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“It hasn’t just been me.” I reclaimed my hand. “There are a lot of reporters keeping a close eye on the senator. Word on the street is he’s receiving the party nomination tonight.” The other political journalists were starting to smell “White House” in the water and were gathering like sharks, hoping for something worth seizing on. Buffy spent half her time disabling cameras and microphones set up by rival blog sites. She spent the other half writing steamy porn about the senator’s aides and hanging out with Chuck Wong, who’d been spending a disconcerting amount of time in our van recently, but that was her business.

“Yes, but you’re the only one I’ve met who’s reporting on him, rather than the interesting things his campaign drives out from beneath the rocks, or the fictional affairs of his office aides,” Emily said, wryly. “I know I can trust what you say. That’s meant a lot to me and the girls while Peter was on the road, and it’s going to mean a lot more from here on out.”

“It’s been an honor.”

“What do you mean, ‘it’s going to mean a lot more’?” asked Shaun. “Hey, George, are you finally going to learn to write? Because that would be awesome. I can’t carry you forever, you know.”

“Sadly, Shaun, this doesn’t have anything to do with how well your sister can write.” Emily shook her head. “It’s all about the campaign.”

“I understand,” I said. Glancing to Shaun, I continued, “Once he accepts the nomination—assuming he gets nominated—this gets real. Up until now, it’s been a weird sort of summer vacation.” After the nominations, it would be campaigning in earnest. It would be debates and deals and long nights, and she’d be lucky to see him before the inauguration. Assuming all that work didn’t turn out to be for nothing; assuming he could win.

“Exactly,” said Emily, expression going weary. “That man is lucky I love him.”

“Statements like that make me wish that I didn’t have quite so much journalistic integrity, Emily,” I said. The statement was mild, but the warning wasn’t. “You, expressing unhappiness with your husband? That’s about to become sound-bite gold for both sides of the political fence.”

She paused. “You’re telling me to be careful.”

“I’m telling you something you already know.” I smiled, changing the subject to one that would hopefully make her look less uncomfortable. “Will the girls be joining you? I still need to meet them.”

“Not for this silly convention,” she said. “Rebecca is getting ready for college, and I didn’t have the heart to drag Jeanne and Amber away from the foals to get their pictures taken by a thousand strangers. I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t absolutely necessary.”

“Understandable,” I said. The job of a candidate’s spouse at the party convention is simple: stand around looking elegant and attractive, and say something witty if you get a microphone shoved in your face. That doesn’t leave much time for family togetherness, or for protecting kids from reporters itching to find something scandalous to start chewing on. Everything that happens at a party convention is on the record if the press finds out about it. Emily was doing the right thing. “Mind if I drop by later for an interview? I promise not to bring up the horses if you promise not to throw heavy objects at my head.”

Emily’s lips quirked up in a smile. “My. Peter wasn’t kidding when he said that the convention had you feeling charitable.”

“She’s saving up her catty for her interview with Governor Tate,” Shaun said.

“He’s agreed to an interview?” asked Emily. “Peter said he’d been putting you off since the primaries.”

“That would be why he’s finally agreed to an interview,” I replied, not bothering to keep the irritation from my voice. “Doing it before now was dismissible. I mean, what was I going to say about the man? ‘Governor Tate is so busy trying to get elected that he doesn’t have time to sit down with a woman who speaks publicly in support of his in-party opposition’? Not exactly a scathing indictment. Now we’re at the convention and if he doesn’t talk to me when he’s talking to everyone else, it looks like censorship.”

Emily considered me for a moment. Then, slowly, she smiled. “Why, Georgia Mason, I do believe you’ve entrapped this poor man.”

“No, ma’am, I’ve merely engaged in standard journalistic practice,” I said. “He entrapped himself.”

