XIX

The Vice President looked up as he entered his office. "Josh," he acknowledged, with a crooked smile.

"Mr. Vice President." There was no trace of... well, anything, in his tone, but perhaps that in itself sent a message. Hoynes played with a letter opener for a moment, then set it down pointedly and leaned back in his chair. He waited for Josh to speak.

"I've been coordinating with Leo and CJ," he obliged. "If you're sure you're ready to go public with this-"

"Do I have a choice?" the Vice President wondered wryly. Josh didn't answer. After a moment, he sat forward. "Josh, I know full well what a mess this is going to be from the moment it hits the news. The president won't accept my resignation."

"We serve at the pleasure of the president," he said quietly. Hoynes smiled wryly.

"Yes, we do," he agreed, with a faint hint of a sardonic tone that wasn't really directed in Jed Bartlet's direction. "And if we're going to have even the slightest hope of keeping control of what happens once this is out in the open, then it has to come from me."

Josh inclined his head in a short nod. It was seductively tempting to try and cover up what was still pretty much a secret, depend on the fact that Bridges hadn't made it public this far... but who knew how long they could rely on his silence? If he realised McGann had deliberately leaked news of the deal to evade his blackmail; if he'd noticed the flurry of meetings that had accompanied their discovery of the secret; if he tried to step up his blackmail campaign and wasn't satisfied with the responses to it...

He wondered if they'd been saved from previous disaster by their own swell of bad publicity. If Bridges had taken it into his head to ruin the Vice President in the past few months, it probably would have been utterly buried in the media storm surrounding the presidential biography. No, they couldn't just sit on this and hope it never came to the surface.

As it was, salvaging the Vice President's reputation from the admission that his marriage was little more than a sham was going to be hard enough. McGann wasn't the only affair in his closet, just the longest and most recent. She wasn't out to ruin him, but who was to say the others would be so discerning once it became a publicity free-for-all?

He was going to need a list of names, sooner or later. He knew it... but he really didn't have much stomach for asking the Vice President for it right now.

Hoynes looked up as the silence lingered on a few beats too long. "I should imagine you're pretty disappointed in me right now," he said, with a wry lift of his eyebrows.

Josh didn't answer.

Donna met him on his way in as he returned to the office. "I got you some time with the president like you asked for."

"Thank you."

"And I finally managed to speak with Rita Wells."

He looked at her sideways. "Ash isn't playing defence anymore?"

She pulled an unhappy face, perhaps feeling as guilty as he did for having put the young secretary on the spot to get to the truth about what was going on with McGann. "He's gone."

"She fired him?" But Donna shook her head.

"He tendered his resignation. Wells must know he was the one who spoke to us, but she said she would have kept him on anyway."

Oddly enough, Josh believed her. The young staffer must have been extremely loyal to be trusted with this kind of secret in the first place, and betraying that trust clearly hadn't sat well with him. He sighed, and rubbed his face.

"Okay. Thanks, Donna."

He headed for the Oval Office.

"We shouldn't do this now."

"Sam-"

"Toby, it's the State of the Union in two weeks, it's going to-"

"Sam-"

"-It's going to totally blow us out of the water, and they're going to expect us to address it in the speech-"

"Sam!" Toby shouted him into silence. "It's been decided," he said more quietly. "We're doing this, and we're doing it now, because you know what's just about the only thing worse than the Vice President admitting to having an affair two weeks before the State of the Union? The Vice President admitting to having an affair one week before the State of the Union! Or two days before the State of the Union, Sam, we can't sit on this until after the State of the Union, so we have to get it out as soon before the State of the Union as we can hope to-"

A soft knock interrupted his rising tone of voice. Bonnie appeared in the doorway, looking slightly nervous. "Toby? Andy's here."

Sam shot his boss a curious look, his anger over the Vice President's hijacking of carefully laid plans taking a back seat to more personal concerns. Toby hadn't said as much - of course, he never would - but there had certainly been things in the atmosphere that led Sam to suspect his reconciliation with his ex-wife was on the rocks.

Toby just nodded. "Okay." He started to stand, but Andy walked into the office to join them. Sam was confused to see she was carrying a booklet - some kind of report? Her expression was impossible to read.

She and Toby just locked gazes for a moment, and Sam tried very hard to pretend he wasn't there.

"You're a crazy, crazy, crazy man, you know that?" Andy said finally.

He just blinked, and looked at her. "Am I crazy man with an answer?"

She opened the back of the booklet and pointed to something that Sam couldn't see. Toby's inscrutable expression gave no clue as to what was going on. He held out a hand to her.

"We should talk."

"We should," she agreed. She took the offered hand and they left the room together, Andy dropping the document on the desk in passing.

After a few moments, Sam looked up at Bonnie.

"Any guesses?" he queried.

"Mystified."

They both looked at the dropped booklet. After a brief ethical battle, the outcome of which had been fairly assured from the start, Sam reached out and flipped it over.

"One thousand and one reasons to marry Toby Ziegler?" Bonnie wondered incredulously.

"What?" That brought Ginger in from outside.

Sam picked the pages up and flicked through them, wondering if this was what Toby had been working on so religiously for most of the past day. "One thousand and one reasons," he agreed, eyebrows up. They were individually numbered.

"One thousand and one?" Ginger said incredulously. "I couldn't think of one thousand and one reasons to marry Brad Pitt."

Bonnie looked her sideways. "That's because you'd pretty much have to stop after number one, 'he's totally hot'."

"Okay, it's only one, but it's good enough for me," Ginger shrugged.

Sam was still skim-reading. He turned to the back page, and then sat up. "Oh, wow."

"What?" They both leaned in to read.

"Oh, no he di'n't," Bonnie said a moment later, in tones of vaguely awed horror.

Sam blinked. "Apparently, he did."

"Did Andy look mad?" Ginger wondered.

"She didn't look anything," he admitted. He hadn't been able to puzzle out anything from her expression; he wondered if it had been any more readable to Toby. "I saw her point at something on that page," he added.

"Yeah, but what on that page?"

"I didn't see."

"Me neither," grimaced Bonnie.

They all looked down at the final page of Toby's magnum opus... which had been neatly laid out like a formal document reply slip.

I, the undersigned, hereby declare that in view of having read and fully understood the above, I intend to:
( ) Marry
( ) Not marry
( ) Take further time to consider marrying

Toby Ziegler. (Check one box only.)

SIGNATURE

Please return form as promptly as possible to the White House Communications Department for swift response.

They looked at each other. "She's either going to marry him, or kill him," Ginger pronounced.