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I sniffed ( ouch— snotcicles ) and wiped my eyes before opening the truck door. “Get in before we freeze to death.”

“Don’t I need to push or something?”

“No, the truck will handle it.”

“Well, I’ll just stay out here and be ready to climb back into the—”

“Are you wanting to drive the rest of the way up Banyon, considering you literally went off the road at the very first curve?” I dangled a

leg from my seat as I looked back over my shoulder at him. “Because if that’s what you want, I am more than happy to leave

you to your sticky mess and—”

“No, no. Sorry. Yes, thank you. I’ll take the ride.”

He began walking around the back of the side-by-side to get to the passenger side of the truck—like an idiot—rather than just stepping over the chain connecting the two vehicles.

I considered throwing out a word of caution and advice but ultimately thought better of it.

Instead, I climbed in the rest of the way and watched him in the rearview mirror as he struggled to lift his feet through the snowdrift.

The snowdrift that got deeper and deeper as he got closer to the mountainside.

I had to hand it to him, he wasn’t a quitter.

Not when it came to this, anyway. It would have been so much easier, at any point, just to accept defeat, turn around, and go the other way.

But no. I don’t know—maybe he thought that would be too humiliating.

If he’d been able to see what I saw, I think he might have eaten that particular slice of humble pie rather than descend deeper and deeper into a work of art that was part La Brea Tar Pits and part Luke Skywalker on the ice planet of Hoth.

I cranked at my window, but it was frozen shut, so I leaned across the bench seat and opened the passenger door. “Go around,

dummy!”

“What?” he yelled into the wind as he attempted to lift his foot in snow that had now buried him clear up to his hips.

I shouted louder. “Go around!”

There was no point in it now, of course. He’d passed the point of no return. He knew it. I knew it. And doggone it if I didn’t

start laughing when he called out, “Would Edmund Hillary give up? Would Jacques Cousteau? Where would we be right now, Addie,

if Lewis and Clark had decided to ‘go around’?”

He finally reached the door of the truck and stepped up before brushing off thick powder from the waist down. He joined in

the laughter at his own expense as he held on to the grab bar and collapsed into the seat beside me. “That went well, don’t

you think?”

***

By the time the side-by-side was pulled out of the ditch and we were plodding along at a safe pace back toward the inn, the

laughter had faded, taking all the comfort with it. Gone was the brief moment in time in which we were too focused on the

present to think about the past. Not that I was thinking about the past per se. There was no particular memory in my mind—good

or bad. It was more that, for me, Wes only existed in the past. For a few brief moments, dopamine and endorphins and adrenaline

had worked their magic and now had been all that mattered.

But once the spell was broken, I was sitting beside a guy who, at worst, represented a truly miserable time in my life and couldn’t be trusted or who, at best, was a politician with as-yet unclear motives and most definitely could not be trusted.

Or maybe I had that the wrong way around. In my mind, the best and worst of Wes Hobbes were interchangeable... and all

pretty bad.

“What are you doing here, Wes?”

“Do you mean here ? As in sticky and cold from head to toe?”

“No, I mean here . Adelaide Springs. Surely you didn’t come all this way after all this time to fight a losing battle for another vote or two.”

He chuckled softly. “Are you saying I’m not going to find any ‘Vote Hobbes’ yard signs around town?”

“I’m saying the people of this town wouldn’t vote for you on Dancing with the Stars , much less for president.”

“Um, ouch . I’m actually a very good dancer, if you must know.”

“You are not.”

“I am.”

“ You are a very good dancer?”

“Well, I’m better than competent.”

“Since when?”

“Since spending three years as one of two men tasked with partnering with approximately ninety-four women in the young adult

class of Madam Kiki’s Art of Dance Studio of Greater Hartford, thank you very much.”

I took my eyes off the road just for a moment, just long enough to try to interpret what he was playing at, and I’d never

seen a more earnest expression on anyone’s face in my entire life. A chortle built up in my chest for just a second before

bursting out of me.

“You’re serious!”

“Yes, I’m serious! I would never joke about Madam Kiki.” He adjusted and rested his left knee on the seat as he twisted to face me. “I mean,

I exaggerated about the ninety-four women, but there were fifteen, easily, and Beauregard and I—”

I gasped. “No.”

