“Did you see any cameras?” I asked him.

“No, definitely not. I mean, I guess there could have been one-I remember a room service cart-I guess a camera could have been there. Hell, they can hide a camera anywhere these days.”

“Well, they say in the article that y’all went out walking holding hands.”

“No, that’s BS. We didn’t leave the room.”

My guess was that Rielle had tortured the hotel staff in order to get an upgrade and was not in the room where the E›whenquirer guys had set up their stakeout. A glance at the Enquirer Web site turned up no actual photos of Edwards with Rielle or the baby. They only had pictures of him in public areas of the hotel. “I don’t think they’ve got what they say they have,” I told him. Then I asked, “What are you going to tell Elizabeth?”

“I already talked to her. I had to.”

Now a bit calmer, Edwards explained that he had been so alarmed by the encounter with the Enquirer guys that he felt he had to call his wife. But as usual, he didn’t tell her the truth. He told her that Bob and Rielle were blackmailing him. He went to the hotel because they were going to tell the world an enormous lie-John Edwards is the father of this baby-and he had to give them money or else. He also told Elizabeth that I wasn’t paying child support.

The story might have been logical if he had told Mrs. Edwards that I was part of the blackmailing scheme, but he had not. “It doesn’t make sense for you to be alone in a hotel room with my girlfriend for three hours, until two A.M.,” I said. “It’s stupid.”

A call waiting signal interrupted our conversation, and Edwards told me he had to go to Los Angeles International Airport to catch a flight home. He sounded a little like a man headed to the gallows or a little boy going to see his mother after he broke a window playing ball. He said he would call me from the airport. When I hung up and checked the message on my phone, I discovered it was Fred Baron. He sounded full of life as he almost shouted, “Hey, I’m out of the hospital and feeling great. I’m gonna beat this thing!”

Fred, whose cancer was progressing, told me he had recently spent several days at the Mayo Clinic undergoing treatment. He sounded so cheerful, I thought that he must not know what was happening with John Edwards. When I called back and informed him, he finally believed my insistent claim, which I had expressed to him for months, that I was not the father of Rielle’s baby. He accepted that I had never had an affair with her and that I had been protecting his friend the senator all along.

Fred was very upset. I could hear him telling Lisa Blue the news and saying, “Goddamn Edwards. What the hell was he thinking?”

Fred and I spoke nine times in the next few hours. He was devastated to learn the truth about a man he had trusted with his time, emotion, and fortune. Like someone who has been through a terrible trauma, Fred wanted to pore over the details. At one point we discussed the fact that Edwards had asked us both to see if we could get a fabricated DNA test showing he was not the baby’s father. Fred laughed and said, “That’s criminal. That’s ridiculous. And it’s not going to happen.” When we talked about how the Enquirer staff could have known that Edwards was going to be at the hotel, we had to conclude that they had been tipped off by Rielle, Bob McGovern, or someone either of them had told. In the end it didn’t matter, but it was natural to speculate. (The details ›. (in the Enquirer were mostly accurate, including some facts I wouldn’t confirm until much later.)

The senator called me from the airport and continued the conversation we had started earlier. We talked a total of seven different times during the day.

When Cheri and I talked about what was going on, she instantly thought of Mrs. Edwards and how she might react. According to her husband and Fred Baron, she had threatened to hurt herself many times before. Genuinely concerned for her and her children, we decided it would be best to contact their old family friend David Kirby and suggest someone check on her condition. Kirby agreed and made sure someone did. The next day, I got the following voice mail from Elizabeth Edwards, who was speaking about Rielle:

If you want to be helpful to me you can not call a bunch of people, you can call the mother of your child and pay what you owe… This is a completely crazy, desperate, pathetic woman with no skills and no possibility of employment. You are going to have to take care of your baby. If you do that, she won’t behave in this erratic way [long pause]. And then you and your concubine and your entire family can stay out of our lives.

Cheri had predicted that one person was absolutely certain to believe the cockamamie story Edwards had devised about the blackmail scheme: his wife. She was right, and the message proved it. Considering what Elizabeth Edwards believed was true, the anger that she directed at me was understandable, but I couldn’t excuse her decision to direct some of her fury at Cheri. On the same day she used voice mail to lecture me, she called Cheri’s number and said in a fake, syrupy drawl: “Andrew needs to pay for that baby!”

In the days that followed the Beverly Hilton fiasco, the senator schemed to avoid future problems and actually suggested we move to Bunny Mellon’s estate. That way we would never run into Elizabeth at school events. For her part, Elizabeth would continue the effort to make Cheri feel the kind of pain that comes with intimate betrayal. One of her messages recommended that Cheri call one of John Edwards’s campaign supporters who lived near Figure Eight Island to hear about how I had used their home there as a love nest: “You need to call Russell at the beach and find out why we had the locks changed on the house… so that Andrew would not use it with his girlfriends. We were told about it by people at the beach. Ask Russell.”

When I learned what was happening at the Edwards estate during the time Elizabeth was troubling herself with calls to us, I was amazed to hear she had the time or energy to even think about us. According to Senator Edwards, she was consulting with advisers and even brought a bunch of them, including Jennifer Palmieri and Harrison Hickman, to the mansion for a big pow-​wow about how to handle the Enquirer’s false story. In a whispered phone conversation, Edwards told me that while helicopters carrying photographers circled overhead, the›d oy’d decided, with Mrs. Edwards’s leadership, that honesty would be the best policy. The senator was going to go on television with a respected and fair-​minded journalist-Bob Woodruff of ABC News-and tell the story. He would do it on August 8, as the opening ceremonies for the Olympic Games in China were being broadcast, in hopes that most of the world would ignore him in favor of the spectacle at Beijing National Stadium.

This plan seemed idiotic to me. First of all, the story the senator was planning to tell, of a brief affair and blackmail, was still an incomprehensible lie. Second, the supposed “spy photos” the National Enquirer published on August 6 were, as far as I could tell, fakes. Edwards had gone to the Beverly Hilton wearing a blue button-​down shirt. The pictures showed him holding a baby and wearing a sweat-​stained T-​shirt. It was the wrong shirt, and anyone who knew the guy understood that he would never walk through a hotel lobby looking like such a mess.

The senator and I discussed his decision by phone after my family and I had departed for Santa Barbara for good. With the press descending on our house, we had gone to Los Angeles to hide at Disneyland before our flight home. The motel we booked near Disneyland was a Fairfield Inn, where we had a room on an upper floor. With five of us sharing a room, the only privacy I could find for the call with him was next to an ice machine. I leaned against the wall, looked out over the busy street, and begged Edwards to delay his decision. As a candidate, he had sold himself to the public as an especially moral, Christian family man. His wife had cancer. It would be far wiser, I said, to wait to see what the press really had and tell the whole truth-the real truth-only when he couldn’t avoid it.