The media had gone into full feeding-frenzy mode as they examined the issue from all possible angles while dredging up every detail of Nick’s life—and Sam’s. She’d learned of women from his past whom she’d never heard of before, and had her first disastrous marriage paraded before the world while she tried to carry on with her work and help to care for her dad as he recovered from surgery, all the while pretending the storm wasn’t happening.

In short, it had been a nightmare, compounded by the ongoing wait for results from the lab analyzing the bullet that had been removed from her dad’s spine, which seemed to be taking forever.

Sam hadn’t breathed a word to Nick about how awful the storm had been for her. She didn’t have to. He was fully aware and terribly contrite. More than once he’d contemplated removing himself from consideration so they could get back the lives that had already been hectic and complicated before they became more so. But she’d refused to allow him to give up without seeing the fight through to the finish, whatever that finish turned out to be.

And then late last night the word had come from the White House: They had the votes. Nick had informed her that under the twenty-fifth amendment, a majority of the House and Senate had to vote in favor of the measure. The Senate had never been in question. Nick had endeared himself to colleagues on both sides of the aisle during his year in office, and seventy-five of the Senate’s one hundred members had pledged their support of his nomination.

The House had been another matter altogether, controlled as it was by Republicans who refused to give the Democratic president an easy victory. It had been nothing short of a dogfight, managed by the White House and the president himself, who’d been resolute in his effort to win confirmation for his candidate.

Nick had tried to stay out of the fray as much as he could, but with cameras thrust in his face every five minutes and his phone ringing off the hook around the clock, it was all he could do to keep his head down and his mouth shut until the political machinations worked themselves out.

It had all come down to today. The nine o’clock vote would be the lame-duck Congress’s final act before they broke for the holidays. Nick would be sworn in right after to cover the month until Inauguration Day, when he’d be sworn in again. They’d stayed up late making calls to ensure everyone who mattered to him would be in the chamber for his history-making moment when he would officially become the nation’s second-youngest vice president.