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She knows she won’t remember much of this in a year, certainly in two, but for now it has the sting of something branded into her mind for eternity. Whatever eternity means, now. The exhaustion of the job has surpassed bone-deep heaviness and gone straight for the sort of soul-sapping shaking that she recognized only as the experience of new parenthood in the midst of a national security crisis. Half the words out her mouth could start or end wars, and it takes every ounce of presence of mind she can devote to stay upright and make sense while she goes about the endless stream of business. The investigation that has its vice grip yoked around the neck of her already too-sparse staff does not help matters to begin with, and only chafes more when it lands on her doorstep, then in her office for hours on end. Sharp blades have her jammed between incriminating Kate for something C.J. would swear on their daughters she cannot believe her partner is capable of, and incriminating them both for any kind of justification she could possibly give for her certainty.
Or perhaps she is the blinded spouse. The opposite, in certain ways, of Ethel Rosenberg. Or the same. Her memory, while a skin-tight and overwhelmingly visceral capsule of the last few months and years, has patches where sleeplessness has blurred out the fine print. She could have – might have – said something to ease the weight of what they both carried in their different ways.
Oliver Babish asks her, once, then again after a dizzying go-around, if she trusts Kate.
She does; she trusts Kate Harper with her life. More than that, with her heart, with her children, with the soft joints and the dark corners of life. She trusts Kate enough to have held them together for nearly a quarter of a century, certainly more than half of their too-long, too-short lives. Even when it felt like – feels like – the only places they have are strongrooms and dark offices nestled behind layers of security. She does not know how to explain to Oliver Babish that it could not possibly be the woman who has too, too much to lose, and too many principles that strengthen each other to break any of them individually. Kate has always been a good sailor, a good soldier. Missing the first years of their older daughter’s life are proof of that. Too good a soldier to break the sanctity of national security, not when she had kept things to herself when her own life rested on national secrets. Too good a soldier, and too smart to leave the custody of their children to chance when C.J. has no leverage or positioning to legally claim them.
There are a million reasons Kate Harper had nothing to do with the leak, but C.J. can only articulate about a dozen of them to White House Counsel.
Babish insinuates an affair with Greg Brock. The knives shift. This didn’t come from nowhere. Oliver Babish is a lot of things, but he does not easily jump from a rapport she has had with the press since her time on the campaign trail in New Hampshire to accusations of a security breach of this magnitude without something to help join the dots. She remembers something Kate would mutter under her breath when she first had to learn the job of the surface warfare officers to take command – two lines made a fix, but a third gave it a degree of accuracy. He would have needed the records, her closeness with the press, and the knowledge that the FBI had found something amiss to have decided to play the long game with her like this. That third position line didn’t come from nowhere.
The trust, C.J. must recognize now, does not seem to go both ways. She cannot claim that it doesn’t hurt. That it doesn’t rip a hole four inches wide and six inches deep at the very center of her chest.
Sure, she does not have the sort of unflinching moral ethos Kate holds as a core tenet of her being, but that did not preclude the ability to abide by the security requirements inherent to her job. It smacked of being kept out of the loop and fed less than the complete story in her first years as Press Secretary, out of fear she could not stomach obfuscating with the press corps.
Perhaps she is the blinded spouse. The sort that couldn’t see that the person she trusted most, and trusted to know her most wholly, thought her capable of something she could not fathom. A part of her wonders if she really did utter words she shouldn’t have, in one of the gaps in her memory that exhaustion has carved in her neural pathways. If she was the one who thought too highly of herself.
Oliver leaves her be after a too-harrowing meeting in the Oval in which she was almost convinced he would be judge, juror, and executioner all at once with only the President to witness. She shakes like a leaf as she walks out, the precious trust the President has in her as his Chief of Staff still intact in a way that gives her no relief. She ensures that every drawer in her office is locked and checked twice, each folder put away and secured under the appropriate measures. Her desk is as empty as it can be when she picks up her briefcase, the sun long since gone down outside the window.
She dreads going home, but she wants nothing else.
There is no one to call, not with eyes on her like never before. She fears conviction for a crime she used to be convinced she did not convict, but cannot afford to articulate that gut-churning fear to a single soul.
She wants to hold her children, but fears tainting them somehow.
She wants, she wants, she wants.
She opens the front door gingerly, bracing it the entire way before the latch clicks softly back in place as she closes it behind her. The hallway is dark, save the light bleeding in a thin line from their room at the end of the hall. Everything goes in its place, next to its natural companion in their four-person home, but she lingers, out of joint and out of place. Her place at the table is set, a plate and a portion of dinner left covered, barely warm. She lingers, even when her plate is cleared and cleaned, standing by the sink with her hands damp as the sink dries.
The light in the hall widens from a crack to a broad beam.
She lingers in the darkness of the kitchen. Puts off the inevitable.
“Claudia,” Kate’s voice calls from the border between the light in the hallway and the darkness of the kitchen where C.J. stands, “Is that you?”
C.J. swallows dryly and tries to force a reply out that does not sound choked.
“Yeah,” She eventually gets past the knot in her throat.
“Come to bed, hon,” Kate asks gently as she enters the kitchen, “It’s late.”
“Yeah.”
