Donna woke to the steady sound of Josh's breathing; the warm whisper of his breath on her neck; the heavy, comforting weight of his arm thrown over her. She opened her eyes, blinking drowsily. The rain had stopped in the night, and sunlight was pouring through the partially-opened blinds, flooding the room. Through their slats she could see the first pink buds of apple blossoms beginning to unfold in the tree beside the window, and she could hear birds singing in its branches.

She lay that way for several minutes, looking around her as much as she could without moving and disturbing Josh. The room was exactly what she might have expected from the style of the house: tucked into a corner under the sloping roof, with a pair of dormer windows on one wall and a single one on the other, it was full of interesting angles and odd nooks and corners. Someone—she couldn't really believe Josh had done it himself—had painted the walls and ceilings white, which gave the space an airy feel, and made the low slope of the roof seem sheltering instead of oppressive. There was a window seat under one of the dormer windows, a handsome chest of drawers against one wall, the big bed, and not much else except light and an expanse of softly gleaming hardwood floor. Even though she'd seen the outside of the house, the simplicity of the space and its old-fashioned charm surprised her. She lay there savoring its sweetness and loving with every atom of her being the man lying beside her. She would never have imagined him in a place like this. It had been years since she had imagined herself in a place like this. And yet it all seemed so right, so completely perfect. She wanted to wake up like this every morning for the rest of her life.

She felt almost dizzy with happiness, drunk with it; she could feel it effervescing inside her like bubbles rising through champagne. She couldn't remember the last time she'd woken next to a man feeling like this: that she hadn't just been having sex, she'd been making love. Sometime in that first year with Alan, probably, but there was no comparison between the thing she'd called love then and what she felt now. And she knew she'd never felt as if she were really and truly being made love to the way she had last night. She'd had good partners before, experienced partners, skilled and considerate partners, but she'd never, in her entire life, been touched and kissed and held in a way that made her feel so completely, so totally loved. So cherished. Her climaxes had been deep and thrilling, but even in the need of the moment she'd felt they were entirely secondary to this bigger, deeper, infinitely more thrilling, more satisfying thing that was blossoming around her. If she hadn't had one, she honestly wouldn't have cared. Not that there had been any question of that: Josh had seemed to care about almost nothing else. She remembered the words of the old traditional English marriage vows she'd heard once and never forgotten: "With my body I thee worship." She'd always wondered what that would be like, to feel, not just admired or desired or skillfully pleasured, but worshipped. She'd found out last night.

She turned herself a little so she could look at him. At his beautiful, beloved face; his strong, reassuring arms; his broad, comforting chest with the faded but discomforting marks on it that brought to mind that terrible night she could still hardly bear to think about. She remembered how she had unbuttoned his shirt so she could run her hands over his chest and stomach; remembered the feel of his nipples going hard under her tongue; remembered running first her finger and then her mouth over his scars and feeling her eyes fill up when she thought about that summer night when she'd come so close to losing him. He hadn't let her touch him there long: he'd moaned softly for a minute and then pulled her up so his mouth could move down her body again, turning her attention from his pleasure to her own. She remembered how he'd kissed the scars that marred her chest now, and how he'd asked, with so much emotion in his voice, if she could ever forgive him for sending her to that place. She remembered how he had kissed and suckled and stroked every corner of her body; how he'd gasped when he entered her; how he sobbed with relief, tears actually running down his face, when he finally came.

She picked up the hand that was draped over her and stroked its fingers, admiring them. He sighed and shifted a little, without waking. She turned his hand over to plant a kiss in his palm, and stopped short, her eyes widening with shock.

She stopped breathing. He stirred, and opened his eyes. Outside a robin trilled joyously.

"Your—arm," she stammered. "You hurt your arm." The pinkish scars were ugly, long and jagged. She hadn't seen them last night because he hadn't taken his shirt off until after he'd turned out the light.

Josh closed his eyes and drew in a long breath.

"Yeah," he answered.

"What—what happened?"

He opened his eyes again, and met hers steadily. There was an expression in them that she couldn't recognize.

"It's what it looks like," he said quietly.

