“She’s her mother re-incarnated,” Fitz says as he follows Clara toward her playhouse, a miniature version of the Rhodes home I visit today, complete with a robin’s egg-colored door.

“He says that because her favorite word is no.” Parker laughs from where we sit on the patio of the couple’s home, that they built and moved into before their daughter was born, in the town where it all started.

It’s hard to imagine Manhasset ever has a day that isn’t beautiful. Nestled on the south shores of Massachusetts, the small town has managed to hold onto the charm it was founded with. It seems fitting that a love story that once captured the hearts of the nation was born in such a special place.

But the homes Parker and Fitz grew up in are long gone—his figuratively, and hers under new ownership.

“Do you miss Captain’s Cottage?” I ask. If I squint, I can make it out on the other side of the cove.

Parker shakes her head. “It was never mine to miss.”

“And your family? Do they miss it?”

“You’d have to ask them.”

Not long after Parker’s father left the White House, he and his wife returned to the home that has been in the Montgomery family for generations. But their full time, civilian tenure there didn’t last long. As Parker’s story gained more and more coverage, the townspeople ran them out, quite literally.

“I saw a lot of coverage of the demonstrations on the street,” she tells me. “I never went.”

The property went up for sale months after Walter and Candice Montgomery became permanent residents in Florida and was purchased by Parker and Fitz before being sold to the town for fifty dollars.

“There’s so much history there,” Parker says after she asks me if I’ll join her in the kitchen so she can make her daughter lunch. “For me, the place had my best and worst memories. But it was just a house. I can still keep the good memories, like all the ones with my grandmother. I’m working on letting the bad ones go. But for people who care about this town, this country? It’s a gem. I mean, Abe Lincoln spent a weekend there. People care about that. Just not us. We aren’t history buffs.”

What Parker cares about, I point out, might one day be read in history books.

She snorts. “I don’t think I’m that interesting.”

Even if she weren’t, her work is, and it began that day in the hotel five years ago. I pull out my phone, showing her a clip of her first congressional hearing.