An exclusive six weeks before the convention would have been something he could bury or buy off: No matter how good it was, unless I somehow got him to confess to a sex scandal or drug abuse, it wasn’t going to be enough to taint the shining purity of his “champion of the religious and conservative right” reputation. Senator Ryman is moderate leaning toward liberal, despite his strong affiliation to and affection for the Republican Party. Governor Tate, on the other hand, is so far to the right that he’s in danger of falling off the edge of the world. Few people are willing to stand for both the death penalty and an overturning of Roe v. Wade these days, but he does it, all while encouraging loosening the Mason’s Law restrictions preventing family farms from operating within a hundred miles of major metro areas and encouraging tighter interpretation of Raskin-Watts. Under his proposed legislation, it wouldn’t be a crime to own a cow in Albany, but it would be considered an act of terrorism to attempt to save the life of a heart attack victim before performing extensive blood tests. Did I want a little time alone with him, on the record, to see how much of a hole he could dig for himself when faced with the right questions?

Did I ever.

“When’s your interview?”

“Three.” I glanced at my watch. “Actually, if you don’t mind Shaun escorting you from here, that would be a big help. I need to get moving if I don’t want to make the governor wait.”

“I thought you did want to make the governor wait,” said Shaun.

“Yes, but it has to be on purpose.” Making him wait intentionally was showing strategy. Making him wait because I didn’t allow enough time to get to his office was sloppy. I have a reputation for being a lot of things— after the article where I called Wagman a “publicity-seeking prostitute who decided to pole-dance on the Constitution for spare change,” “bitch” has been at the top of the list—but “sloppy” isn’t among them.

“Of course,” said Emily. “Thank you for coming out to meet me.”

“It was my pleasure, Mrs. Ryman. Shaun, don’t make the nice potential First Lady poke any dead things before you deliver her to security.”

“You never let me have any fun,” Shaun mock-grumbled, offering Emily his arm. “If you’d like to come with me, I believe I can promise an utterly dull, boring, and uneventful trip between points A and B.”

“That sounds lovely, Shaun,” said Emily. Her security detail—three large gentlemen who looked just like every other private security guard at the convention—fell in behind her as Shaun led her away down the hall.

When she’d e-mailed asking us to meet her, she said she’d be arriving at one of the delivery doors, rather than the VIP entrance. “I want to avoid the press” was her quixotic, but sadly understandable, justification. Despite the snide implications that have been made by some of my colleagues, my team and I aren’t the lapdogs of what will hopefully become the Ryman administration. We’re twice as critical as anyone else when the candidate screws up because, quite frankly, we expect better of him. He’s ours. Win or lose, he belongs to us. And just like any proud parent or greedy shareholder, we want to see our investment make it to the finish line. If Peter screws the pooch, Shaun, Buffy, and I are right there in the thick of things, pointing to the wet spot and shouting for people to come quick and bring the cameras… but we’re also the ones who won. We have no interest in embarrassing the senator by harassing his family or dragging them inappropriately into the spotlight.

An example: Rebecca Ryman fell off her horse during a show-jumping event at the Wisconsin State Fair three years ago. She was fifteen. I don’t understand the appeal of show-jumping—I don’t care for large mammals under any circumstances, and I like them even less when you’re stacking adolescents on their backs and teaching them to clear obstacles—so I can’t say what happened, just that the horse stepped wrong somehow, and Rebecca fell. She was fine. The horse broke a leg and had to be put down.

The euthanasia was performed without a hitch; as is standard with large mammals, they used a captive bolt gun to the forehead, followed by a stiletto to the spinal column. Nothing was hurt except the horse, Rebecca’s pride, and the reputation of the Wisconsin State Fair. The horse never had a prayer of reanimating. That hasn’t prevented six of our rivals from airing the footage from that fair for weeks on end, as if the embarrassment of a teenage girl somehow cancels out the fact that they didn’t make the cut. “Ha-ha, you got the candidate, but we can mock his teenage daughter for an honest mistake.”

Sometimes I wonder if my crew is the only group of professional journalists who managed to avoid the asshole pills during training. Then I look at some of my editorials, especially the ones involving Wagman and her slow political suicide, and I realize that we took the pills. We just got a small portion of journalistic ethics to make