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