"I don't understand," Donna said, confused. There was something here she knew she should be understanding, but the blood was ringing in her ears and she felt a little dizzy. She hadn't had much sleep. She probably needed more sleep, and something to eat, and then her head would feel clearer. "How did you ever do that? Were you working on the house? You have to be careful, Josh; you know you don't know anything about that kind of thing. It can be dangerous. My parents' next-door neighbor cut his arm trying to put a new window in; he had to have three different surgeries; they said if his wife hadn't been home he might have bled to death, and he'd been working around the house for years . . . ." Her voice trailed off as she heard herself babbling.

"I wasn't working on the house, Donna," Josh said quietly. "I did it last summer, in D.C."

Last summer. In D.C. After the convention . . . .

"How?"

He sighed, and sat up.

"With a knife," he said, very softly.

"A knife?"

"A kitchen knife."

"A kitchen knife?" It didn't make any sense; how could a slip with a kitchen knife have done all that? The dizziness was making her feel sick to her stomach now. "Josh, I've told you a million times it's important to keep your knives sharp so they won't slip, and use a cutting board, and—"

"It didn't slip, Donna."

She stared at him, wide-eyed. He looked back steadily, but his mouth trembled a little. Perhaps it was that that made her finally understand.

"No," she whispered. "No. You didn't. You wouldn't."

"I'm sorry," he said, his voice cracking. "I'm sorry."

"Not like that. Not—that Christmas, you told me you didn't really, you weren't really trying . . . ."

"I was lying."

"Lying?" She could barely get the word out.

"Yeah. More or less."

"You lied to me?" Her voice sounded high and strangled.

"Not just to you, Donna." There was a note of desperation in his voice now. "I was lying to everybody. To Leo, to the President, to Keyworth, to the guy he had me see. To myself. Most of all, to myself."

"I—but—you got better then. You know you did. You went to see that man Dr. Keyworth recommended, and you got better." You couldn't have got better if you were lying, she was thinking. It's not supposed to work like that. "You were fine afterwards. You got better."

"That's what I thought, too. For a while."

"Oh, Josh. If you thought—if you knew—If the PTSD was happening again, why didn't you see someone? Go back to that psychiatrist, to Dr. Keyworth, to—anyone?" To me, she was thinking, but didn't want to say. Why didn't you talk to me?

"It wasn't like that, Donna. I wasn't having flashbacks to Rosslyn; what was going on didn't have anything to do with the shooting. I didn't think of it as my PTSD coming back again; I didn't think of it as something I should see someone about. I didn't think there was anything anyone could do."

"It—just happened, then? You didn't really mean to; you didn't know what was happening; you just—" She was babbling again, desperate, but then she saw the expression on his face and stopped.

"You did know," she whispered. "You did know you were going to hurt yourself. You did know that."

"Yeah," he said softly. "I knew that. It wasn't something I did because I was in the middle of a flashback or something. Not to the shooting, anyway; they think my PTSD was a part of it, but it wasn't the same as before. I was angry with myself and exhausted and out of control, but I still knew what I was doing."

"But then you stopped," she said, her voice pleading. "You changed your mind. You called for help—"

He took a deep, shuddering breath.

"I didn't change my mind, Donna. I got lucky. Someone came in—my cleaning lady, she came back for a shopping bag she'd forgotten when she'd left that morning. She has a key. Apparently she trained as a nurse in the Philippines, but she ran out of money before she got her degree. She couldn't make enough money to give her kids a decent life there, and couldn't get anything better than a job with a cleaning service here—at least, she couldn't when she came over. Leo helped her go back to school last fall; she's finishing up this summer, she shouldn't have any trouble getting a nursing job then. We're working on getting her kids over here, too."

She hardly heard what he was saying. The nausea that had been rising inside her ever since she had seen his arm surged up, overwhelming her. She threw herself out of the bed and ran wildly across the room and into the bathroom, slamming its door behind her. Then she dropped to her knees and hung her head over the toilet, retching and sobbing uncontrollably.

oooooo

"Donna? Donna, let me in, please?" Josh's voice broke on the "please." She didn't answer. He pushed the door open a little. She was still bent over the toilet, although the worst of her nausea had passed. He opened the door farther and squatted down beside her, watching helplessly.

