The President's Wife - Kathy Myme Page 0,34
now and take her out of the picture entirely. Maybe that will solve everything. I mean, I do have over three years before the next election to build my polls back up. It could work. All I need to do is-
Then it hit me. Out of the picture. Of course.
Whoever is taking the pictures and leaking them won’t be in the photographs themselves. The leaker has finally made their mistake.
I’m going to catch them. I’m going to stop them, once and for all.
Maybe it will be alright. Maybe I can still save the presidency. Maybe I won’t have to lose Veronica. Maybe I have a chance.
Veronica
Adjusting to life at the White House doesn’t get any easier.
David is true to his words. The next morning, Jackson presents me with an itinerary that is a lot less packed. The morning is non-stop appointment and lesson one after another, but there’s nothing at all to fill my afternoons.
Trevor still won’t call me back. I must have called him a hundred times by now. I even send a few emails to his email address, trying to explain it all. Most of them go like this:
SUBJECT: Please read this
Trevor,
Call me. There’s a lot I need to explain and I can only do it with words.
None of this is as it seems.
I want to make sure we’re okay.
Yours,
Veronica xx
But each and every one of them go unreplied to. I know it’s not a mistake. Trevor has always been obsessive about checking his email. He just doesn’t want to respond.
Even worse is when I talk to my dad again.
“Honey, Trevor hasn’t been into work for days,” Dad tells me. “Do you know where he is?”
“He hasn’t contacted me since this all began-”
“You mean you haven’t explained things to him?” I hear the disappointment in Dad’s voice.
“I haven’t had the chance yet,” I protest.
But with every passing day, I become more and more worried about him. I suppose him ghosting me is an appropriate punishment for what he thinks I’ve done… but it would all be so much easier if he gave me the chance to explain myself.
Although how I’d even begin to explain what’s happened, I don’t know.
Stephanie’s existence is still a threat. I haven’t worked out what to do with her yet. All I can do is bide my time while I try to think of a way to get her to stop or to work out what she knows.
The strangest thing is that I barely see David himself. You’d think that with his obsession over keeping up public appearances, he’d want to be pictured with his fiancée as much as possible. Several days go by without another visit to my suite.
The only interactions we have are monopolized by the press. There are a few more conferences where I have to point my ring finger and show off the huge diamond. A few more carefully orchestrated photos taken of us together as we walk through the grounds.
But we’re never really walking together. David leaves the second the photographer tells him he can go, as if whatever problems waiting for him inside the Oval Office need every precious second of his attention.
“He’s probably busy trying to get that bill of his through,” says Rosalie cheerfully, stirring sugar into a cup. “I wouldn’t worry about it, dear.”
Rosalie Airheart is a bright-faced woman that I’ve been having lunch with for the past few days. She’s from money and it’s so incredibly obvious with every sip of tea she takes from a fine china set. I think she’s the wife of one of David’s cabinet members, which is why he arranged for me to lunch for them in the first place. I think I’m supposed to be winning them over.
But her company has been nice. Jackson and a few other suits still watch me with eagle eyes from the door, but the conversation has been good at distracting me from noticing that kind of thing.
I wish I could say the same about Amber.
“You should try relationship counseling, perhaps,” Amber comments, her lips pursed. “I imagine you and David have a lot to work through. What with your…” She smiles thinly. “‘Background differences’.”
The woman seems obsessed with pointing out that I’m not from a rich family. At every possible opportunity, she will bring up David’s rich father or ask me if it’s really true that my own father worked for the minimum wage for years before starting his own company.
But she and Rosalie are friends somehow. They seem to be