As the Edwardses’ lifestyle became ever more extravagant, I began to feel incredulous. His big issue was poverty, but he was flying around in a private jet, building a gigantic estate, drawing big checks from a hedge fund, and booking speeches for tens of thousands of dollars apiece. In frustration, I once said to Mrs. Edwards, the architect, and the builder, “The press is going to eat him alive on this.” They laughed and dismissed my concerns. The guy who once drove a beat-​up Buick for appearances’ sake told me it was impossible for him to cut back on the house because his wife was sick with cancer and it was her dream.

As the employee who never said no to the senator and Mrs. Edwards, I simply accepted extra assignments related to the new house. One of the first required me to drive a rented truck to Washington, D.C., where I struggled to back it down the narrow alleyway behind their house. The entire Washington campaign staff had come on Mrs. Edwards’s order to load stuff she couldn’t trust to a moving company. I drove back the same day, and after finishing in the early hours of the morning, instead of thanks, I received a grilling about buying beer and pizza for kandthe volunteers who met me to unload.

In time I would realize that my relationship with the Edwardses had grown so close, so familiar, that they felt comfortable asking me to do anything they might imagine, and without expressing much gratitude. During the construction of the mansion, I became Mrs. Edwards’s assistant and informal project manager in charge of chasing down the architect, harassing contractors, and keeping track of appliances, flooring, and other essentials. I helped pick out and purchase most of the furnishings and devoted days to pushing stuff around until it was all positioned perfectly.

Fortunately, when you are working for a presidential candidate, you don’t have to call a 1-800 number to get service. Instead, you call the CEO of the phone company or electric utility and get immediate attention. This power was especially helpful as I worked through to-​do lists written by Mrs. Edwards for me and other PAC employees. These were many pages long and required us to set up everything from the room designed for the sole purpose of wrapping Christmas presents to outfitting a project area with arts-​and-​crafts supplies.

A few problems were beyond even the Edwardses’ power and influence. When the fellow who lived across the street from the Edwardses put up a RUDY GIULIANI FOR PRESIDENT sign, I even posed as a real-​estate speculator to see if his land was available. (Elizabeth was also bothered by the “slummy” buildings and auto repair shop the owner, Monty Johnson, kept on the land.) Monty’s asking price-more than $1 million-was so high, she decided she would just put up with the irritation of seeing Rudy’s name every time she left the house. She often joked about burning down an abandoned house that was on the property.

I, meanwhile, resented having to deal with her neighbor and all the other extra work related to the house, especially the more menial labor. However, I didn’t say anything because these assignments all seemed to flow out of a relationship that was far more complex and personal than the usual employee-​employer arrangement. I believed I would work for the Edwardses for many years to come, and to make my commute easier, I began pushing for us to move closer to their house. Cheri resisted when I suggested building our own new place but eventually agreed. I felt confident taking on the expense because I was making a very good salary, which I expected would grow whether the senator was elected president or not. We bought some land and we hired the same architect and builder that the Edwardses had and began a misadventure similar to the plot of the 1986 movie The Money Pit.

Of course, as this all happened I couldn’t see that I had allowed myself to be trapped in the Edwardses’ orbit. Cheri worried about how entangled my life (and hers) had become with theirs, and though she tried to be supportive, it was a source of conflict in our marriage. However, when she tried to talk to me all I heard was that she objected to the amount of time I put into my job, time that could have been spent with my family. I didn’t understand her other major point, which was that I had come to identify too closely with the Edwardses at the expense of my own priorities and hopes. After so many years, I no longer saw them clearly. In fact, I was willing to imagine they had positive qualities they d kaliidn’t actually possess and overlook their flaws and mistakes, because I needed them to succeed.

Of course, once you allow someone to get away with being pushy, they become only more demanding, and this is what happened with Mrs. Edwards. The clearest illustration of this truth came on Thanksgiving weekend 2005, when I bought the turkey her family would eat for the holiday, left it in the refrigerator, and tried to enjoy the long weekend with my family. On Saturday I was with about twenty members of my family and had turned off my cell phone so I could enjoy the holiday. When I turned it back on, I discovered eight or nine voice mails about a flood at the Edwards home. In one of them, Mrs. Edwards accused me of leaving the water on and causing the flood. In fact, the hose that supplied water to a washing machine had broken and Wade’s room was flooded. Senator Edwards said he and his wife would meet me at the house, where neighbors, a cleanup company, and the fire department were on hand. When I arrived, I found the senator and his wife in the backyard, spreading things out to dry. Noting that his wife was distraught, he asked me to take charge so they could leave.

The plumbing disaster at that house occupied much of my time for several months. First I had to clear out the soaked furnishings and property-everything from rugs to a baseball card collection-and dry whatever might be dried. I then had to have hundreds of items put in storage along with household goods that would be packed away pending the family’s move to the mansion under construction. Between the mess and the valuables such as Lladró figurines that were supposedly damaged in the move, I devoted hundreds of hours to physical labor, managing contractors, and haggling with insurance firms. Mrs. Edwards was initially very pleased with all this work, but this episode would come back to haunt me years later.

Gratitude was often in short supply with the Edwardses, as was empathy. When I was working with the senator, I accepted that he would always be the center of attention, but even when we were alone and I was supposedly “off duty,” he would never express much interest in me, which was a change from our early days. Now he was focused on politics to the exclusion of everything else. Sometimes I would tease him by saying, “Okay, now let’s talk about you!” but even this joke failed to make him less self-​centered.

I trained myself to ignore his self-​centeredness and overlook incidents where he seemed hypocritical-remember when Kerry stopped being an asshole?-and refused to notice when things he said or did made no sense or conflicted with the image he wanted to project. When he flirted repeatedly with a young waitress in Wrightsville Beach, I forced the memory of it out of my head. When I heard about him having extramarital affairs, I refused to believe the stories. And when he arranged for the campaign to pay a hundred thousand dollars for a video project to a woman with almost no experience, I didn’t let myself ask the questions that needed to be asked. Instead, I listened as Josh Brumberger told me to put this mysterious person, named Rielle Hunter, a woman the senator had met in a bar, on the payroll. It was a strange request because the senator knew I wasn’t in charge of the payroll, but I promised to relay it because he was the boss.