"Where is Dorian?" Amelia looked around at the volunteers moving from desk to desk, table to table, and phone to phone. No one answered or even seemed to notice she had asked a question. She raised her voice. "Excuse me! Has anyone seen the candidate?"

"A-me-lee-ya," Dorian chimed from nearby as she entered the room, her purse slung over her forearm.

"Where have you been?" Amelia wondered. Her tone sounded desperate. "I wanted to go over your stances on right to choose and prison reform before your press conference."

"Oh, I'll be fine," Dorian waved her off. "I know where I stand and I'm not afraid to say it."

"All the same," Amelia frowned. "A word here, a word there. We could go over how to segue from one subject to the next."

"Amelia." Dorian paused for direct, eye-to-eye contact. "I've got it. You're just panicked because you won't be there. Besides, David is a genius with the media. Don't worry about it." She smiled and spun to drop her purse on her own desk and slip out of her jacket.

Amelia took a moment to absorb Dorian's upbeat confidence but still wondered. "What are you up to?"

"Jared Banks is missing." Dorian lifted an eyebrow at Amelia. It wasn't that she was unsympathetic to the plight that the Buchanans and Viki were facing, but at this point in time their tribulations were relevant to her interests and future plans.

"Yes and that's terrible," Amelia offered. "Do they think something happened to him, or did he just take off?"

"Oh, knowing Jared he is just out…." Dorian shook her head and spun her hand in the air as she left the end of her sentence hanging. "Despite his apparent rehabilitation at the hands of one Natalie Buchanan, Jared is a con man. If you ask me, he's gotten himself mixed up in some nonsense and now he is trying to fix it."

"Hmm," Amelia thought. "Seems you know this situation pretty well."

Dorian peered at her. Was Amelia teasing her, or was that a relevant observation? "I heard through the media grapevine that 'Charlie' is going to write an article about Jared, and Viki is going to run it on the front page of The Banner."

Now it was Amelia who lifted a brow at Dorian. She said nothing. She knew there was more to Dorian's story.

Dorian looked at Amelia as if expecting her to finish the line of thought. When she didn't, Dorian continued. "Viki? Who has supposedly taken a leave of absence from the paper since it is a conflict of interests with her running for mayor?" She seemed annoyed by it.

"Tell me you didn't…."

"So I reminded her of that…."

"Dorian!" Amelia was both concerned and a bit scolding. "Their family is going through a crisis and if anyone gets wind of you prodding her about that, you're going to seem…."

Dorian almost prided herself on it – almost. "Like an evil bitch? Listen, it isn't that I can't identify with having a loved one missing, but we're in the middle of a cam-paign here and if she can't handle it in a professional manner, she needs to step out of the way. When Starr and Hope were kidnapped and I resigned as Lowell's campaign manager, did I do anything that seemed biased?"

Amelia wasn't sure. She still had not put her finger on how Dorian had gotten Lowell to resign. "Nothing that seemed biased, no."

Dorian wondered why Amelia had answered in such a specific way. "Well, there's my point." She straightened the framed family photos and neatened the stacks of documents on the desk.

Amelia smiled in sincere amusement. "Don't even try to tell me that if you owned a major newspaper and one of your girls was missing, you wouldn't use it to get them back, whether you were running for mayor or not."

Dorian was matter-of-fact. "That doesn't change the fact that she is the one doing it." Amelia was missing her point.

"So what did she say? When you reminded her of her conflict of interests?"

Dorian paused. Amelia waited. Dorian pouted. "She … well, she in her consistent state of righteous indignation decided to throw Stan Lowell in my face." The thought flustered her. "She said his being on the hospital board while serving as mayor could have been considered a conflict of interest in itself, and reminded me that I had started supporting him to get his vote for my being chief of staff – which, by the way, she was not even supposed to know about."

Amelia shook her head. Dorian was implying that Viki was the sneaky one. She knew a mild amount of Dorian and Viki Banks' history, but only knew enough to be more objective than Dorian. "This was just an exchange of words?"

"And then, she saw it fitting to dole out her personal ruling that I should not campaign to be chief of staff at the hospital while also campaigning to be mayor! I haven't done that, have I? I mean, please … give me some credit."

"She thinks you are going to try to be chief of staff at the hospital and mayor of Llanview at the same time?" Amelia asked. "That would be a conflict of interests."

"Oh, she knows that I know that," Dorian sneered. "She's just throwing it in my face because she thinks she's going to win the election and then even if I end up being chief of staff, she'll still have one up on me!"

Amelia blinked. She was a bit taken aback that Viki Banks could even behave in that way. Still, what Dorian was saying made sense. "Well, we'll just have to make sure that doesn't happen." She lifted a piece of paper off the desk and placed it in Dorian's hand. "Talking points. Be ready."

Dorian sighed at the paper and watched Amelia walk away before abandoning the list on the edge of the desk. She sat down and distracted herself with the latest headlines on the local news websites. "What is taking them so long?" she muttered.