"May—may I touch you?" he finally asked, his voice so broken it cut through Donna's misery. She nodded. He put a tentative hand on her shoulder. She leaned back a little towards him, shivering, and he wrapped his arms around her, carefully, as though he was expecting her to push him away. When she didn't, he sank to his knees, rocking her back and forth. "I'm sorry," he whispered into her hair. "I'm so sorry. I didn't want to upset you, Donna. I didn't mean to make you cry."

She leaned back into him and wiped her face with a hank of toilet paper he passed her. Her head felt clearer now, but everything seemed slightly surreal: she and Josh sitting on the bathroom floor, both of them naked, his hands spread over her stomach, his arms wrapped just under her bare beasts, sex the farthest thing from either of their minds.

"Tell me," she said, her voice sounding like somebody else's, plaintive and woeful. "Tell me what happened. Tell me why."

He squeezed a little tighter.

"It had been building up for a while—quite a while—and I'd just been ignoring it, pushing stuff aside, not letting myself think about things I should have been thinking about and dealing with. I felt tense all the time, I couldn't sleep much, but I didn't let myself think about why. I just focused on work. There was so much to do, it was easy to get lost in it, and I guess that's how I tend to cope with things anyway—how I used to cope with them. Only it wasn't really coping, you know? It was just getting by, hoping the other stuff would go away and I wouldn't have to think about it, because I didn't know what to do about it, I didn't think there was anything I could do about it. But I couldn't help thinking about it sometimes, and it was ripping me apart. So I just did what I always do and put my head down and threw myself into something I knew I could do something about, or thought I could."

"The campaign?" Donna asked.

"The campaign. Other things before that—that China trip, whatever I could find. But it all went wrong. I screwed up the China thing, and I screwed up the campaign, and—"

"Josh," Donna said, twisting in his arms so she could see his face and he could see hers. "That's not true, you know that's not true. You didn't screw up either of those; you did a great job on them, on both of them. They just didn't work out the way you wanted."

He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, forcing himself to relax. She could see him doing it; it made her want to cry again.

"Yeah," he said. "Yeah, I know. You're right. But that's what I was thinking then. And then, when we'd lost and Matt went back to Texas, there wasn't anything to do anymore, there wasn't anything to hide behind anymore, and I—I cracked, I guess. I just couldn't stop beating up on myself, for the campaign, for all the stupid things I'd done that fall before you left, for—" He stopped abruptly. "For everything," he finished in a whisper.

Donna felt a cold finger run down her spine.

"For what, Josh?" she asked, her voice sounding almost stern. Her heart was racing. "What do you mean, 'for everything'?"

He squeezed his arms more tightly around her and pulled her down on his shoulder, where she couldn't see his face.

"It's okay," he said. "It doesn't matter now. I'm okay."

"Josh," Donna said again. "You have to tell me. What do you mean, all the stupid things you did before I left? What do you mean by 'everything'?"

He didn't answer. It was all the answer she needed. She remembered how he'd reacted when she thanked him for being her teacher, how he'd asked if she could ever forgive him when he'd seen her scars, how he'd told her he loved her, how he'd wept in her arms when he came.

"It was me, wasn't it, Josh?" she wailed. "Because you sent me to Gaza and I got hurt. You thought it was your fault. Because you sent me there. Because I was angry with you. Because I went to work for Bob Russell, because I left."

"It's okay," he said, quietly. "I'm okay now, Donna. It's not going to happen again. It's okay."

She buried her face in his chest and wept helplessly. He stroked her hair, saying over and over, "It's okay. Don't cry, Donna. It wasn't your fault. I'm okay now. It's okay."

oooooo

Donna stood in the shower, soaking in the warmth of the water running over her, letting it clean her body and trying to let it clear her mind. After they'd been sitting together for a while on the bathroom floor, Josh had whispered, "Come on, you need a shower and something to eat," and had got up and turned on the water and helped her in—it was an old-fashioned claw-footed tub with high sides, and she was still shaky. She'd wondered if he was going to come in too, and had been grateful when he didn't. She needed a few minutes by herself to pull herself together. She loved that he saw that and gave her the space. It had cost him something—she'd felt him growing hard against her while he'd been holding her, once she'd started to calm down. She couldn't have handled more sex right now. There'd be time for that later—plenty of time, if she had anything to say about it. Just not now, not right now.

