Lapis is quiet and elegant; it gives off strong bistro vibes, only with sitar music. The owner, Shamin, gives Bess a smile when she sees her enter with Link. Shamin leads them to one of the tables in the window. Bess thanks her profusely even though, because of the conversation she’s about to have, she would prefer a table tucked behind one of the latticed wooden screens.

“Wow,” Link says. “You get star treatment.”

“I come here a lot,” Bess says. She doesn’t mention that this was the one place in DC where Ursula would eat in public while she was campaigning. Shamin made every accommodation to ensure that Ursula, Jake, and Bess were comfortable.

“I love bolani,” Link says. “And qabuli palau.”

“The palau here is off the chain,” Bess says. “It’s made with cinnamon rice.”

“We have to get the halwa for dessert,” Link says.

Bess beams. Link really does like Afghan food. All she can imagine is the lobbyist looking at the menu and ordering a chicken kebab and French fries.

“Let’s get the pakoras to start,” she says. She wants to pinch herself. How did she get so lucky?

Once they’re settled with a glass of Albariño for Bess and a beer for Link, Bess realizes this happiness comes with a price: She has promised to tell Link what was going on between her father and his mother.

Link tears a piece off his flat oval of bolani and dips it in yogurt sauce, then raises his eyes to Bess. He’s better-looking than any lobbyist, she decides. She loves his shaggy blond hair and his bluish-green eyes that remind her of the ocean the day she first met him.

“So your dad told you what was going on?” Link says.

“He told me on the way back to St. Louis after we saw you,” Bess says. She busies herself with her own bolani. Her father made her solemnly swear never to tell a soul, and she had promised. She understood the gravity of the situation at the time: Her mother was running for president and there could be no scandalous family secrets floating to the surface. If Bess told her best friend, Pageant, or Kasie, the campaign manager, in a moment of weakness, it would be all over. Her father was entrusting her with a secret he’d kept longer than she’d been alive. She realized that he was telling her because she was the one who had made the trip to Nantucket with him, because she’d asked him what the whole thing meant, because he loved her, because he was sodden with emotions when he left Mallory’s bedside holding the rented guitar, because Mallory was a day or two from death and by telling Bess what had happened between them, he was keeping Mallory alive.