Bastard. She wanted to shout the word at him, but she was her father’s daughter, schooled from birth to hide her emotions, so she didn’t. Instead, she regarded both men steadily. “It’s impossible. I want my life back. I’ve earned it.”

Her father came closer, crossing the oval rug with the presidential seal, stealing even more of the oxygen she needed to breathe. She felt imprisoned, and she remembered that Bill Clinton had once called the White House the crown jewel in the federal correctional system.

“You have no children to raise, no profession to pursue,” her father said. “You’re not a selfish person, Cornelia, and you’ve been raised to do your duty. After you spend some time on the island, you’ll feel more like yourself. The American people are counting on you.”

And how had that happened? she wondered. How had she managed to become such a popular First Lady? Her father said it was because the country had watched her grow up, but she thought it was because she’d been trained from childhood to be in the public eye without making serious missteps.

“I don’t have the popular touch.” Vandervort spoke with the bluntness she’d frequently admired about him, even though it cost him votes. “You can give it to me.”

She vaguely wondered what Jacqueline Kennedy would have done if LBJ had suggested something like this. But LBJ hadn’t needed a surrogate First Lady. He’d been married to the best.

Nealy had thought she’d married the best, too, but it hadn’t worked out that way. “I don’t want to do this. I’ve earned a private life.”

“You gave up your right to a private life when you married Dennis.”

Her father was wrong. She’d given it up the day she was born James Litchfield’s daughter.

When she was seven, long before her father had become Vice President, the nation’s newspapers had run a story telling how she’d turned over the Easter eggs she’d found on the White House lawn to a disabled child. The story didn’t say that it was her father, a United States senator at the time, who’d whispered to her that she must give up those eggs and that she’d cried afterward because she hadn’t wanted to.

At twelve, her mouth gleaming with braces, she’d been photographed ladling up creamed corn in a Washington, D.C., soup kitchen. At thirteen, green paint smeared her nose while she helped repair a home for seniors. But her popularity had been sealed forever when she’d been photographed in Ethiopia at the age of sixteen holding a starving infant in her arms as tears of rage ran down her cheeks. The picture had run on the cover of Time and established her as a symbol of America’s compassion.