Page 47 of Where There's Smoke

I laughed. “So other candidates don’t have slave driver campaign managers to keep them on their toes and in line?”

“Well, certainly not good-looking ones, anyway.”

“Cocky son of a bitch.”

“I don’t deny it.”

We both laughed. The conversation dwindled, and after a while, we both fell silent. He pulled his phone out of the console to check his e-mail or something, and I stayed focused on driving. This was becoming the norm for us; especially when we were alone, we could only keep the bantering and small talk going for so long before frustration set in. Being out in the sticks like this, with no supervision and a few too many cheap motels along some of the more populated stretches, was dangerously tempting.

I forced myself to think of anything but the man sitting next to me and the empty backseat behind us. As the highway wound into the night in front of my high beams, my mind drifted back to that morning with Simone in San Diego. If this campaign was worsening anything faster than the tension between Anthony and me, it was the very, very different tension between Simone and me. Three times since that morning in the hotel, I’d caught her making herself sick, but I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t. Not without throwing gas on the fire. And every time I heard her retch behind a closed door, caught the scent of a breath mint, or noticed the shadows beneath her cheekbones and the cavernous depressions beneath her collarbones, the helplessness burrowed deeper.

She fought a constant battle with this, but these severe episodes—when she threw up more than she kept down—usually only lasted a few weeks. The election and our divorce were still months away. Something had to give before then, or she’d do irreparable damage, if not kill herself.

Something had to give, but damn if I knew what. If I dropped out of the election, the guilt would send her into a tailspin. Modifying her schedule, getting her out of the spotlight, or just getting the divorce over with now…if it didn’t stress her out, it would tip off the media. As it was, the media was waiting in the wings, frothing at the mouth for a scandal to tarnish my campaign, and the second the boat rocked, they’d be all over it. I couldn’t have cared less about how that would affect the campaign, but what would it do to her?

“Jesse?”

Anthony’s voice made me jump.

“What? Sorry…”

He gestured up ahead. “Our exit is coming up.”

“It…” I glanced at a sign just before it whipped past us. “Oh. Thanks.”

As I changed lanes, he said, “You kind of, I don’t know, spaced out there for a bit.”

“I was just thinking.” Taking a deep breath, I held the wheel a little tighter. “Simone isn’t handling this well.”

“She knows?”

“What? No, I mean the election.” I tapped my thumbs on the wheel. “But yes, she does know.”

“She does?”

I put up a hand. “Anthony, the woman can see right through me. I couldn’t lie to her if I wanted to, so when she suspected something was up…” I shrugged.

“And she can be… She can be trusted with this?”

“Absolutely. Divorcing or not, I’d trust the woman with my life.”

“Good,” he murmured. “That said, define ‘isn’t handling this well.’”

“She’s losing weight.”

“Oh shit.”

“Yeah.”

“Isn’t there anything she can do?” He absently scratched his jaw as he looked at me in the low light. “See a therapist or something?”

“If you can talk her into it, be my guest.”

“How bad does this get? Forgive my ignorance here. This isn’t something I have any experience with.”

“Depends. Sometimes she comes out of it on her own. Sometimes she ends up in the hospital.”

“What kind…” He hesitated. “What kind of hospital?”

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