As the trip approached, it fell to me to arrange for the senator to get the required vaccines at the last possible moment. Rielle was in town, so when I told him he was up against a deadline, he invited her to go with him to a walk-​in clinic. I didn’t like this, because folks in the rather gossipy community of Chapel Hill would see them together. To make matters worse, the senator’s parents were due for a lunch visit, so he just told them to meet us at the clinic.

The scene, as Bobbi and Wallace Edwards came upon it, found their son hidden a kr sway in the doctor’s private office with a younger woman who was not his wife. They sat side by side chatting playfully, like a couple preparing to go away on their honeymoon. Unlike the nurse who attended the senator and Rielle, who looked at them incredulously as she did her work, Bobbi and Wallace didn’t seem to notice anything was strange. I went to a nearby deli to get sandwiches, and we all ate together. When we finished, Wallace and Bobbi wished their son well in Africa and went home.

The Africa tour was sponsored by the International Rescue Committee, which was trying to address a humanitarian crisis caused by a civil war that had displaced more than one million people. Rielle filmed Edwards, clad in khaki pants and a Tar Heel blue T-​shirt, inspecting refugee camps and listening as groups of children greeted him with songs. On video he looked like the great white leader who had come to save the country. Later he and Rielle would tell me that during this trip, when they spent every night together, he said “I love you” to her for the first time.

When the senator and Rielle returned to the United States, he stumbled into the house exhausted, brought his luggage into the huge dressing room where he kept his wardrobe, undressed, and then flopped into bed. At some point a secret cell phone he had left in his suitcase began to ring. Mrs. Edwards heard it, found it, and, noting a number from a New York City area code, answered.

Without hearing a “Hello,” Rielle Hunter launched into a romantic monologue about how much she missed the man who was supposed to answer the phone. In her defense, this particular phone had been purchased by Rielle for the sole use of John Edwards, and she was the only person who had the number. Still, unless she intended to force some kind of showdown, Rielle’s blurted professions of love and adoration were a big mistake.

After ending the call, Mrs. Edwards, carrying the phone in her hand, went to the senator and demanded to know what was going on. He confessed to having had a one-​night stand but didn’t say with whom. For some reason, she accepted this explanation but demanded he return the call and, as she watched, end the relationship. He did as he was told, but as soon as he was able, he telephoned Rielle again to tell her what had happened and reassured her that they were still in a relationship.

The senator explained all of this to me soon after it happened. We were alone backstage at an event, and as often happened, the conversation got around to the fact that he was unhappy in his marriage. He said that Mrs. Edwards was being overly demanding, obsessive, even “crazy.” But he also said that he would never seek a divorce. For one thing, he still loved Elizabeth in certain ways. And he believed that his wife was more popular with many voters than he was and that if he left her, he might as well forget ever becoming president. (I cringed when he said this.) When I thought about how it would look if he divorced a wife of almost thirty years, who had lost a child in a car wreck and was living with cancer, I had to agree with him about the political impact. And since becoming president was his single driving ambition, it was never going to happen.

When Mrs. Edwards left Chapel Hill to start her book tour, the senator brought Rielle to his home, where she met Jack and Emma Claire and even interviewed them briefly while holding a video camera to capture their replies. (She also interviewed Edwards’s parents, who were there that afternoon.) When I went to the house to see him, I discovered her sitting in the living room curled up in a chair like a cat, with her shoes and socks off. She wore blue jeans and had a colorful scarf around her neck and sunglasses perched atop her head.

The mood in the house was relaxed and upbeat. Instead of the news blaring out of various TVs, which Elizabeth kept tuned to C-​SPAN. I heard music playing. I noticed because the senator had told me he had stopped listening to music when Wade died, and I had seen him turn off music whenever it was playing. We went on a run together, following our usual route past a cow pasture full of mooing heifers and waving to neighbors who hailed us from their front porches. While we were gone, Rielle napped in Cate’s room.

That evening, we ate take-​out ribs from a place called Nantucket Grill and sat on the senator’s back porch, a huge space covered by a sturdy roof. The group included me, the nanny, Heather, and her husband, Jed, the senator, his kids, and Rielle, who talked excitedly about everything from national politics to astrology. She said she had been a spiritual teacher and that she believed the future was foretold by the stars. Rielle took great pleasure in noting that John Edwards’s future was limitless, and every once in a while she punctuated her observations about him with a laugh and the line “It’s good to be king.”

As the wine flowed and Heather put the kids to bed, the senator and Rielle became more comfortable touching each other and dropped the pretense that they weren’t involved. At one point, they started musing about how the house seemed like a happy place with Elizabeth and her “negative energy” removed. Rielle talked about living in the mansion once Mrs. Edwards was out of the way. A new family would be formed, the senator said, after he and Rielle married on some rooftop in Manhattan with a celebration that would include music from Dave Matthews. As Rielle listened to the senator spin this fantasy, she smiled like a little kid who had gotten her way.

As the night wore on, clouds rolled in, followed by thunder and lightning and the heaviest rain I had ever seen. Protected and dry under the roof, we watched the water come down in sheets, and in a quiet moment the senator said, “This is the way it should be-no stress, no fighting.”

“It’s good to be king,” said Rielle.

I left the house during the downpour, shaken by everything…

The next time I spoke to Rielle, she happily told me that she had spent that night in the Edwardses’ bed and slept in while the senator made breakfast for the kids and then drove them to school. She said that when he r kthaeturned, he got into bed and they “made love.”

Eight

I had my own problems.

While the senator had been in Africa, Cheri and I had tried to celebrate our wedding anniversary. Our occasional lifesaver (“babysitter” doesn’t do her justice), Melissa Geertsma, came to care for the three kids while we got dressed and went to a nice restaurant. We ordered wine and food, but at a moment when we might have marveled at how far we had come together in life, we talked instead about my twenty-​four-​hour-​a-​day devotion to the Edwards family and my scheme for moving us out of Raleigh and into a house in the woods at the end of a long dirt road.

We had already purchased the land from an Edwards donor and friend named Tim Toben, and I was ready to put the house on Lake Wheeler up for sale. Cheri loved this house, the church we attended, the preschool where our kids were enrolled, and the friends who lived nearby. She dreaded packing up everything and moving a two-​year-​old, a four-​year-​old, and a five-​year-​old to a temporary home we would occupy while the house in the woods was constructed. I was motivated by the good offer we had for the house we were selling and the prospect of eliminating a tiresome commute. The move would require us to take on a much bigger mortgage, and though I was finally earning a very good salary and getting some respect from the powers-​that-​be in national politics, Cheri knew I was not guaranteed a position over the long term. We were dependent on John and Elizabeth Edwards for our income and health insurance, and these people had not shown themselves to be paragons of stability, especially since the arrival of Rielle Hunter.