“Yes. His name was actually Beauregard. Beauregard Linklater, I kid you not.”

“What were Mr. and Mrs. Linklater thinking?”

“Well, they obviously hated little Beauregard from birth. There’s no other explanation. Anyway, Beauregard and I were supposed

to divvy up all the ladies, but Beau had asthma and tended to max out at three or four a night.”

I smiled as I leaned forward over the steering wheel and strained to see the entrance to the Inn Between. Once I spotted it,

I flicked on my turn signal—not that anyone else was on the roads, and not that they would have been able to see my taillights

until it was too late if they were—and settled back into my seat. After removing all traces of the smile, of course.

“Okay, so maybe we’d be forced to support you in your pursuit of the Mirrorball Trophy, but the White House, Wes?” The truck

came to a stop, and I shifted into Park before turning toward him, matching his knee-propped posture. “Regardless, the votes

of a couple hundred voters don’t matter when you’ve already got Colorado sewn up. So why are you here? What’s the angle, Senator?”

“There’s not an angle , Addie. I mean, okay, does it make for a freakishly small world that Adelaide Springs is home base for a journalist I’m hoping

to—”

“I knew it!” I exclaimed. Even as disappointment coursed through my body upon realizing that I had not, in fact, known anything.

I should have known it. I felt really off my game for not having figured it out. I’d focused on the wrong part of that “we’ll all

get to be part of a little feel-good piece on the nightly news” comment I’d overheard at the airport. I’d wasted time thinking

about the chumps he was trying to get to “behave” when I should have been focusing on the “little feel-good piece.” There

was no one in the world more beloved for exactly that type of journalism than our old friend Brynn Cornell—the sunny host of Sunup , the number one morning news/entertainment program in the country.

But as I looked at him, and he didn’t shy away from looking at me, I felt like something still didn’t add up.

My role as an analytic methodologist very rarely required me to come face-to-face with a target, but I had spent countless

hours—days, weeks of cumulative hours—watching video feeds of people who couldn’t be trusted (unless they could, because desperation sometimes

caused even the vilest to grasp at redemption). I stared into their eyes when they didn’t know they were being watched and,

more often than not, in those moments they told me most of what I needed to know without ever saying a word. I had always

figured my job was easy in that way. Certainly easier than what agents in the field were called to do—look into the eyes of

some of the most brilliant people in the world (because dummies rarely survived long enough to merit CIA involvement) when

everyone’s life is on the line and determine, in real time, whether they could be trusted. Not in the future. Not under different

circumstances. Right then. Right there. And certainly easier than what Joel had done as the management officer for a great

number of those agents. How many times had he sent someone into the field hoping his contact could be trusted? How many times

had he sent someone into the field—a real, live, breathing person, often with a family at home—knowing full well his contact

couldn’t be trusted?

As I studied Wes’s unflinching eyes, seeking answers, I couldn’t imagine what desperation could have led him back to his hometown

of a few hundred people who had refused to speak his name for more than twenty years. The last polls I’d seen had 57 percent

of Americans voting for him if the general election were held today, and he hadn’t even won the nomination yet. (Though most

of his respectable opponents had dropped out of the race before Christmas, so winning the nomination was not going to be a

challenge.) In an America as divided as we had ever seen in our lifetime, electing Senator Wesley Hobbes as president seemed

to be the one thing the majority of people could agree on. He didn’t need our votes. That much was obvious. And he didn’t

even need a feel-good news story.

Brynn wasn’t the journalist he wanted to talk to, I finally realized. And Adelaide Springs was, after all, home base for more than one in-demand reporter.

“You snuck out here, incognito, not knowing who you would run into or what their reaction would be—”

“Oh, I think I know what their reactions will be.”

“And still you came.” My voice was soft and no longer in attack mode. I genuinely wanted to figure out what I was missing.

“Just to try to talk with Sebastian?”

Whereas Brynn was known as America’s Ray of Sunshine and did ads for orange juice and approached her weekly recaps of The Bachelor with the same level of seriousness that other journalists applied to their election-night coverage, her husband was arguably

the most trusted and revered newsman of his generation. Sebastian Sudworth had been a Pulitzer Prize–winning international