At Any Cost Read Free Page B

teachers, personal assistants, minders, and the various pols who orbited around her parents like buzzards.
    At the thought of the little sandy-haired boy and all his haunting complexity, her heart squeezed. She loved him very much, painfully and protectively. She hoped she loved him with enough breadth and intensity to make up for the fact that her parents were less than loving toward him.
    Her mother felt overwhelmed by his needs, and her own, so she drank to make all of it irrelevant. Since she’d abdicated her parental responsibility, Fallon stepped in. Nobody else was going to. Certainly not her father.
    â€œI heard he toured Andrews Air Force Base. Ran away and slipped into the pilot’s seat of a C-130. The agents were panicked, thinking they’d lost their protectee.”
    Fallon giggled, remembering the incident that had scandalized her parents, though they were more angry than amused. They thought of him as a problem child, someone who refused to yield to discipline, instead of a boy who could no more alter his love of aircraft than he could change the color of his eyes.
    â€œHe’s very self directed. If there’s an airplane within Frisbee distance, he’s going to find it, and he’s not going to wait for you to catch up.”
    â€œHow about your parents? How are they?”
    â€œGood,” Fallon said automatically. She didn’t think Tom would gossip if she told him the truth, but she felt protective of her family, however crazy they were. In fact, the less uttered about them, the better.
    She’d had a rocky relationship with her parents for most of her life. It had something to do with feeling like she wasn’t living up to their expectations. Her airy-fairy love and peace and butterflies existence seemed trivial to them. Over the years, they’d all settled into a mutually disappointing relationship.
    It had reached a breaking point during the campaign; even now, things between them were more strained than usual. She was emotionally estranged from both of them now. Like most presidential campaigns, her father’s had become ugly.
    From his earliest days as an oil executive, Preston Taylor Hughes had flouted his marriage vows, and though his team was prepared to handle a whisper campaign that questioned his morality, they had been stunned by how hard President Ballard’s people had hit on the theme that Hughes was a ladies’ man and serial adulterer, and therefore could not be trusted with the presidency. Ballard’s reelection team was headed by his longtime political guru, Gil Parry, who had masterminded Ballard’s political climb from his earliest days. To a man like Parry, Hughes’s personal life was a gift on a golden platter. His surrogates had leaked reports by “knowledgeable sources within the Hughes campaign” that Hughes and his wife were close to splitting. These same “knowledgeable sources” reported late-night screaming matches that featured thrown objects, vile language, and threats of divorce. No matter how many times Hughes denied marital problems, or his wife Elizabeth tried to laugh off the rumors off on daytime TV shows, the story had legs.
    Accusations and tabloid tell-alls by women from Hughes’s past added momentum and energy to the gathering storm.
    Hughes fought back with an “above it all” strategy crafted by Jerry Chambliss, an inside-the-Beltway veteran of many political wars and Hughes’s closest friend and advisor. It had been Chambliss who made sure the loudest of the Montana ladies with stories to tell quietly went away with large sums of cash.
    Despite his full-force smear campaign, Ballard’s henchmen missed the larger scandal, the real scandal that would have likely torpedoed Hughes’s aims for the presidency. Six-year-old Evan Hughes was not Preston Taylor Hughes’s child. For all his political muckraking and caterwauling about ladies on the side—which was