Chapter 8: Daniel and Ophelia — The Arrangement

The reception was held in the Rayburn Building's second-floor gallery, which meant marble floors and fluorescent overhead lighting softened by the addition of rented floor lamps that nobody had bothered to position with any conviction. The effect was a room that looked like it was trying and failing to feel intimate. Daniel had been here before, for a fundraiser of his father's, back when being his father's son was a role he wore with the sullen obedience of a borrowed suit. That had been three years ago. The room looked exactly the same.

He arrived twelve minutes late, which was the right amount of late — present before the crowd consolidated into its fixed configurations, but not so early that he would be remembered as eager. He took a glass of white wine from a passing tray and held it without drinking.

Ophelia Park was standing near the far window with two other journalists he recognized from the White House press pool, a legal pad tucked under her arm with the proprietary ease of someone for whom a legal pad is as natural an appendage as a hand. She was laughing at something the taller of the two men had said, and the laugh was real, and Daniel noted this with the specific attention he had trained himself to pay to authentic responses in rooms built for their opposites.