Saving Faith By: David Baldacci

worry about now. She’d never had a lasting relationship in her life,

unless one counted a certain young man in fifth grade whose name she

couldn’t remember but whose sky-blue eyes she would never forget.

Danny Buchanan had given her lasting friendship. He’d been her mentor

and substitute father for the last fifteen years. He had seen

potential in her where no one else had. He had given her a chance when

she so desperately needed one. She had come to Washington with

boundless ambition and enthusiasm and absolutely no focus. Lobbying?

She knew nothing about it, but it sounded exciting. And lucrative. Her

father had been a good-natured if aimless wanderer, dragging his wife

and daughter from one get-rich scheme to the next. He was one of

nature’s cruelest concoctions: a visionary lacking the skills to

implement that vision. He measured gainful employment in days instead

of years. They all lived one nervous week to the next. When his plans

went awry and he was losing other people’s money, he would pack up

Faith and her mother and flee. They’d been homeless on occasion,

hungry more often than not; still, her father had always gotten back on

his feet, however totteringly. Until the day he died. Poverty was a

lasting, powerful memory for her.

Faith wanted a good, stable life, and she wanted to be dependent on no

one for it. Buchanan had given her the opportunity, the skills to

accomplish her dream, and much more than that. He had not only vision,

but also the tools to execute his sweeping ideas. She could never

betray him. She was in breathless awe of what he had done and was

still trying so hard to do. He was the rock she had needed at that

stage of her life. However, in the last year their relationship had

changed. Ever more reclusive, he had stopped talking to her. Danny

was irritable, snapping for little reason. When she pressed him to

tell her what was troubling him, he withdrew even more. Their

relationship had been so close that the change had been even harder for

her to accept. He became stealthy, stopped inviting her to travel with

him; they no longer even engaged in their lengthy strategy sessions.

And then he had done something entirely original and personally

devastating: He had lied to her. The matter had been purely trivial,

but the implications were serious. If he spun lies in small areas,

what was he holding from her of importance? They had one final

confrontation and Buchanan had told her that no possible good could

come from his sharing what troubled him. And then he dropped the real

stunner.

If she wanted to leave his employ, she was free to do so, and maybe it

was time she did, he had strongly intimated. His employ! The father

telling his precocious daughter to get the hell out of the house was

more the effect upon her.

Why did he want her to go away? And then it finally dawned on her. How

could she have been so blind? They were on to Danny. Somebody was on

to him, and he didn’t want her to share his fate. She had point-blank

confronted him on that issue. And he had point-blank denied it. And

then insisted that she leave. Noble to the end.

And yet if he wouldn’t confide in her, she would map a separate course

for them. After much deliberation she had gone to the FBI. She knew

there was a chance it was the FBI that had somehow discovered Danny’s

secret, but this might make it easier, Faith had thought. Now a

thousand doubts assailed her for the decision to approach the Bureau.

Did she really believe the Bureau would just fall all over themselves

inviting Buchanan into the prosecution’s fold? She cursed herself for

giving them Danny’s name, although he was very famous in a town of

famous people; the FBI would not have failed to make the connection.

They wanted Danny to go to prison. Her for Danny. That was supposed

to be her choice? She had never felt more alone.

She looked at herself in the bathroom’s cracked mirror. The bones of

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