XVI

Gareth Vance stood up and shook his hand with a smile. "Mr. Seaborn."

"Sam," he repeated, politely but firmly. He was never going to get used to being called 'Mr. Seaborn', and didn't really want to.

Vance retook his seat, pulling it close to the table. "I hope you've had a chance to consider my proposal. I realise it's incredibly forward and you must have a million and one other things you need to be thing about right now, but the amount of good it could do-"

"Yeah," Sam agreed neutrally.

"I work with these kids every day, Sam," he said earnestly, "I know what it takes to try and get through to them - how long you can be hammering at walls of defences that aren't easy to break through, that you may never break through. They've lived through things you and I can't begin to imagine, and they don't trust well or easily."

Sam nodded, knowing what his eventual answer was going to have to be but feeling obliged to hear the argument out anyway. Both his inner lawyer and his sense of fairness demanded it.

"We can pour all we've got into campaigns, awareness drives, childlines, but all the goodwill in the world can only do so much. These are kids who have learned firsthand that talk is cheap. We can keep trying to convince them that it's safe to come forward, that we'll believe them, we won't blame them, but victims of child abuse live lives steeped in the deceptions of authority figures, and too many of them just flat out won't believe us."

He locked eyes with Sam. "But kids trust the president. They trust him, Sam, because we taught them since they were old enough to recognise the star-spangled banner that this is our leader, this is the man we trust, this is the man we turn to whenever we need an answer." He snagged Sam's sleeve, as if trying to communicate his point of view by sheer force of proximity.

"If they could see him, if they could hear him speak out about the terrible things that were done to him... If we could show them that these things that happen to them could happen to anybody, even the President of the United States... If we could teach our children that terrible things can happen to even the greatest of people... wouldn't that be an incredible thing?"

"Yeah." Sam folded his arms on the desk in front of him. "Yeah, it's not gonna happen."

"CJ?"

"Hey there, Chuck."

"Yeah." He decided to ignore that, in the hope that it would go away. "I asked Carol yesterday if I could maybe have a minute of your-"

"I know." She leaned back to stretch out her long legs to look up at him. "What's on your mind, daddy-to-be?"

His heart jolted, in the way he had become somewhat accustomed to it doing. "Okay, can we not say that?" he pleaded earnestly.

"Better get used to it," she smirked mercilessly. "Soon enough there's gonna be a little fluffy-haired moppet running about the place, chirping all kinds of-"

"Okay, yeah, that's enough." He rubbed his forehead, wondering again if he'd woken up in the middle of someone else's life all of a sudden. Fatherhood...? "Actually, that was kind of what I wanted to talk to you about."

"Fluffy-haired moppets? I've got to tell you, Charlie, I'm really not the office expert."

"Well then, you're just about the only person who's not pretending to be," he noted wryly. Amazing how everybody within a thirty-foot radius had suddenly become a never-ending fount of pregnancy tales and name suggestions. "CJ, Zoey wanted me to ask about announcing this to the press."

CJ grew more serious, biting her lip pensively. "I won't lie to you Charlie, this isn't-"

"The best time in the world?" he completed with a curl of his lip. "Yeah. Is it ever?"

She frowned. "I'd like to say that the good news would be a nice change of a pace, pull some of the press attention away from the president... but the fact is, the way things are going it could just as easily get lost in the crush."

"I know," Charlie acknowledged. He met her eyes. "But we don't want this to just leak out like before." His and Zoey's engagement had got off to a somewhat ignominious start when it had found its way to the headlines before it even reached the ears of his prospective in-laws. "It's already buzzing round the West Wing, if the press weren't all so distracted they'd have the story already."

"Yeah." CJ rubbed her forehead. "Okay. I'll have Toby and Sam maybe draft an announcement for you to look at, and we'll... we'll talk about this." The unfinished part of that sentence was 'when things get a bit less hectic', but why add it in when they both knew it was never going to happen?

"Okay. Thank you, CJ." He headed back to rejoin the president.

Jed eyed the psychiatrist balefully. "You know, I really do have better things to do with my time," he warned, as he settled into his chair.

