“Fantastic. And see you tomorrow night. Want to meet me at my place? I shouldn’t be home too late. I love you.”

“I love you, too,” she said. “See you tomorrow.”

He hung up the phone and immediately picked up his office line to buzz Kara.

“Can you come into my office for a minute?”

She was there within seconds.

“What’s up, sir?” she asked.

He couldn’t help the smile that spread across his face.

“I’ve been wanting to tell you this for a while, but I had to wait until it was okay with her. I’ve been dating someone. She’s a lawyer in L.A.; you’d love her. We’ve been trying to keep it quiet, but we’re ready to be less quiet about it.”

Kara grinned back at him.

“I’ve been waiting for you to tell me this, sir. Congratulations. You seem very happy.”

He sat back and stared at her.

“You knew? How did you know?”

She laughed.

“I already suspected, but if you thought you didn’t make everything clear when you told me about your ‘friend’ who had the great idea for the town halls … well, we need to work on your poker face. It also helped explain why you’ve been in such a great mood lately. So after we had that conversation, I came up with a plan. I drafted a press release, you can look at it shortly, but first, we can— ”

He held his hand up to stop her.

“I appreciate that so much, but I think we both want this to be pretty low-key. No plans, no briefing, no press releases—we’re just going to go to the Hollywood Bowl together this weekend without me in any baseball cap or glasses or anything like that. We’ll just take it from there.”

Kara sat down across from him.

“That’s lovely, sir, it really is, but this weekend? Can you at least hold off another week? Maybe I could just have a call with her, to talk about …”

He shook his head.

“Thank you, Kara, I really am grateful you think about all of these things for me, but I don’t want to make a whole thing about this. I don’t think people will care all that much about my personal life. Plus, she’s nervous about this, understandably, so I don’t want to make this more stressful for her.”

He wanted to ease into this—do something fun with Olivia this weekend, and then maybe by the end of the summer she’d be able to come with him to all sorts of events and it wouldn’t be a big deal.

“I understand that, sir, but I’m pretty sure people will definitely care about this. You were on those most-eligible-bachelor lists in both DC and L.A., remember?”

He brushed that off.