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“Where in the world have you been?” Phil asked him in greeting as he answered the phone. “Do you have any idea how close I

was to notifying the sergeant at arms that you went missing?”

Wes put his phone on speaker, turned up the volume, and set it on the desk beside him. “Oh no. Please don’t. I’d hate to involve

the lady responsible for protecting the Senate gavel.”

“Don’t get cheeky, Senator. You know as well as I do that the sergeant at arms oversees Senate protocol—”

“In addition to babysitting the gavel? I stand corrected.”

“—and as soon as she was made aware, she’d have to notify the vice president. And then the vice president—”

“Would do nothing. You know he hates me.”

“That may be, but that doesn’t change the fact that this stuff matters. I believe we’ve all been more than understanding—”

“Who’s we ?”

“ I’ve been more than understanding. There.

Is that better? First your wife and then the governor.

.. I know it has been a difficult time for you.

But fair or not, your life is not just your own.

You know that. It belongs to the people of the fourth district of Connecticut, and you don’t just get to wander off and not answer your phone—”

“I checked my messages, Phil.” Wes stood in front of the mirror and held a silver necktie up to his collar with his left hand,

then lowered it and held the black one up with his right hand. “I didn’t miss a single call from the people of the fourth

district of Connecticut. If they had called, I definitely would have called them back.”

“Fine. Joke all you want. But we’ve now gone an entire news cycle without anything new from you, and your opponents are beginning

to circle like there’s blood in the water. There’s no guarantee that your victories in Iowa and New Hampshire will carry you

through South Carolina—”

“I know. It’s crazy. Almost like South Carolina is an entirely separate state with different voters and everything.” He threw

the silver tie over the back of the chair and looped the black one around his neck.

Phil sighed on the other end of the line, and Wes pictured his red, exasperated face as if it were right there in front of

him. He’d certainly seen it enough—not just over the course of the past couple of years, as he dealt with the declines and

deaths of Wray and his father, but really since the day they met.

“Sorry, Phil. You’re right. I’ve been a bad little senator, and I promise to behave much better—” Wes caught the lie as it

came out of his mouth and quickly attempted to rephrase it into truth. Tricky. “I know I’m not always easy to put up with. I appreciate you, Phil. I really do.” He’d almost uttered some true but cryptic

statement like, “You won’t have to put up with me for much longer,” but he knew Phil would have taken that as, When I’m elected, I’m not bringing you on as White House chief of staff after all, and he would have considered that a fate worse than death, most likely.

When he first met Philip Brewster, Wes had been eighteen, regretting his decision to go to Connecticut with his newly discovered father and nearly convinced he needed to go to trade school and learn to be a welder or something.

He had absolutely no ambitions for his life, and truthfully, he was fairly confident a career as a welder was out of reach for him.

Welders had skills and worked hard, while Wes believed the only thing he’d been born knowing how to do was love Addie Atwater, and the only skills he’d picked up in his eighteen years of life since were making out with her and abandoning her.

It may have been his father, already in his second term as governor of Connecticut (one of thirteen states without gubernatorial

term limits), who plotted the course for Wes’s life and opened the doors, but Phil had been the one to do the heavy lifting.

As the governor’s deputy chief of staff, he couldn’t have been pleased with his new assignment—playing Henry Higgins to a

small-town, homesick, and brokenhearted Eliza Doolittle with a C-minus average—but Wes had sensed a shift in his allegiance

around the time he was elected to his second House term. That was when Phil asked him, for the first and only time, if he

wanted to be president.

Wes had come to understand pretty early on that that was his father’s desire for him. When he threw himself into his schoolwork

to keep his mind off Addie and began to make decent grades for the first time—and, more important to him, actually began to

learn some things—the desire began shifting into cautious optimism. The addition of Wray into the mix helped convert the cautious

optimism into a full-fledged plan. From that point on, he wasn’t still or quiet long enough to truly think about anything.

Until the day Phil cleared Wes’s schedule, drove him the hour to Mystic Seaport under the guise of a photo op at a War of

1812 exhibit at the museum, and then asked him if we wanted to be president while they sat on a dock and ate lobster rolls.

