Cynthia slipped out of the chair. “I’ll call Uncle Nathaniel.” She stopped by her mom’s chair and hugged her, breathing in the familiar smell of her vanilla body scrub. “In the meantime, I’m going to go jogging.”

“Have fun, dear,” she said, pulling her phone out of her pocket.

Cynthia went into the kitchen and rinsed out her cup, then went up the back stairs to her room and used the landline there to call the Secret Service detail. “This is Doctor Myers. I’m going to go for a run in twenty minutes.”

After she changed, she sat in a wingback chair near the fireplace to put on her tennis shoes, and her cell phone rang. When she saw the incoming number, her stomach fell. Immediately, her mind went back to that dinner at the White House. Andrew, late and drunk, had arrived with some tall, curvy daughter of a diplomat on his arm. When Cynthia tried to pull him aside to confront him, the woman pushed her and started screeching at her. She grabbed a drink off a table and threw it in Cynthia’s face, which made Andrew laugh and laugh until he fell over and into a table, glass and china breaking everywhere.

Cynthia stood there in total shock, a gin martini stinging her eyes and stripping makeup off her face. Someone swooped in and escorted her out of the room, but by then the damage was done. The incident, filmed by an eager cameraman without a sense of decency, had played on an almost continual loop on the twenty-four-hour news shows and had become the source of much laughter on social media platforms.

Andrew, a young congressman from Illinois, hadn’t tried to contact her since the morning of that incident. Why would he call her now?

With shaking fingers, she declined the call and blocked the number. She didn’t care what he had to say. She hoped his antics that night made him lose the next election and he could go back to his law firm and stay out of her life—and out of her city.

She tied her shoes and secured her hair. A check of the temperature had her also grab a knit cap out of her closet and slip it on over her ears before she bounded down the stairs. A Secret Service agent wearing a pair of sweatpants and a hoodie met her at the door. She knew another one already waited outside.

The cold air stung her face. She looked up at the gray March sky and wondered when spring would beat the cold away. She had loved the weather in the jungle. Perhaps she needed to go to a tropical climate, get away from the city.