Madam President by Nicolle Wallace Page A

during his first year. But between Penny’s increasingly sarcastic e-mails and comments in their recent calls and Harry’s laid-back approach to everything, Charlotte worried all the time that she’d messed up her kids by abandoning them during the years when she actually could have made a difference. Now they were college students and would never live at home again, and she was terrified that she’d screwed them up by never being around.
    Charlotte felt a familiar tightening in her stomach and gently pushed Cammie off her legs and stood up to take the dogs out for a final walk.
    “I’ll come with you,” Peter offered.
    “Nah, watch your game. I’ll be right back. I need the air.”
    Cammie walked to the elevator and stood outside it, but the two younger dogs had charged down the stairs. Charlotte had to lure Cammie down the stairs with the rest of her sandwich. Charlotte bent down and kissed the dog’s soft white nose.
    “You’re the only one who understands,” she whispered.
    Cammie licked Charlotte’s face and reluctantly followed her down the stairs and out to the South Lawn. Charlotte breathed in the warm air and tipped her head back to look at the sky. Her surroundings were perfectly soothing, but she was on edge. She’d been questioning herself at every turn lately. Charlotte missed her fearless, self-assured self. She also missed having a chief of staff like Melanie, who anticipated her every move and knew when to step in and when to back off. Charlotte threw a couple of balls for the dogs and watched a car approach the security gate. The large metal bolts that protected the street in front of the White House from car traffic disappeared into the ground, and the SUV rolled through the checkpoint.
    As it neared the South Lawn, Charlotte noticed that her friend Mark was hanging out the back window, waving enthusiastically in her direction.
    “I always forget how dead this town is at night. Do you know where I can get a drink around here?” He stepped out of the Navigator and rushed to give Charlotte a warm embrace.
    Around her, Brooke and Mark acted largely unchanged from their days as the social ringleaders in college, but she had figured out a long time ago that their over-the-top antics were designed to distract and entertain Charlotte. In their real lives, they were pillars of their wealthy community. Mark was a venture capitalist who’d funded a handful of Stanford college students with brilliant technological innovations. He’d turned a couple of them into billionaires. Brooke was the most sought-after interior designer in Northern California. Their son, Griffin, was a senior at UCLA, and their daughter, Finley, was a junior at Berkeley. They were the kind of parents that Charlotte liked to think she would have been if she hadn’t chosen a career—a life—in politics. Their children actually talked to them. Finley and Griffin had always been like older siblings to the twins. Charlotte hoped that they’d continue to grow closer now that they were all in California. Neither she nor Peter had much extended family the twins had bonded with over the years, so Brooke and Mark served as the closest thing to an aunt and uncle.
    “How was the show?” Charlotte asked.
    “Boring as hell,” he said. “But the seats were awesome.”
    “It was fabulous,” Brooke said, as she teetered in her four-inch Christian Louboutin stilettos on the uneven pavement. She was wearing a leather dress that would have looked ridiculous on anyone else, but with Brooke’s Pilates-sculpted body, she managed to pull it off.
    “Charlotte, I’m sorry that my wife looks like a hooker. The good news is that I get to go to bed with her, but the bad news is that we sat with your secretary of labor or education or something like that, and I’m sure he thought we were that couple who crashed your state dinner a few years back. I’m surprised that you didn’t get a call during intermission.”
    “Excuse me. This is a