“Exactly,” said Emily, expression going weary. “That man is lucky I love him.”

“Statements like that make me wish that I didn’t have quite so much journalistic integrity, Emily,” I said. The statement was mild, but the warning wasn’t. “You, expressing unhappiness with your husband? That’s about to become sound-bite gold for both sides of the political fence.”

She paused. “You’re telling me to be careful.”

“I’m telling you something you already know.” I smiled, changing the subject to one that would hopefully make her look less uncomfortable. “Will the girls be joining you? I still need to meet them.”

“Not for this silly convention,” she said. “Rebecca is getting ready for college, and I didn’t have the heart to drag Jeanne and Amber away from the foals to get their pictures taken by a thousand strangers. I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t absolutely necessary.”

“Understandable,” I said. The job of a candidate’s spouse at the party convention is simple: stand around looking elegant and attractive, and say something witty if you get a microphone shoved in your face. That doesn’t leave much time for family togetherness, or for protecting kids from reporters itching to find something scandalous to start chewing on. Everything that happens at a party convention is on the record if the press finds out about it. Emily was doing the right thing. “Mind if I drop by later for an interview? I promise not to bring up the horses if you promise not to throw heavy objects at my head.”

Emily’s lips quirked up in a smile. “My. Peter wasn’t kidding when he said that the convention had you feeling charitable.”

“She’s saving up her catty for her interview with Governor Tate,” Shaun said.

“He’s agreed to an interview?” asked Emily. “Peter said he’d been putting you off since the primaries.”

“That would be why he’s finally agreed to an interview,” I replied, not bothering to keep the irritation from my voice. “Doing it before now was dismissible. I mean, what was I going to say about the man? ‘Governor Tate is so busy trying to get elected that he doesn’t have time to sit down with a woman who speaks publicly in support of his in-party opposition’? Not exactly a scathing indictment. Now we’re at the convention and if he doesn’t talk to me when he’s talking to everyone else, it looks like censorship.”

Emily considered me for a moment. Then, slowly, she smiled. “Why, Georgia Mason, I do believe you’ve entrapped this poor man.”

“No, ma’am, I’ve merely engaged in standard journalistic practice,” I said. “He entrapped himself.”

An exclusive six weeks before the convention would have been something he could bury or buy off: No matter how good it was, unless I somehow got him to confess to a sex scandal or drug abuse, it wasn’t going to be enough to taint the shining purity of his “champion of the religious and conservative right” reputation. Senator Ryman is moderate leaning toward liberal, despite his strong affiliation to and affection for the Republican Party. Governor Tate, on the other hand, is so far to the right that he’s in danger of falling off the edge of the world. Few people are willing to stand for both the death penalty and an overturning of Roe v. Wade these days, but he does it, all while encouraging loosening the Mason’s Law restrictions preventing family farms from operating within a hundred miles of major metro areas and encouraging tighter interpretation of Raskin-Watts. Under his proposed legislation, it wouldn’t be a crime to own a cow in Albany, but it would be considered an act of terrorism to attempt to save the life of a heart attack victim before performing extensive blood tests. Did I want a little time alone with him, on the record, to see how much of a hole he could dig for himself when faced with the right questions?

Did I ever.

“When’s your interview?”

“Three.” I glanced at my watch. “Actually, if you don’t mind Shaun escorting you from here, that would be a big help. I need to get moving if I don’t want to make the governor wait.”

“I thought you did want to make the governor wait,” said Shaun.

“Yes, but it has to be on purpose.” Making him wait intentionally was showing strategy. Making him wait because I didn’t allow enough time to get to his office was sloppy. I have a reputation for being a lot of things—after the article where I called Wagman a “publicity-seeking prostitute who decided to pole-dance on the Constitution for spare change,” “bitch” has been at the top of the list—but “sloppy” isn’t among them.

“Of course,” said Emily. “Thank you for coming out to meet me.”

“It was my pleasure, Mrs. Ryman. Shaun, don’t make the nice potential First Lady poke any dead things before you deliver her to security.”

“You never let me have any fun,” Shaun mock-grumbled, offering Emily his arm. “If you’d like to come with me, I believe I can promise an utterly dull, boring, and uneventful trip between points A and B.”

“That sounds lovely, Shaun,” said Emily. Her security detail—three large gentlemen who looked just like every other private security guard at the convention—fell in behind her as Shaun led her away down the hall.

When she’d e-mailed asking us to meet her, she said she’d be arriving at one of the delivery doors, rather than the VIP entrance. “I want to avoid the press” was her quixotic, but sadly understandable, justification. Despite the snide implications that have been made by some of my colleagues, my team and I aren’t the lapdogs of what will hopefully become the Ryman administration. We’re twice as critical as anyone else when the candidate screws up because, quite frankly, we expect better of him. He’s ours. Win or lose, he belongs to us. And just like any proud parent or greedy shareholder, we want to see our investment make it to the finish line. If Peter screws the pooch, Shaun, Buffy, and I are right there in the thick of things, pointing to the wet spot and shouting for people to come quick and bring the cameras but we’re also the ones who won. We have no interest in embarrassing the senator by harassing his family or dragging them inappropriately into the spotlight.