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  She stood from the other end of the bed. “This campaign is dead. A waste of time.” She sniffed. “Waste of money.”

  My phone buzzed, and I grabbed it from the duvet. When I saw the name on the screen, my shoulders slumped. “Dwight, I was just thinking about you,” I said into the receiver.

  “Wanted to call with my condolences.” He cleared his throat. “But we’d be kidding ourselves if we didn’t see how was this was going to go ahead of time, Patrick.”

  “Alex and I—” I glanced over at Kathryn, who glared at me, then got off the bed and began pacing the room with the phone still to my ear. “She was a good communications director. Great person.”

  “Sounds like she was more than that.”

  “Listen this…”

  “Don’t try to snow me,” Dwight said. “You and I both know where we’re headed from here.”

  “Sometimes people lose. I lost.” It sounded so hollow, but I didn’t know how to respond. Nothing I could have said would have made it any better. “We can still move on to Super Tuesday, and Nevada is coming up.”

  “Not good enough.” Dwight clicked his teeth. “I stuck my neck out for you. Believed in you. I thought I could overlook some of my misgivings, but I’ve got to be honest. You don’t have me going forward. I need to look out for my own seat. Facing a tough primary challenge this time around, and my staff needs to focus on that.”

  I stopped pacing near the bathroom door. “I understand. Completely.” Disgust and sadness coursed through my body, but I knew I only had myself to blame. In the end, I hadn’t made the sale. I hadn’t done my job. I’d lost. After Dwight and I ended the call, I shuffled back into the main part of the suite.

  “What a shame,” Kathryn said.

  “Not the kind of conversation I wanted to have, I’ll admit that.”

  Kathryn turned her attention back to the TV, and the brunette surrogate for Howard Sayers being interviewed by Darla Martin. The woman had a large, victorious smile on her face.

  “You’ll never come back from this loss,” Kathryn said. “Momentum has shifted. Sayers came in second in Iowa, second in New Hampshire, and first here. The energy is with him, not us.” She walked over to the large mirror and examined her face as if she’d see some hint of her former life peeking out from underneath the pounds of makeup she wore. “Thank god we aren’t in too deep. I would have hated to get past Super Tuesday only to see this whole thing collapse.”

  “Don’t act like you’re sad or anything.”

  “I’m not.” She turned to me, and her face softened into something that resembled sympathy, but wasn’t. “I’m tired, Patrick. Exhausted.”

  “Me, too.”

  In the end, I gave one of those speeches to the small crowd that night, one that sounds like hope but is really just a bunch of bullshit. I do so with an annoyed and disappointed Kathryn by my side. We could have moved on, we could have tried for Super Tuesday, but everyone knew we wouldn’t. When I ended my campaign the next morning from the lobby of our hotel, no one seemed that surprised. Only one media outlet, MSNBC, bothered to carry it live. The others decided to focus on Sayers and his new position as the default Democratic nominee.

  Sometimes in life, you lose. It’s not an easy lesson to learn—especially for someone as proud and sometimes arrogant as me. A lesson like that stings. It’s not something that a man forgets.

  “I can’t do this anymore,” I said to Kathryn as we got on the bus after my suspension speech. Only Doug and Heather planned to join us on the long trip back to DC. The other interns, volunteers, and die-hards planned to find their own ways back to their hometowns or to Washington. “I need a break from this. And from you.”

  Kathryn sat down on a bench in the bus and tossed her handbag onto the floor next to her. “Good, because I’m done, too. I can’t take it anymore.”

  Like I said, in politics, no one wants to be around the loser; everyone wants to hitch themselves to the winner. In some ways, that meant that winding down the campaign wasn’t as hard as I expected. The staff understood; this was how politics worked. People had jobs one day and lost them the next. It happened. No fuss.

  The only thing that bothered me was Alex.

  When she resigned, she did it fast. We couldn’t stop her; she’d made up her mind. She wanted to leave, even though I wasn’t asking her. She wouldn’t have it any other way.

  But I kept thinking about her. All the way back to DC, on that lonely overnight bus ride where Doug and I sat in the back while Kathryn fumed in the front, I thought about Alex. When I dreamed, I dreamed about Alex.

  The truth was, I needed her.

  And that’s how I found myself on her doorstep three weeks later. I’d driven by it a half dozen times, but I hadn’t worked up the courage to stop, get out of my car, and confess to her what I’d been thinking. It took a while to gather that kind of strength.

