the call she knew it wasn’t going to happen. Her brain was fully awake and she actually felt refreshed. As if her sleep had been deep and steady where usually she tossed and turned and slept in short bursts.
Leaving her bedroom, she headed into the kitchen to scrounge for some food. A plan of hot chocolate and a late-night movie was already starting to form. Vivian stopped, though, when she saw the blinking light on her home phone.
Few people called her on her home phone, as her friends and employees all had her cell.
The automated voice told her she had two new messages. Wow, she thought. She’d been so out of it she hadn’t even heard it ring the second time. Actual sound sleep.
“Vivian, this is Jefferson. I had hoped to catch you at home.”
See, she told herself, he sounds perfectly normal. A deep voice with a hint of a Southern accent. There was no reason not to find this man attractive. Except when he’d asked for her phone number, she had purposely given him only her house number, not the cell she always had with her. There was always a sense of distance. Susan used to call these behaviors her barriers. Vivian had always been inclined to build them around herself. The kidnapping had only made that worse.
“I would like to extend you an invitation to a Christmas fund-raising event. I’m sure your father will be there, too, but...well, I would like you to come as my date. The three of us, of course, can sit together.”
“Of course we can sit together. Otherwise you lose the chance at a photo-op,” she muttered, then immediately winced. She was supposed to be keeping an open mind. It was just that she couldn’t help but feel as if Jefferson’s interest in her had more to do with her name than her.
It had been the way he’d casually brought up the scandal when they had first met. How she had been a victim. Vulnerable after having survived such a horrific event. Nicholas Rossi had been the villain and should have been treated by the country as such.
The American people must realize that now in hindsight. That was what Jefferson had said.
As if the American people cared at all about a ten-year-old affair, no matter whom she was.
The former president’s grown daughter was of no interest to the American people. However, as the wife of an up-and-coming congressman, that could change. Suddenly the name Bennett would be back in the political spotlight.
Spin.
His words had felt like spin to her, as if he were already spinning how he would handle any questions related to her very public affair with Nicholas.
Vivian had left DC to stop the spinning.
“Please call me...”
She hit the number to end and save the message, cutting Jefferson off in midsentence. She didn’t have the strength to deal with him yet, so the best thing she could do was put him off. Tomorrow she would play the message again and see if the sound of his voice didn’t make her cringe, make her think of reporters, cameras and fake smiles. Everything politics was and everything she was not. For now she had to admit she was a little oversensitive.
“Second message.”
At first there was nothing. Possibly a hang-up or a wrong number. Then the buzz of a conversation played as if on speaker and Vivian could hear people in the background.
“Why did he do it? Can you tell us that?”
“No. I don’t know why he did it. He said he wanted to make me clean. He said he loved me.”
“Do you think he loved you?”
“I think he was crazy.”
For a moment Vivian didn’t understand what she was hearing. It was her voice on the phone. Her voice and Katy Thurman’s, the CBS correspondent.
This was the interview. The only interview she’d done after the kidnapping. The one her father had insisted she do, to give the country closure. She’d considered it torture having to share publicly everything she had lived through, because it meant living through it again. Only this time with people watching. As if they could actually see her naked and tied to a chair. Bloody and bruised. No one ever wanted to be that vulnerable. Certainly not her.
But she hadn’t been able to say no to her father when he was telling her it was something the American people needed from her.
“How do I ask this without sounding like a monster? Is there a part of you that is relieved he was killed? That you don’t have to suffer through a trial where you would have to confront him every day?”
“I’m just glad I’ll never have to hear his voice again.”
There was a pause. Long enough that Vivian might have thought to delete the message if she hadn’t been focused on trying to breathe past the panic that had gripped her chest. Then she heard it. It was faint and distant, not as loud as the replay of the interview had been. But she definitely heard it.
“Sugarplum. I love you.”
This time the surge of fear propelled her into action. She pulled the phone off the counter. The plug flew out of the socket and the light on the handset dimmed. She stood there with it in her hands as if it were a snake ready to bite her. She considered tossing it in the trash but realized it didn’t make a difference what she did with it.
She’d gotten the message.
McGraw was still alive. He had to be. It was the only explanation—that was his voice. Maybe Joe only thought he had killed him. Maybe McGraw had been in a coma all this time and had just woken up.
Vivian giggled in a near-hysterical state. She was starting to sound like a writer for a soap opera. McGraw was dead. Closing her eyes, she tried to remember that night. It wasn’t a place she often went back to. Her memories were hazy and disjointed. Like clips of a movie she’d never seen from beginning to end.
She was cold. So cold. McGraw was screaming. At her and at Joe.
Shots. Then the sound of Joe’s voice.
“You’re going to be okay.”
“Joe?”
“I’m here, baby. Everything’s going to be okay.”
“I’m so cold.”
Vaguely, she recalled Joe carrying her outside the room where she’d been held. He’d set her down on a chair and kneeled in front of her.
“I’m naked.”
“Shh. Shh.”
“I don’t want you to see me this way.”
“It’s okay, baby. You’re safe with me. Will someone get me a damn blanket!”
“I don’t want you to see me this way. Please, Joe. Help me.”
At her plea, he’d taken off his Secret Service–issued windbreaker and pulled it over her head. She remembered thinking she wanted to crawl inside it and never come out.
There had been