“C.J,” Kate pauses; C.J. can almost see the wheels in her head spinning with the position lines she is trying to take to figure out where C.J’s head is at, “What is it?”
She shrugs. Anything to prolong the inevitable.
She can feel her blood pumping with each beat of her heart through the pulsing veins in her neck and temples. She marks the time with each twitch, holding on to the last threads of her life as she knows it.
“Honey?” Kate reaches for her in both word and action, her hand coming up to rest on C.J’s waist. C.J. does not move away, even when the touch burns in a way she does not know how to recognize.
Her head is spinning. Her world has stopped on a dime. She does not know how to tell between her own breath and the phantom pulsing of what she might have done in another version of reality. It might have hurt less to have been convicted on the spot.
“Claudia, sweetheart, what’s going on?” Kate’s voice borders on begging, her free hand coming up to lift C.J’s chin as she tries to get C.J. to meet her gaze.
C.J. cannot fathom a world in which she would trade this life they have built for a decade in federal prison. Not when she is the right hand of the man who can make the decision without the fallout of a massive security leak. Not when she trusts him just about implicitly to have the humanity to make the right call. Not when she recognizes that some things are bigger than her and her own sense of right and wrong. Not when she knows every day she gets of watching her daughters grow up is one more day than she can easily assume she will have. There are no guarantees in their life; C.J. would not gamble with it, not for the wide world.
She looks past Kate, over the curve of her left cheekbone and into the hallway. Her lips stay pressed together. She cannot fathom words that would make this all make sense. She imagines the best of poets would do no better than journalists to try to parse the seismic shifts that have happened, that no one can be allowed to see.
Her life is on fire. She can only watch it burn, because to put it out would be a different sentence she cannot put on her entire family.
She cannot find the words to ask why Kate has effectively turned her in as the White House’s prime suspect. She does not know if she wants to. Probably not. She does not want to ask what Kate would have to affirm or deny, not when Kate would not and could not lie to her face, and she would potentially have to live with more knowledge than she could stomach. There are no other suspects, she knows now. Even if there were, amongst the minuscule pool of senior staffers left who could have been privy to the information about the shuttle, there would be bigger consequences for just about anyone else to take the fall.
If someone had to hang, now that all was said and done, she would certainly cause the smallest ripple. A footnote, at most. Easily explained, neatly wrapped up on paper. No children to orphan. No legacy to tarnish. She was still merely the right hand. Perhaps she wouldn’t fight it. Perhaps it was for the best.
Her shoulders drop, the fight leaving her bones. She pushes the hair that has fallen into her eyes back, ignoring the way the too-dark strands make it feel like the walls are closing in on her every time they fall into her field of vision. She lets Kate pull her closer, her body slack, and leans into the clean linen scent of home.
On paper, she has to admit she makes the most sense. On paper, she has the least to lose. On paper, she is nothing.
“Toby asked why I turned you in to Babish today,” Kate’s voice worms into her consciousness from the lips against C.J's hairline.
“Kate–”
There went plausible deniability, right out the window.
“I’m sure Oliver gave you a real wringing out. I think you’re wondering how I could name you a suspect to him too,” Kate’s words are shaky as she tries to explain, “I think you’ve been driving yourself up the wall trying to understand why I would think you were capable of something like this.”
“Kate, please,” C.J. cuts her off at the end of her sentence, a shaking hand coming up to grasp Kate’s forearm, “Don’t do this. Don’t make me do this.”
“I didn’t , Claudia. I need you to know that I didn’t turn you in for something you didn’t do,” Kate pleads, “I know it seems like it. I spoke with Oliver Babish, yes, but it was to ask his advice, not give him a suspect’s name. This whole investigation has been running you ragged. You haven’t forgiven yourself for something like this coming from inside the house you run, and every day that has gone by without an answer has been another day you’ve carried the weight of the world around on your shoulders without giving it a rest. I told him that Greg likes to try to leverage on old friendships to try to pump you for information so the Times can have an edge even though that’s not your arena anymore, that that looks bad especially if we’re going to continue investigating ineffectually in-house. We need to turn this over to someone who can actually do this objectively, or it is always going to look like a cover-up, and you’re going to keep running yourself into the ground.”
Her grip on Kate’s forearm tightens. Kate pulls her closer and holds her more surely.
“Kate–”
“The truth will come out,” Kate assures her, her lips brushing against C.J’s temple, “We need whoever it is to believe – really believe – that we have a suspect. It’s either going to push them to come clean or it’s going to make them get sloppy. The FBI can come in and get more out of what we’ve not been able to handle in-house. The truth will come out.”
C.J. nods against Kate’s hold. She shakes in Kate’s arms, relief bleeding out of her pores. They move in tandem, slowly and quaking, towards the glow the single light casts in the hallway. She is still on a tightrope, but the knives have moved back the essential inches to let her breathe a little easier. Her chest does not feel as empty and carved out; she can hold her breath just long enough to tread water until the swell passes and the tide goes out.
She cannot imagine now what the end will turn up. She is the most disposable by far, which means that the fallout will be that much uglier. There will be consequences she cannot fix, and others that she will have to handle. She has gone in a moment from the ignition spark to the fire sentry, hand on an extinguisher and her heart in her throat as she waits for the arsonist to self-immolate.