She was not impressed. As far as she was concerned, the real issue was her “thirty-​year marriage” and not “about you working for us” as a staff person. “Andrew, you are not family. You work for us. Nothing more. You get paid for all you do.”

For a decade, I had heard the senator and Mrs. Edwards use that word-“staff”-to dismiss certain people as if they were interchangeable parts. Hearing it used to describe me was too much. “I don’t do the things I do because I get paid,” I answered. “I’ve changed your kids’ diapers. I helped your parents move twice. That’s not what a staff person does. You take advantage of people. You chew them up and spit them out. I’ve done everything in my power to help you and your family because I believe in you and your goals.”

My resistance and anger only made her come on stronger. She said that her husband wore “blinders” when he looked at me, not noticing that I had worked my way into a tight relationship with the family so I could exploit them. “Andrew, you hold us close so you can advance yourself.”

“What do I get for changing your kids’ diapers?” I asked. “What do I get out of helping your parents move?”

After telling me that household chores were part of my job, Mrs. Edwards said I had “thirty seconds to tell the truth” or I would be fired. This time I was the one who ended the call. As I clicked off the phone, I turned to see Cheri staring in amazement. “Fuck her,” I said. “It looks like I {lono longer work for the Edwardses.”

“Yeah, right,” said Cheri. She didn’t believe they would let me go.

Later I thought about the commitment we had made to build a new house (I had really forced that decision on her) and about our kids and their needs, like health insurance. Then the senator called to ask about my argument with his wife. “Did you just yell at Elizabeth?” he asked. I told him I had and explained why. He laughed in amazement and then asked, “You said that to Elizabeth?” He then told me how the storm had developed.

According to the senator, once Rielle was dismissed, Elizabeth demanded that campaign manager Jonathan Prince gather all the videos Rielle had shot. She then locked herself in her crafts room to review them hour by hour, and then day by day, coming out only to use the bathroom and/or fetch a Diet Coke. She interrogated Heather, who told her about Rielle interviewing Jack and Emma Claire at the mansion. She knew that if all of the work had been turned over, she should be able to see this footage. None of it was in the collection she received. In fact, she saw nothing at all from the house, not even the interviews Rielle did with Wallace and Bobbi Edwards. Knowing that Rielle had held out this material made her furious, and she pored over the videos again and again, devoting days to the work, believing she saw things that suggested that a great deal of potentially incriminating evidence had been withheld.

During this time, Mrs. Edwards also focused on me in her effort to track down information about Rielle, including her phone number. She left me a voice mail saying, “Andrew, I am tired of playing games with you. I want every single number, every single person. And if you DARE, you can call John.”

As the senator discussed all of this with me, I could imagine his wife scanning for clues and then shaking with rage as she confronted him. Now I understood her fury. He said, “Let me take care of Elizabeth,” and he repeated that he needed me and would be terribly hurt if I walked away at the start of his big push for the White House.

What he didn’t say was that I was the only person in the world who knew everything about Rielle Hunter and his marriage, and he needed me to keep the charade going. The knowledge made me the one friend he would open his heart to and the one person besides Rielle who could hurt him the most. Years of service had also earned me a place as his most trusted adviser, and at the time no one was able to raise more money for him from big donors.

Taken together, everything I could do for John Edwards and everything I knew about him made him more loyal to me-a rare switch in roles-than he had ever been. I could hear a hint of desperation in his voice, and I knew that if I stayed working for his political action committee, I would be able to stop doing domestic chores at his house and enjoy more autonomy at work than I had ever known. I agreed to stay on. And from that day forward, my status changed. In the campaign office, people began making fewer demands on me, but they also began to shun me. I found out this happened because Mrs. Edwards had called many of the people I worked with and {ork informed them that I wasn’t to be trusted or included. I was soon banned from the house I had helped them build, and she stopped letting her children play with mine.

Elizabeth Edwards was able to control what happened at our office because for all intents and purposes she was the manager of the campaign. She set the strategy, determined the senator’s political positions, approved the schedule, and made all the key hires. (In most cases, she picked people with little or no experience.) There was a philosophy behind this approach. She and the senator believed that they were smarter than the big-​time consultants and that they were going to pioneer a new kind of campaign that would use the Internet in a huge way. Instead of old speechwriters and pollsters, they focused on hiring the hottest Web gurus they could find. (The key one was Matthew Gross, who had been a big influence on Howard Dean’s 2004 campaign.) Elizabeth was right about the World Wide Web, but as far as I could tell she was wrong about the way she used these fellows. She told them what to do and then second-​guessed them. They were afraid to discuss issues with her because of her temper.

Ironically, the Web guys were very competent in their specialty and would have delivered the innovations Elizabeth wanted had they been managed properly. Similarly, the majority of the players who filled out the 2008 Edwards roster were smart and effective despite their inexperience. But in her rush to bypass so-​called party hacks, Mrs. Edwards had failed to bring in people with real passion for John Edwards and for the issues at the core of his campaign. In 2004, we may have been a bit behind the curve when it came to technology, but we were deeply committed to the cause, and Nick Baldick was an assertive and effective manager. This time around, we had no strong manager and seemed to be reactive instead of proactive.

John Edwards, however, was far improved as a candidate, willing to outwork everyone in the field and burning with real intensity. Everyone else felt the desire to win and harbored hope for a victory but made the effort as if it were a job instead of a crusade. I still recognized that John Edwards was a charismatic campaigner and that he was right about the issues. But my enthusiasm was flagging, and I was being shunted aside. I used the freedom I enjoyed to set my own agenda and schedule, and to focus on raising money from donors. I was able to enjoy my family more, and pay attention to our dream house project.

The acreage Cheri and I had purchased on a forested hilltop in Chapel Hill represented a dream come true for me. Before any construction started, we got a camper and set it up on the site so we could enjoy weekends in the woods with the kids. On Super Bowl Sunday 2007, we held a big party where we set up a television outside, made a big bonfire, and laughed and hollered into the night. That party was more fun than I could recall having in a long time, and the vision of our home-all stone, glass, and natural wood-rising among the pines gave me a powerful sense of optimism about the future.

Visits to the land became even more important for me and the rest of the family after we moved out of Lake Wheeler and into a rental in Southern Village. The new place was painted such an odd shade of violet that the kids took to calling it “the purple mansion,” and everything about the move was painful. For one thing, it required us to adjust {d u to living in a space less than half the size of our old place. For another, when the time came to make the transfer, I was busy with the campaign and unable to drive because of the DWI conviction. Cheri’s mom and dad came from Illinois to lend a hand, and they did it all without me. At one point, her mom was so angry about this that she literally turned her back on me. I couldn’t blame her, really; I was fed up with me, too.