She was still feeling rocked to the core by what she'd just found out. Josh. Just to think of him being hurt and going to the hospital and her not being there, not even knowing about it, took her breath away; but to think of him doing that on purpose, of him actually wanting to do that, wanting what that would do to him—it was unbearable. And then to think of what he must have been going through before that, in the weeks after the convention, in all the weeks and months before that . . . . He'd told her over and over again that it wasn't her fault, and rationally she knew he was right, but it was hard not to feel as if it was. As if, at the very least, she should have guessed that something was wrong and tried to do something about it, instead of keeping her distance, nurturing her hurt feelings, blaming him for not being what she wanted him to be and doing what she wanted him to do after Germany.

She couldn't really believe she'd missed what was happening with him after Gaza. Of course, he'd missed what was happening with her, too—that had obviously taken him completely by surprise, and she knew he wasn't going to forgive himself for it easily. They'd both been preoccupied with their own emotions after the bombing and their experiences in the hospital in Germany: he'd told her enough as they'd talked just now to let her understand how emotional a time he'd had there, how difficult it had been for him. And the problem was that Josh's way of dealing with powerful feelings was to ignore them, to push them aside and try to act as if nothing had happened. He'd had a lot of practice at that over the years, so he was pretty good at it, or pretty good at giving the impression that he was good at it, which wasn't the same thing. And she'd known that about him—that was what really upset her; she'd known how he was, known what kinds of things he got twisted into knots about, and yet she hadn't seen this coming, hadn't guessed that it was happening at all.

Of course, she hadn't known how deep his feelings for her really went. He loved her—she was still totally amazed by the idea. She'd known that he cared about her; there'd been times when she'd known he was attracted to her; but love—that was what C.J. had seemed so sure she was alone in feeling, and foolish to feel. She'd been too drugged up to remember much about what had happened in the hospital, but she'd been amazed at his having come at all and having stayed so long, and had hoped it might signal a change in their relationship. When it didn't, she'd been so angry with him for reverting to his old ways and not noticing her, and so angry with herself for having hoped, yet again, for something more, that she'd never really allowed herself to wonder why he might have been acting the way he was. It had been so easy to think, "That's just Josh, damn it," and to remember what C.J. had said to her that night of the lockdown and conclude that here was the final proof she needed that she really didn't matter to him the same way he did to her and she'd never be able to count on him for anything more than what she already had, which wasn't enough—not nearly enough. It had never crossed her mind that he might be wrestling with emotions he couldn't handle, or being undermined by the susceptibility to emotional stress that she knew must have started for him when his sister died, but that had become so much more obvious when he'd been shot and developed PTSD.

She'd been worried about him when he wasn't returning anyone's calls after the convention, but then she'd listened to Will, who'd been so sure that Josh was just nursing a bruised ego and not wanting to lower his standards to play second fiddle on their campaign and work with them—with her—and she'd allowed herself to be talked into believing that that was all it was. It had been all too easy to believe that Josh wouldn't want to work with her in her new role, and she'd been hurt all over again, and angry, and ashamed of him, because she'd always believed he was better than that. She'd been bitterly disappointed to think that he would leave the Democrats to fight the election on their own just because the candidate wasn't the one he'd chosen or because his former assistant had managed to work her way up to Press Spokesperson for the campaign, and had wondered for a while why she'd ever been so infatuated with him at all.

Now all she could think was that she shouldn't have listened to Will, she shouldn't have listened to Leo, she shouldn't have worried about the campaign—she should have gone to find him, to see for herself that he really was all right and to help him if he wasn't. She thought about what might have happened—what, except for the injustices of the distribution of the world's wealth and a forgotten shopping bag, would have happened—and she felt sick and dizzy all over again. She thought of him lying in the hospital with his injured arm, blood dripping back into him through an IV, on those painkillers that never really did their job as well as you needed them to, and she wanted to cry. She wondered where he had had to go after that, what kind of place it had been, what he had had to do to get better, and thought of him doing it by himself, with no one there who knew him or really cared about him except his mother, if he'd told her, or Leo, who'd been so busy with the campaign he could hardly have spent a lot of time with Josh, and she did cry. She wouldn't have thought she'd have any tears left, but it turned out she did. The noise of the shower muffled her sobs and the warm water washed her tears away, so she let herself go and cried until she couldn't cry any more. She didn't recognize herself; normally she never cried. She hadn't cried this much since she was about thirteen years old.

