“That might be a good reason for you to say no,” John said. “You, not us.”

“But I love him.” I pushed the food away too hard; some of it drifted off the plate in lazy spirals, toward my lap. “I love him.”

“Of course you do,” John said. “But look at it with some detachment. You gave each other emotional support at a time of almost unimaginable stress. Hopes crushed, helpless children dying left and right, all your work and caring gone to nothing; worse than nothing. You needed each other—or someone, at least—more than you needed oxygen.”

“I’ll concede that.” Not to mention the stress, twelve days earlier, of my husbands taking another wife.

“So is it possible that what you love is not Sam himself, but what Sam did for you?”

“This isn’t a Cabinet meeting, John. Let’s leave analysis out of it for a minute. How does it make you feel?”

“I don’t know enough to know how to feel. If you’re asking whether I’m jealous, the answer is no. Hurt, maybe; guilty, maybe. If you want Sam because of something we should be giving you.”

“It’s not that.” I guess I said that fast enough for them, or at least him, to know it wasn’t completely true. Give me some of what you’re giving Evelyn.

“There’s one thing I thought of,” Daniel said. “It is analytical, though.”

“I can handle it.”

“It doesn’t have to do with you or us, but with other people’s perceptions: if Sam joins the line, we’re going to have four Cabinet members in one five-person family.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” O’Hara admitted, and laughed nervously. “Ten percent of the Cabinet in bed together.”

“With a spy from the working class,” Evy said.

“At least we’d be evenly split between Engineering and Policy,” John said, smiling. “Not a voting bloc. There are a lot more significant coalitions around.”

We looked at each other in silence. I guess I knew all along that they’d throw the ball back to me. I resolved the problem with typical Alexandrian decisiveness: “Well … I’ll tell Sam we just have to wait. It’s too sudden; we have to think about it, talk about it. If he wants to be my lover in the meantime, that’s fine; if not … it won’t be the end of the world.”

“We should all talk to him tomorrow,” Evy said. “Make sure he knows he’s welcome.”

John and Dan agreed, but an interesting look passed between them.

YEAR 3.21

LEAVINGS

PRIME