back at her. That old self-pitying refrain was so familiar it was hard not to follow its well-worn grooves, only now they were tangled with guilt and recrimination. Her father wasn't some towering, emotionless fortress looming over her, he was mixed up and hurting like she was, and all her life she'd been pushing him away. Pushing hard, and then crying herself to sleep every time when he didn't immediately come rushing back.

Not because he didn't care. She hugged that newly revealed truth close to her, clutching onto its sharp edges in a form of self-imposed punishment. Not because he didn't care. Because he really thought she wanted him to leave her alone, and he cared so much that he'd rather hurt himself by doing so than hurt her.

God, this was all such a bloody, twisted, horrible mess.

Dr. Kensington was waiting patiently for her to speak; blank, impassive, non-judgemental. She hated that, that... emptiness. Like sitting down in front of a blank sheet of paper, being asked to write about yourself, and feeling that sickening, haunting fear that you wouldn't be able to find any self to write about...

Dr. Kensington was still waiting. "I... talked to my dad," she said. Approaching the subject from a distant, tangential run-up, which seemed like the only way she knew how. "At Zoey's wedding. We talked a bit."

The therapist nodded wisely. "And did you tell him what you told me? About how you feel like he isn't there for you when you need him?"

No. This wasn't right. This wasn't what she meant anymore, it wasn't what she wanted to say-

"I found out about- the..." Go on, say it, Eleanor Emily, I dare you to say it- "-About this." Dr. Kensington knew what she was referring to - how could she not? You'd have to be blind to have missed the explosive news cycle.

"From your father?"

Ellie laughed at that, a choked, bitter, painful sound only fractions away from sobbing. Her father, talk to anyone about this? Talk to her? "From mom. She told me how he- he didn't ever have a proper relationship with his dad, and he doesn't always understand it when we, when I-" The knowledge was there, inside her brain, but she couldn't force it out into words, didn't have that effortless flow of eloquent language that had fallen on all the rest of her family.

"It's natural to feel guilty, Eleanor," Dr. Kensington said, almost painfully calmly. "We forget sometimes that the pains that others cause us come from fears and hurts of their own. But that doesn't make your pain any less real, or less valid. Your father neglected you because his father neglected him-"

"But he's not-"

"Ellie. Eleanor," the therapist said comfortingly. "I need you to let go of thinking about your father for a moment. Yes, he went through an appalling childhood, but you exist too. You have to stop defining your world in terms of how it affects other people."

"But-"

-But it's not like that, I know always said he neglected me, I always said he didn't love me, but I didn't really believe that - not deep down, not right the way under the skin for real. I know he's never in his life wanted to hurt me, I know he'd drop everything in a heartbeat to help me, I've always known that. I know he loves me, I didn't mean it when I said I didn't think he loved me, I just meant-

How could she explain that? How could she explain about that uncrossable gap, about desperately wanting to be like Liz and Zoey, to be understandable, to be somebody he could connect with? About knowing all that love was there for her and she just didn't know how to reach it, didn't know how to reach out and grab it and make it hers the way her sisters could without even thinking about.

She'd never been able to figure out how to be a Bartlet, how to have that special spark that somehow drew you in to the centre of things and let you feed off each other's energy. She'd always been too withdrawn, too different, unable to take part in that electrical give-and-take that the rest of the family took for granted.

It had never been in her nature to be the kind of personality that her father needed to have around him, the kind of fierce, resilient person who could resist being sucked under and drowned in that wave of towering charisma. But he still loved her desperately and she loved him right back, and she hadn't understood until far too late that in his world that wasn't something that was unquestionable.

All of that ran through her mind in a heartbeat. None of it came out.

Dr. Kensington smiled - a smile that was knowing, and yet had no understanding behind it. She didn't know what was going on in Ellie's head, she didn't understand the truth or how she felt, and Ellie didn't have the words to put it across.

"Eleanor," the therapist said gently. "You don't have to defend your father to me. I believe that you love him. I believe that he's a good man. But I also believe that good men can be bad fathers sometimes, and I think you need to address that. You need to be able to acknowledge that he did hurt you, and he did treat you wrongly, and that you're not to blame for that."

Ellie was hit, suddenly, by a mental image so strong it was almost a vision - one that made her feel about half an inch from throwing up. She suddenly saw her father sitting in a room just like this, having a conversation just like this... Only his pain was real.

His pain was real... and hers had only ever been make-believe. A spoiled little girl throwing a self-pity party, demanding that the world bow down and give her what, she knew deep down, there had never been any question she already had.

She stumbled to her feet, almost knocking the chair over. Dr. Kensington raised her hands placatingly. "Eleanor-"

"It's not like that," Ellie spat out, on the edge of tears of frustration. "It's not what you're making it into. He's not what you're trying to make me say he is. He never neglected me, he never did that!"

"Eleanor, I want you to-"

"You don't know him! You don't know anything about him! He's my dad. He's not a monster, he's not anything, he's just my dad."

She turned and ran from the room before she could collapse in on herself and break down completely.