Nealy still wasn’t used to having Lucy call her Mom instead of Nell. It had only started a few weeks ago, and Lucy had never talked to her about it or asked permission, she’d just started doing it. Button, on the other hand, had been calling her ma—usually shrieked at the top of her lungs—since that day three months ago when they’d all walked out of the house in Iowa.

Not all of them, she reminded herself. One member of their makeshift, not-quite-a-family had stayed behind.

But Nealy had learned not to think about Mat unless she was alone, and she forced her attention back to the battle of wits going on between Lucy and her father.

“. . . so I asked Lardbutt—”

“Lucy . . .” Nealy’s voiced sounded a warning note.

“I asked Mrs. Fegan if Mom could come in and talk at a school assembly, not about her campaign—that’d be so obvious even a moron could see through it—but about the contributions of First Ladies. Mom’s got lots of good stories, like how Abigail Adams was a women’s libber, and Nellie Taft got the cherry blossoms planted in Washington, and Edith Wilson ran the country when Woodrow was sick.”

“That wasn’t exactly a contribution,” Nealy reminded her. “Edith Wilson nearly drove the country into a constitutional crisis.”

“I still think it was cool.”

“You would.”

Lucy folded into her favorite place, the easy chair across from Nealy’s desk, and spoke with all the aplomb of a seasoned campaign manager. “We’re going to whip Hollings’s a—butt in the primary.”

James Litchfield narrowed his eyes, but he was too cagey to openly reprimand Lucy. At the very beginning, Nealy had made it clear that was her job, and he’d quickly discovered that she meant what she said. The fastest way out of her life was to show open hostility toward either of her girls.

Her poor father. She’d actually begun to feel sorry for him. The girls had been a bitter pill for him to swallow, but swallow it he had. At the same time, he’d also been forced to deal with the unrelenting publicity her disappearance had caused.

For the past three months, Nealy had been subjected to the type of tabloid scrutiny usually reserved for drugged-out movie stars. Everyone she’d come into contact with during her seven days on the road had been interviewed. Bertis and Charlie had done her proud, and Nico hadn’t been the disaster she’d feared. Even the Celebrity Lookalike Contest organizers had received their fifteen minutes of fame. Everyone had been interviewed except Mat, who’d told the story in his own way and, to this day, refused to appear on camera.