Madam President by Nicolle Wallace

that she not do that.”
    Peter finally put down his paperwork and turned to face her. “How about looking at it this way? If she wants to say something about an issue that’s very important to her, she may take to Facebook like everyone else her age and write something about your historic speech. Your daughter might act like a socially aware college freshman who cares about issues like abortion rights. That sounds like someone Charlotte Kramer would be proud of. Actually, that sounds like someone I know. Someone I fell in love with more than twenty years ago.”
    His voice was patient, as always, but his words felt like a reprimand. She scrunched up her face and turned back to her speech, taking out her frustration on the draft in front of her by slashing several pages with large black lines. “You always defend her,” she charged.
    “Someone has to,” he said quietly.
    Charlotte decided to let that be the last word on the topic, but she was extremely unsettled by their conversation. She had a strong feeling that she was correct about the likelihood of Penny sayingsomething publicly about the speech, and Peter was correct, too. It was precisely what she would have done.
    It was clear where the fault lines had developed in their family when she and Peter had carved out separate lives for themselves years earlier. Going public about his affair with Dale had been the flash point, but Charlotte had always seen it as an inevitable and unavoidable consequence of her long and willful neglect of their marriage during her first run for the White House. Now she was terrified about giving their relationship a second chance, but she also felt hopeful that they were both finally committed to building bridges back to each other. She was more concerned about whether or not she could revive her relationship with Penny.
    Since she and Peter had been back together, Penny acted as though she resented Charlotte for diverting Peter’s attention away from her. While he was close to both of their kids, he and Penny had a special bond. After Charlotte was first elected president nearly six years earlier, it was Penny who’d asked if they were going to move to D.C. with Charlotte or stay in California with their father. Charlotte and Peter had never even discussed separating the family, but Penny apparently thought that it should be on the table that the kids could stay in school with their friends and their dad would take care of them while their mom went off to D.C. When Charlotte had affirmed that the family would be relocating to Washington, it was Penny who’d argued that it wasn’t fair to make Peter move. He’d ultimately convinced the twins that moving to Washington would be a great adventure. But he returned Penny’s protectiveness and was not the least bit intimidated by her stubborn streak. He’d had plenty of training in dealing with strong-willed women.
    Charlotte, on the other hand, was constantly thrown off by how fiercely independent her daughter had grown after just one year at college. Charlotte saw in Penny the same seriousness that she’d possessed as an eighteen-year-old and fretted that her daughter was growing up too fast. She also suspected that her displays of toughness were a defense mechanism designed to project more maturity than she felt. But Charlotte was running out of time to correct the mistakes that she secretly feared she was making each time she acquiesced toPenny’s requests for more space and independence. She was beginning to think she should be hopping on a plane and planting herself in Penny’s dorm until she talked to her about whatever it was that she was so angry about.
    Harry, on the other hand, never played games with Charlotte. He was open and affectionate when Charlotte came to visit, and while he seemed to have formed a closer family unit with his new fraternity brothers at college than with his own family, Charlotte was grateful that he had created such a tight-knit support group