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“Are you serious, Addie?” He pushed off the bed and returned to the window.

“Look, this town was always made up of kind people who meant well. I’m not denying that.

And I don’t know what it’s like now. But back then?

” He shook his head and leaned against the wall, facing me.

“Maybe they would have accepted her, maybe they wouldn’t have, but she felt like she had to get out.

And let’s not revise history here and forget that at various times for various reasons we all felt that way.

I was the only person she knew outside of Adelaide Springs, so I was the person she tracked down.

And then from that point on, we were both so focused on what we could accomplish together that we never turned back. ”

He was right, of course. We’d been blessed to grow up in a community in which you didn’t lock your door at night and everyone

knew everyone. Everyone looked out for everyone. But there weren’t ever any big surprises. If you were one of them, they would

fight to the death for you. And if you weren’t? Well, I wasn’t aware of anyone ever being run out of town or anything like

that, but new people didn’t usually stick around. And as painful as it was to admit, it probably wasn’t just because you had

to drive nearly an hour to pick up a decent pizza.

“Okay, but then she left. She was at Yale. She was in Washington. DC is not Adelaide Springs, Wes. She could have—”

“Well, now , sure. Maybe,” he added a little less confidently. “But this was twenty years ago.”

I sighed. “Of course. You’re right.” I’d been a woman in the military and then in the intelligence community long enough to

understand that even those who advocated for change and had the power to do something about it sometimes—all too often—still

fell back on asking the only person in the room wearing a skirt—who outranked at least a few of the men with empty cups—to

pour the coffee. And it hadn’t been anywhere near twenty years ago that my compliant pouring had last been followed up with,

“Thanks, hon.” My circumstances and Wray’s may have differed, but I could understand her desire to keep those circumstances

from interfering with the things she wanted to accomplish.

“By the time the world—or at least DC—might not have cared quite as much, we were pretty settled in.” He stuffed his hands into the pockets of his slacks.

“Neither of us forced the other into anything we didn’t want.

It was not traditional, and maybe it isn’t what other people in our situation would have done, but we got to focus on the work, and that was what mattered to us.

It worked for us. Really. For a long time. Until... well, until it didn’t.”

“What changed?”

He sat back on the bed, this time against the headboard with his knees propped up against his chest. “Would you believe it

was a potent combination of cancer and Brynn Cornell?” He laughed gently.

“What? What does Brynn have to do with any of this?”

“Cancer makes you reevaluate everything. At least it made Wray reevaluate everything. Not the choices she’d made—the choices

we had made—just why we had made them. She began seeing my father a little more for what he was, and she saw how long we’d both

been ignoring our scars rather than trying to get any healing from them. And then everything that happened with Brynn on Sunup , putting down Adelaide Springs and everything, happened, and she—Wray, I mean—forced us to have a conversation we’d managed

to avoid for fifteen, sixteen years or so.”

“About what?”

He wrapped his arms around his knees, and one corner of his mouth rose in a half smile. “You, mostly.”

“Me?”

“Yeah. You. And Andrea. Cole. Laila. Jo. Everybody, I guess. But yeah... you.”

I didn’t have to ask for more details. Not that I would have anyway, of course, but there was no need. I didn’t know what

pain he had been dealing with. What unresolved emotions he may have needed to tackle. But I understood that he and Wray had

finally had a conversation equivalent to the one Joel and I had in the meadow.

And let the healing begin.

“So if that’s not the story, Wes, what’s the story? I don’t understand. No one knew she was gay. You said it’s not about an

affair. No one knew the two of you were anything other than a perfect DC power couple on their way to the White House.”

“Exactly. We were a perfect DC power couple, and when she died, I was the perfect grieving widower. The perfect grieving widower who experienced an unprecedented bump in the polls, it’s worth mentioning.

You could even argue that I’m the front-runner because of how perfect Wray and I were together and because of how perfectly destroyed I was when I lost her. ”

“Okay, yeah, so? It’s not like you murdered her to get ahead in the polls. I mean, you didn’t, right?”

He chuckled. “No. I didn’t. But pretty soon it’s going to leak that while my wife was on her deathbed, finally losing her

brave battle with breast cancer, hooked up to machines and having only a couple of weeks left to live, I walked myself down

to the courthouse and filed for divorce. And that’s something everyone on both sides of the aisle can agree is pretty unforgivable.”