XVIII

Donna cautiously poked her head through the door. "Josh?"

"We need him to make a statement," he said, launching into the conversation as if she'd been there all along instead of just arriving. "It can't sound like he's being pushed into it, he has to take the initiative. But if it sounds like he's over-rehearsed..." He trailed off and grimaced.

"Josh, you can't stop him taking a hit," she reminded him warningly. That much was plainly obvious, but Josh had to be repeatedly prodded anyway. Left to mull things over for too long, he was always able to convince himself that he ought to be able to find a way. And then torture himself for not coming up with it.

"If we have him come forward-" he said stubbornly.

"Then it's better, but he's still coming forward to say he had an affair," she pointed out. "You can't spin that into something that's going to go down well."

"It doesn't need to be a career-breaker," he insisted.

Donna offered a tentative smile, and wondered if he was trying to convince her, or himself. Carry on a political career after admitting to an extramarital affair? Possibly. Launch a presidential bid after doing so? She couldn't see it happening. Not for Hoynes. He'd already made one false start and had his thunder stolen by a supremely unlikely challenger out of New Hampshire. With that and now the seeds of a sex scandal under his belt, who would back him?

Hoynes had to know that. They all knew it. Even Josh knew it. He was just stubbornly beating his head against it, trying to find a way through or around that wasn't there.

"The party's going to push to have him replaced if they think he's unelectable," she said, deliberately focusing his attention on a more attainable goal. Salvaging the Vice Presidency was going to be battle enough, never mind reaching beyond it.

"With who?" Josh scowled. "Phillips? Winston? Russell? There's nobody in that pack I'd want within spitting distance of the Oval."

"Josh," she said hesitantly, after a moment. "Are we sure we're... doing the right thing here?"

"Sticking by Hoynes?" He met her eyes seriously for a moment, then nodded slowly. "Yeah."

"Why?" she had to ask.

"Because, at the end of the day... it's not about who's got juice and who's a lame duck and who's gonna be running in 2006," he said quietly. "It's about who's gonna be sitting in that office tomorrow morning if something happens to the president. And for that... we want Hoynes."

Donna nodded, accepting that. "Okay."

Josh was silent for a long moment, and then sighed and stretched. He glanced up at her. "Can you get me that file I gave you yesterday on McGann and the technology bill?"

"Sure." She moved to leave, but Josh called her back.

"And- can you find out what happened to Ashley Bowers?"

"Ashley Bowers?" she frowned.

"McGann and Wells must know by now that he's the one who leaked it to me," he confirmed. He pulled a face, probably adding the guilt for any consequences of that to his over-inflated personal load. "He was a good kid, he was trying to do the right thing. Just... see if you can find out what happened to him."

"Okay," she agreed, and left.

"Congresswoman?" The young aide who appeared in her doorway was wearing a slightly puzzled expression. "We just got a package through for you from the White House Communications Department."

Andy frowned and looked up. "A message, was that?" she assumed.

"No, a package."

Utterly baffled, now, she stood up in time to see the courier just leaving. Nikki held up a thick manila envelope and gave her a pantomime shrug. What was going on here?

She hadn't been tangling with the White House recently on any professional basis, and that meant this had to be a personal communication from Toby. Sure enough, she recognised his scrawled but still somehow elegant handwriting on the address label. But the package was thick enough to be an official report, not a personal letter. What the hell had he sent her?

Ignoring the curiosity of the rest of the office, she shut herself away before opening it. Who could predict the Ziegler mindset? It had been a scant matter of days since she'd sorrowfully told him that she couldn't see a future for them the second time around, and turned down his impulsive proposal. Would this be another part of the same stubborn campaign, or had he immediately shelved it to go back to business?

Despite herself, she felt unreasonably nervous as she tore open the top of the package to find out. What fell into her hands was a neatly typed, bound document of at least twenty pages... entitled 1001 Reasons to Marry Toby Ziegler.

A snort of amused disbelief escaped her before she could stop it. "My God, Toby..." she murmured to herself, shaking her head. She was sure it was a bad idea, but she flipped through the pages anyway. Yes, sure enough; one thousand and one list items, all individually numbered. She tried to imagine how many hours he'd spent writing it, and failed. Had he been typing solidly since the very evening she broke up with him?

A strong suspicion suddenly gripped hold of her, and she turned to the very last page. Then she sat down, and laughed like she hadn't laughed in a very long time. "Oh, Toby," she said aloud to herself. "What am I going to do with you?"

When she finally stopped chuckling, Andy picked up the phone and punched for her secretary. "Nikki?" she asked, still smiling. "Can you hold my incoming calls for a while? I've got some heavy reading to do."