  But then I did. I knocked three times on the front door of apartment 4C, and she answered a half-second after the third knock. She wore a pair of grey sweatpants, a red tank top, and her hair pulled back in a low ponytail.

  “What do you want?” She sneered, and her eyebrows lifted. “Why are you here, Patrick?”

  I regarded her for a beat, marveling at how gorgeous she looked, even though she appeared to have not slept in six months.

  “May I come in?”

  “No.”

  “Fine,” I said. “I deserve that.”

  “If this is about the news coverage—”

  “It’s not.” I winced. It had died down right along with my failed campaign. No one cared about the love life of a failed presidential candidate once he’d dropped out of the race.

  “Like I told you in my resignation letter, I’m going to lay low,” Alex said. “I’ll probably go back to Omaha, or maybe the West Coast. You won’t have to hear from me ever again, and I won’t sell my story. You can trust me.” She braced her arm on the doorframe. “So I don’t know why you’re here, because we have nothing to say to each other.”

  “But I need you. That’s why I’m here.”

  She recoiled. “What?”

  “You heard me,” I said. “I need you. I haven’t ever needed anyone, but I need you. And I—” I stepped closer to her. “I want you to understand something. I know I screwed up. I know I’m not perfect. But I know—”

  “Stop,” she said, but a small smile pulled at her lips. “I know where we stand. You don’t have to say anything.”

  “Yes, I do.” I placed a hesitant hand on her arm. “Let me explain.”

  She answered me with a small nod.

  “Kathryn and I are over. She’s—” I glanced away and grinned at the memory of the last time I’d seen Kathryn, and the disgust that decorated her face. “I’m not useful to her anymore, so she walked away.”

  “What about the pictures? The cocaine?”

  I shrugged. “She might leak them, but trust me, the junior senator from Ohio isn’t exactly someone she cares about. She and her father want bigger fish than me. I don’t think she’ll use them. And if she does—”

  “People in DC have long memories.”

  I sized her up. She still had it. She still turned on something inside of me that no one else ever had. “So do campaign staffers.”

  “Why should I trust you?” she said. “What makes you think that you deserve it?”

  “I don’t. After all that I’ve done to you, I don’t. I don’t deserve it at all, and if you want me to leave right now, just say the words. I’ll leave. You’ll never hear from me again.”

  We stared at each other for a beat.

  “I just don’t know.” She frowned. “This hasn’t been easy for me.”

  “I know, and that’s my fault. But please, Alex. Please. I have to say that I want a second chance.” I reached out and cupped her soft cheek.

  “I want to try again, and do it right this time. Will you let me? Will you let us?”

  Now her smile became a grin.

&nb
sp; “Of course,” she said. “I could never resist you, Patrick.”

  “Never?”

  “Never.”

  THE END

  A deep, heartfelt thank you to everyone who has worked with me on this story. As always, I couldn’t do any of this without the fantastic and unwavering support of my family, close friends, and outstanding professional team. Thank you to my husband, Sean, for always helping me pursue my dreams. Thank you to Ashley, Lisa, Meg, and Mandy for early feedback on this story as I crafted it. Thank you to the Celi Circle subscribers for ongoing support and encouragement. Thank you to Lauren, Josie, and Amy for editing this book. Thank you to Julie for formatting, and to Damonza for the cover design. Thank you to Inkslinger PR for promotional and marketing work. Thank you to Jenny for ongoing support, marketing, graphic design, and brainstorming.

  Most of all, thank you to you, the readers.

  Amazon Top 100 and Barnes & Noble Bestselling Author, Sara Celi, has lived all over the United States. She calls the Greater Cincinnati area home.

  Sara has spent more than a decade working in journalism and broadcasting, with jobs both on-air and off-air at TV stations in Louisiana, Ohio, and Oklahoma. Her work has appeared in numerous online publications, magazines and newspapers, and she is a contributing author to Chicken Soup for the Soul: The Power of Positive. Since the release of her debut novel, The Undesirable, in 2013, she has authored several other works, including Hollywood Nights, Natural Love, Prince Charming, and The Palms.

  Sara graduated cum laude from Western Kentucky University in 2004.

  In her spare time, she likes to read, shop, write, travel, run long distances, and volunteer her time to local charities.

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