The water was starting to run cold before she shut it off and got out. She couldn't find a hair dryer, and of course she'd forgotten to bring one—she was too used to the amenities of good hotels now, she thought—so she towelled off her hair as best she could, then towelled it again. He'd brought her suitcase up to the bedroom. She freshened her face with some makeup, slipped on her jeans and a cotton sweater, then glanced around the room one more time, wondering again at the thought of Josh choosing such a sweet, old-fashioned place to live. There was a picture propped up on the chest of drawers that she'd noticed before; now she crossed the room and picked it up to look at it more closely.

It was an oversized postcard, eight inches long by three or so inches tall, showing a panoramic view of blue hills or low mountains. Somewhere in the Blue Ridge, Donna thought, wondering why Josh had chosen that as the only ornament for his bedroom. She didn't think it was quite the same skyline she was used to from the drive out to Camp David, though perhaps he liked it because it reminded him of that. Without really thinking about what she was doing she turned the card over to see where the picture had been taken, and was surprised to find the back of it covered in Josh's familiar scrawl.

Age 680,000,000 yrs.

Av. hgt now 3,000 ft.; tlst pks 6,000 +

Orig. hgt unkn, prob. like Rockies or more (tlst Rockies pks now 15,500 ft. after 140,000,000 yrs). Flattened once, then lifted up, worn down again.

1400+ species sheltered by woodland.

Eastern farmland all alluvial soil, supported native tribes, colonists, still supplies East Coast half its fruit, veg, dairy.

No U.S. without this.

The last words were underlined. What on earth, she thought, staring at the little set of facts and figures in bewilderment. Then she saw what he'd written below them: Survive it. Endure. Grow. Give.

She sank down on the windowseat, staring at the words until they were burned into her mind. Then she turned the card over and stared at the picture again, that long line of hills that had once been mountains and had been worn down by the inevitable processes of weather and time, by millions and millions of years of wind and rain and freezing hail and snow, rubbing away at solid rock or slipping into cracks and fissures and breaking them up, breaking them down, but giving in the process the rich soil that had nurtured men and women as they built a nation, that helped sustain millions still. She felt as if she had opened a door and seen Josh's soul, naked. Her eyes filled with tears again, but they were tears of pride this time, as well as grief.

She didn't hear him bounding up the stairs. "Donna? I've got breakfast rea—" He broke off. She looked up, not bothering to hide the wetness in her eyes. He flushed, then laughed a little, looking embarrassed.

"You found that?"

"Yes. It's beautiful."

He walked over and squatted down beside her.

"That was the view from the place I stayed at for a while, last summer, after—" He gestured vaguely with his arm. Donna swallowed and nodded.

"How—how long were you there?" she asked, her voice a little choked.

"A couple of months. Leo got me in, and pretty much forced me to stay till I was really back on my feet. I didn't have much of a choice: he drove me down, so I didn't have a car to make a getaway in." He was trying to make a joke of it. Donna gave him a smile to oblige him, but she knew it was a wobbly one.

"They had this barn, where people did art stuff. I stayed the hell away from it for as long as I could, but finally my therapist told me if I didn't do a couple of sessions down there, she wouldn't sign me out. It wasn't as bad as I was expecting; turned out to be kind of interesting, really. They had this big box full of postcards and photographs, and they let you rummage around in it and choose something you liked. And then you were supposed to write stuff about why you chose it, what it meant to you."

"And that's what you wrote."

"Well, part of what I wrote. The digest version. Make a nice set of fridge magnets, don't you think?"

"It's beautiful."

"I used to look at it when I got up in the morning, to remind me . . . ." He shrugged, self-consciously, his voice trailing off. "I haven't thought about it in a while, though. I'd forgotten it was there. I might have known you'd go poking around and find it." He was smiling, but Donna felt guilty.

"I didn't have to poke very far, Josh. It was right there on the dresser, and I just turned it over to see where the picture was taken. I'm sorry—I didn't mean to pry. Do you mind?"

"No," he whispered. "I don't mind. Not with you. I don't mind anything, if it's you."

She leaned over to kiss him. It was a very long time before either of them thought about breakfast again.

oooooo