No! Don’t think about that! She’d think about her hair, her itchy nose. She’d think about the way she hadn’t been able to swallow food since her secretary had broken the news that Dennis had been assassinated three blocks from the White House by a gun fanatic who believed his right to bear arms included the right to use the President of the United States for target practice. The assassin had been killed on the spot by a Washington, D.C., police officer, but that didn’t change the fact that her husband of three years, the man she’d once loved so desperately, lay before her in a gleaming black casket.

She broke her father’s grip to reach up and touch the small enameled American flag she’d pinned to the lapel of her black suit. It was the pin Dennis had worn so frequently. She’d give it to Terry. She wished she could turn around right now and hand it to him, perhaps ease his grief.

She needed hope—something positive to cling to—but that was tough even for a determined optimist. And then she hit on it . . .

She was no longer the First Lady of the United States of America.

A few hours later, that small bit of comfort was snatched from her by Lester Vandervort, the newest President of the United States, as he regarded her across Dennis Case’s old desk in the Oval Office. The box of Milky Way miniatures her husband had kept in Teddy Roosevelt’s humidor had disappeared, along with his collection of photographs. Vandervort had added no personal touches of his own, not even a photograph of his deceased wife, an oversight she knew his staff would soon correct.

Vandervort was a thin man, ascetic in his appearance. He was fiercely intelligent, almost entirely humorless, and a confirmed workaholic. A sixty-four-year-old widower, he was now the world’s most eligible bachelor. For the first time since the death of Edith Wilson eighteen months after Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration, the United States had no First Lady.

The air inside the Oval Office was climate-controlled, the three-story windows that rose behind the desk bulletproof, and she felt as if she were suffocating. As she stood by the fireplace, staring blindly at Rembrandt Peale’s portrait of Washington, the new President’s voice seemed far away. “. . . don’t want to appear insensitive to your grief by broaching this now, but I have no choice. I won’t be remarrying, and none of my female relatives is remotely capable of handling the job of First Lady. I want you to continue in that role.”

As she turned to him, her fingernails bit into her palms. “It’s impossible. I can’t do it.” She wanted to scream at him that she was still wearing her funeral clothes, but excessive displays of emotion had been leached out of her long before she’d come to the White House.