She picked up the document, and started reading from the beginning.

1001 Reasons to Marry Toby Ziegler:

1. He'll stop bugging you.
2. Saves time wasted in training new husband from scratch.
3. Wedding paraphernalia from previous ceremony can be recycled.
4. Good sounding board for political debates.
5. Someone to carry the groceries.
6. You already have a key to his apartment...

"Mr. President?"

"Hi, Sam." The president nodded at him, still stroking the black-and-white kitten that was perched on the arm of his chair. "Have you met our new arrival?"

"No, but his fame has spread before him." Sam paused to pet the cat for a moment, and smiled as it purred at him. "I hear he's already causing chaos amongst the White House domestic staff."

"Ah, Abbey won't let me feed him stuff from the kitchens," the president grumbled. "Bad enough she's got me on this nutritionally balanced diet, now she wants the cat on one too. Don't listen to her, buddy," he advised the rumbling ball of fluff. "A little fish in sauce now and then won't hurt you. It's good for your brain."

Sam wondered what the Bartlet family's personal chef thought of his finely crafted dishes being redirected to the presidential pet. "Does he still not have a name?" he wondered.

"I was thinking of calling him Trouble, but around this place, who'd know what I was referring to?" the president said, with a wry smile. "What's on your mind, Sam?" he asked shrewdly.

He straightened up, growing more formal in his awkwardness. "Mr. President, to be frank, I'm not entirely comfortable with-"

"Defending the Vice President?" He nodded. "I didn't expect you to be."

He struggled to get his feelings across. "Sir, I just-"

"Sam, I've been married for thirty-five years. You think I don't have a problem with this? You think it doesn't bother me?" The president looked solemn. "A marriage is a sacred thing, Sam, that's why we're fighting so hard for everyone to have the right to it, for people like you and Steve to have the right to it if you want it. It's more than a religious rite or civil rights, it's more than words on a piece of paper. It's a vow of commitment, and it's not something that should ever be taken or broken lightly."

He looked down at his hands for a moment, and Sam followed his gaze to the wedding band that was so much a fixture you didn't even see it. "I have opinions of my own on the Vice President's actions," he continued heavily. "But right now, it's not about what I think, or what you think, or what the American people as a collective might think. What happens next is between John Hoynes and his family, it's nobody else's business."

Sam nodded stiffly, still feeling the reflexive flash of contempt and disgust for men who cheat, but accepting the president's words. What had happened with his father... that was private, something deeply personal. It didn't matter how many people saw it from the outside, none of them knew what it was like to be on the inside of it.

The president gave him a small smile. "Don't lose sight of what we're doing, Sam," he said softly. "Nobody's standing up for his actions. But we're standing up for his right to live his own life with as much privacy as any man deserves. It doesn't matter what he did or didn't do; it's helping nobody to see it dragged through the headlines."

"Yeah," he agreed quietly.

If anyone should know the truth of that, it was Jed Bartlet. When the Michael Rogers biography had brought dark insinuations about the president's relationship with his father to the surface, secrets long-buried had been dredged up into the light in a media frenzy. Every news source in the country had got in on the act, competing to reveal more and more sensational details about the abuse their country's leader had suffered in his childhood.

Hacking apart private pains in public was good for nobody. It might excoriate the guilty, but the innocent suffered just as badly, and sometimes worse. Seeing Hoynes ripped into by the press for his actions might be darkly satisfying on a personal front, but his wife and teenage son didn't deserve to be put through that.

"Yeah," he said again, more firmly. He could live with that; building a strategy not to shield the Vice President from the consequences of his affair, but to give his family the privacy they deserved in the aftermath. He looked up at the president. "Has he spoken to his family?"

"Suzanne is... aware of the situation," he said grimly. "But I should imagine there are some long and difficult conversations in his immediate future."

"Yeah." It would have been nice to take some dark satisfaction in that, but it just made him feel worn and tired. Sam wondered if the Vice President's son had any idea how much his parents' marriage had collapsed in on itself over the years... or whether he'd suddenly woken up, to find the foundations of his life had shaken themselves apart without the slightest warning.

"You'll be working with CJ and Toby?" the president asked, couching the question of whether he could handle this assignment in more comfortable terms. Sam straightened up.

"Yes, sir. Thank you, Mr. President."

The president nodded. Sam paused, and gave him a smile as he was leaving. " Sir?" He waited until the other man met his eyes. "You're looking better."

The president smiled then, a warm and genuine expression. "Thank you, Sam."

He left, and headed for his office.