"Mm-hmm." Stanley nodded neutrally. That was what Jed hated most about these sessions, that complete passive non-reaction - how was he supposed to respond to that, how was he supposed to keep throwing out his thoughts if they did nothing but disappear into a black hole? Probably it was supposed to relax him, make him feel as if he wasn't being judged, but instead it left him edgy as hell. He was a man of words, concepts and abstract ideas, and how could he feel like he was communicating anything of note if it didn't get a reaction?

He sat back, and regarded the other man impassively. Waiting for Stanley to crack was a pretty fruitless pursuit, but that didn't mean he had to give in easily.

Probably recognising that Jed was intending to be stubborn, he shifted in his chair and spoke first. "If we could go back to what we were talking about yesterday... I feel we were beginning to get somewhere."

Get somewhere? Where the hell was there to get? He'd had a rocky relationship with his father, it was too long ago to matter now, and the sooner the press could get over it, the sooner he could get back to doing his job. Yes, the press invasion was making him uncomfortable - but there was hardly any great psychoanalytical mystery there.

"Not only do I have no idea what you think we were talking about yesterday, Stanley, I have no idea where you're trying to get with it."

"Oh, I think you do. You just don't want to go there," Stanley replied implacably. "And we were talking about acceptable levels of abuse."

"There are no acceptable levels of abuse," Jed pointed out sharply.

"Well parroted, Mr. President, now could you tell me why you don't believe it?"

"Of course I believe it," Jed scowled impatiently. This line of questioning was ludicrous! "I do not condone... certain of my father's actions, whether in my case or in the absolute, I'm saying... it was more complicated than you, or those jackals over there in the press room, would like to paint it."

"Complicated isn't an excuse, Mr. President," Stanley said, eyes boring into his own.

"And nobody's trying to make it one." He met the challenge full on, unblinking. It was childish to score it like a game of stare-out, but there was still a certain measure of satisfaction to be had when Stanley looked away and took a breath to regroup.

He raised his head again. "Mr. President... do you believe in moral absolutes?"

"I'm Catholic, Stanley," Jed reminded him dryly.

"I hadn't forgotten." He shifted in his seat. "So you believe that... certain sins are sins, no matter what the circumstances."

"Well, thank you for distilling centuries of faith into Readers Digest form for me there, Stanley." Sarcastic commentary was much less fun when it provoked neither anger nor visible amusement. "Yes. I do believe that," he conceded.

Sometimes sins had to be committed for the greater good... but that didn't stop them being sins. Every death he caused in his capacity as president was an equal stain on his soul, no matter how many other lives he might have bought with it. Human souls were infinite and immeasurable; you couldn't add and subtract them like so many sacks of potatoes.

Stanley nodded and mused on that for a few moments. Then he looked up. "Mr. President, if I could ask you... how often did you used to hit your children?"

Jed jumped to his feet, knocking the chair backwards in fury. "I don't know just what the hell you think you're-"

The study door slammed open, and in microseconds there were an uncomfortable number of guns trained on his suddenly rather cowed-looking companion. Jed stood and breathed in for a long moment, before waving the agents away in a quick hand gesture. "It's okay."

The Secret Service agents hesitated a moment over leaving; scanning the scene, checking for any signs that the view before them was other than what it seemed to be. None of the guns shifted their aim until all the agents had scoped out the room and the nearest spoke coded words of reassurance into his wrist radio. Then the dark-suited figures melted away as rapidly as they'd arrived, door falling softly shut behind them.

For the first time, Stanley looked distinctly rattled.

"You're lucky I didn't have them escort you out of the building and throw you into the street," Jed told him coldly.

Stanley gradually recaptured his equilibrium. "Mr. President, your..." He took a deep, shaky breath and continued; "Your reaction was... wholly appropriate."

"Damn right!" Jed snapped, still standing stiff with angry tension.

Stanley pressed his fingertips together, and looked up at him slowly. "So now, the question becomes... where does that reaction go when I ask you about your father hitting you?"