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around the hotel room. There was a glass-covered desk with a blotter, a lamp, and a folder full of postcards. A queen-sized bed. An industrial-strength carpet that matched the opaque drapes. A framed print of a painting of a harlequin whose outfit matched the carpet. A dresser with a built-in cabinet for a minirefrigerator and another cabinet for the TV. And, of course, a drawer with a Bible. There was also a night table with a lamp like the one on the desk, four wastebaskets, a clock, and a box of tissues he had moved from the bathroom.
    My new home , he thought again.
    Except for the laptop on the desk and the pictures of the kids beside it—last year’s school photos, still in their warping cardboard frames—there was nothing of home here. The stains on the carpet weren’t apple juice Alexander had spilled as a boy. Harleigh hadn’t painted the picture of the harlequin. The refrigerator wasn’t stocked with rows of plastic containers filled with that wretched kiwi-strawberry-yogurt juice that Sharon liked. The television had never shown home videotapes of birthday parties, pool parties, and anniversaries, of relatives and coworkers who were gone. Hood had never watched the sun rise or set from this window. He had never had the flu or felt his unborn child kick in this bed. If he called out to the kids, they wouldn’t come.
    Tears pressed against the backs of his eyes. He turned to look at the clock, anything to break the steady succession of thoughts and pictures. He would have to get ready soon. Time—and government—stopped for no man. He still had professional obligations. But lord God, Hood thought, he didn’t feel like going. Talking, putting on a happy face the way he did with his son, wondering who knew and who didn’t in the instant message machine known as the Washington grapevine.
    He looked up at the ceiling. Part of him had wanted this to happen. Hood wanted the freedom to do his job. He wanted an end to being judged and criticized by Sharon. He also wanted to stop constantly disappointing his wife.
    But another part of him, by far the largest part, was bitterly sad that it had come to this. There would be no more shared experiences, and the children were going to suffer for their parents’ shortcomings.
    As the finality of the divorce hit him, hit him hard, Hood allowed the tears to flow.

THREE
     
    Washington, D.C. Sunday, 6:32 P.M.
     
    Sixty-one-year-old First Lady Megan Catherine Lawrence paused before the late-seventeenth-century gilded pier mirror over a matching commode. She gave her short, straight, silver hair and ivory satin gown one last check before picking up her white gloves and leaving her third-floor salon. Satisfied, the tall, slender, elegant woman crossed the South American rug collected by President Herbert Hoover and entered the private presidential bedroom. The president’s private dressing room was directly across from her. As she stepped out, she looked out at the lamp-lit white walls and light-blue Kennedy curtains, the bed that was first used by Grover and Frances Cleveland, the rocking chair where delicate, devoted Eliza Johnson awaited word of her husband Andrew’s impeachment trial in 1868, and the bedside table where each night the seventh president, Andrew Jackson, would remove a miniature portrait of his dead wife from its place beside his heart, set it on the table next to her well-read Bible, and made certain that her face was the first thing he saw each morning.
    As she looked out at the room, Megan smiled. When they first moved into the White House, friends and acquaintances would say to her, “It must be amazing having access to all the secret information about President Kennedy’s missing brain and the Roswell aliens.” She told them the secret was that there was no secret information. The only amazing thing was that, after nearly seven years of living in the White House, Megan still felt a thrill to be here among the ghosts, the greatness, the art, and