Wes had begun to answer without thinking. When was the last time he’d been asked to think about any of it, after all? Of course he wanted to be president. He believed he could make a real difference. It would be

an honor to serve his nation in that way when the time came. If he was one of Pavlov’s dogs, questions about his future in

politics were the bell, and his stump speech was the saliva.

But Phil stopped him and stood up, telling him he didn’t want an answer until they got back to Hartford. Then he went to the museum, leaving Wes to eat alone by the water and walk through the village and think .

On the way back to the city, Phil had talked to him about anything— everything —apart from the question he had asked. When they parked at the Capitol building, the only thing Wes knew to say was, “I want

to be president. When did that happen?”

Phil nodded and said, “Though I’ve seen no data to support my hypothesis, I’m convinced that Washington, DC, corners the market

on daddy issues per capita. But you’re one of the few I believe can work his daddy issues to his own advantage.” Then he’d

stuck out his hand, and they’d shook on the pursuit of a shared dream.

From that moment on, Phil Brewster was his man. Not his father’s.

“Water under the bridge,” Phil said now on the other end of the call. “How goes it in Sacramento? Maybe we’re not quite to

the point of filing a sergeant at arms missing-persons report just yet, but there really have been rumblings. I need your

face on television.”

Yeah, television wasn’t going to work. Not when his backdrop would have to be either snowy mountains that clearly couldn’t

trick anyone into believing they were the 831-foot Carpenter Hill, which had the distinction of being the highest point in

Sacramento, or one of any number of stuffed and mounted dead animals, which had the distinction of being Jo Stoddard’s design

element of choice.

“With those new ads the PAC seems to be running every two minutes, I think my face is on television plenty.”

“Then do Press the Nation .”

Wes groaned. “I hate doing Press the Nation . Herbie Eccleston is a ratings-chasing kiss-up who doesn’t even understand the electoral college but tries to pass himself

off as a pundit.”

“Oh, come on. Herbie’s not so bad. Besides, most of the electors in the electoral college don’t understand the electoral college.”

“Still. Herbie Eccleston, Phil? Really?”

“Herbie Eccleston has eight million daily listeners, Wes. He’s got the number one current-affairs podcast.”

He didn’t. He was number two, after Sebastian Sudworth. But Wes couldn’t focus on that right then. He had finished tying the tie and slipped the knot up against his neck, and he was currently trying to make sense of what he was looking at in the mirror. “I just tied a Windsor knot.”

“I’m sorry?”

He tilted his head and ran his thumb and forefinger along the bulkier triangular shape as he studied it. “My tie. I tied a

Windsor.”

“Good to know. Is that what you want me to take to Reuters? ‘Senator Wesley Hobbes of Connecticut gained another four points

in his bid for the presidency this week. Pundits credit his Windsor knot’?”

He had probably tied at least ten ties a week for the last fifteen years, and every last one of them had been tied with a

Kelvin knot. (Wasn’t sure when he’d decided he wanted to be president. Also wasn’t sure when he’d turned into a guy who knew

the names of tie knots.) Wray had called it his signature knot. It was just an inside joke between them, because she had said

she drew the line at being like those politicians’ wives on TV who straightened their husbands’ ties in a contrived show of

intimacy. “If your people ever want me to do that, just tell them I’ve never been able to master your signature knot.” It was a joke. It was funny. It made him miss her deeply when he thought of it. But it didn’t change the fact that the Kelvin

knot sort of was his signature knot.

And he’d just tied a Windsor.

He pulled at the tail, and it released and unfurled in one smooth motion. He’d forgotten how much he enjoyed that sensation.

Doc.

Doc Atwater had been the first man to help him tie a tie.

That first time, Wes’s mom had dropped him off at the Atwaters’ house for the middle school dance, which Doc was driving all five of them to.

Cole was wearing a bolo tie he’d borrowed from his grandfather, but Wes hadn’t thought about the necessity of a tie at all.

Addie, Laila, and Brynn were all in Addie’s room finishing getting ready, and Doc had pulled Wes aside and handed him one of his own ties.

Wes had stared at him blankly—embarrassed, he supposed, by the expectation that he should know what to do with it.

Doc, of course, had defused the situation before Wes could even figure out why he was ashamed of himself (because he didn’t

know he should wear a tie? because he didn’t have money for one? because he didn’t have a dad to teach him these things?)