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in.”
    Ignoring her, I spun on my black pumps and opened the door just in time to catch the senator mid-diatribe.
    “We are getting annihilated from this, goddamn it! His wife is a sympathetic figure, and people know that it came from us!” She stopped, startled when I joined them. “Natalie, what are you doing here? This isn’t the best time. Too much going on right now. I assume that you saw the papers?”
    My mouth dropped, and I looked over at Kyle, but he was strangely fascinated with his hands in his lap. He glanced over at me and mouthed, “Nice work,” then continued staring at the floor.
    “I saw the papers, yes, which is why I came in. No one would return my calls.” I suddenly felt much dizzier and more nauseated than just a moment before, so I steadied myself on the empty chair beside Kyle.
    “I think you should go home,” Dupris said tersely, folding her arms across her chest. She couldn’t have stood more than five foot three, but she made so much of those sixty-three inches that she The Department of Lost & Found
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    towered as if she were eight feet tall. Even from behind her desk, Dupris conveyed the sense of power. Of drive. Of being someone whom you could only aspire to be because her aura made you well-aware that you weren’t quite there yet. She was arguably the pret-tiest of the female senators: She was meticulous about her blond highlights at the salon, and in six years, I’d only seen her twice without makeup. Even so, she’d been blessed with sharp bone structure, so she didn’t need the spatulaed layers to begin with.
    “What’s the problem?” I asked, befuddled. “This is a good news day. The tide is turning in our direction.”
    “Did you leak this? The stuff about Taylor? Because the phones have not stopped ringing, and frankly, I’m furious. You should have informed me.” She paced back and forth behind the very hand-carved desk that had gotten her in trouble.
    “You said you didn’t want to know. And you told me to do what I needed to.” I paused to let that sink in. “And besides, I still don’t see the problem! We needed to make Taylor look like the bad guy. We did. End of story. We win.”
    “No, Natalie, we don’t win,” Dupris snapped back and pointed to a chair, which I immediately sank into. “This? Is a major fuckup.
    This? I would have wanted to know. Totally unacceptable. True, I don’t give a flying fuck that Taylor’s favorite pastime is sleeping with prostitutes, but I do care about the fact that his wife is one of the leading faces of cancer right now and people want to champion her. Do you know how many calls I’ve had this morning from people who now think that if Taylor loses, Susanna will lose the will to live? Because she has nothing else to live for . That’s actually what three of them said.”
    My glory, I thought. There it goes. Right down the shit er .
    “That didn’t occur to me,” I said with less assurance than 68
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    I’d have liked to. I felt my stomach rise up into my throat. I hadn’t eaten breakfast, so I wasn’t sure what, if anything, I had in me to throw up. A cool layer of sweat began to form on my neck, and my fingers felt tingly, as if they were about to detach themselves from my hands.
    “Damn right, it didn’t!” The senator tossed her arms up in the air and stopped pacing. She pointed at us. “Kyle, I want you to clean this up. Natalie, I want you to go home. Kyle will call you if he needs you, but for now, I suggest that you stay out of it. Enough damage has been done.” I saw Kyle shake his head and watched his hands clench into fists of rage.
    “No,” I said firmly and stood up. “This is my doing, this is my idea, I’m going to get us out of it. I started it, and I want to be the one to finish it.”
    “Absolutely not,” Dupris seethed. “Go home. Now. Stay. Out. Of it.” As if I were ten, and she was sending me to my room for bad behavior.
    I started to protest, to