“You bastard.” She tore off the jacket and threw it at her husband. His expression fell somewhere between that irritating smirk and complete befuddlement as he attempted to catch it, but it just slithered down his body and landed on his expensive shoes. “You used me! You are always using me.”

He calmly bent, which reddened his face, plucked up the garment and spread it lovingly across his office chair. It burned that she didn’t remember the last time he tried to touch her with such tenderness, at least when the cameras were not on him. “You knew the deal, sweetheart.” He didn’t even look at her when he said it. Which made her even angrier.

“What. That I am to be your weapon of mass distraction?”

“If the Louboutin fits.” She turned away, crossed her arms over her chest. He tugged in a deep breath and sighed. Made a kind of murmuring sound at her, like he was trying to make up. As if. This was going to cost him big time. And not just in his credit card. “Aw, come on,” he said. “It was a joke.”

She spun toward him. “You. You are a joke. You think I do not hear what they are saying? That I am some kind of…kind of…” The English words failed her. And she wanted to make that his fault, too. “Eva Braun.”

There came the befuddlement again. And then a smile. If it would not spoil her manicure, she would punch it off his fat, orange face. Hell, maybe it would be worth it.

“At least Eva stood by her man.”

Was he again trying to be funny? Did she used to like this about him? She was finding it hard to remember. The money? Yes, the money had been good. But she could make her own money. She was not that poor, struggling girl anymore. “Eva Braun died by her man.”

A pall fell over the room. “So, whadda you want?” He pulled open a drawer. “Tiffany’s?”

“I want you to stop it.”

“Can you be more specific?”

“The children. Stop it with the children.”

He made a rude noise with his lips. “Sweetheart. I know what I’m doing. They’ll cave and give me my big, beautiful wall and everything will be great again. Why don’t you let Ugo take you up to Manhattan this weekend. Buy yourself whatever you want and leave running the country to me.”

“Running the country…? You are running it…like a shithole country.”

He straightened and glared at her.

She pulled herself up taller, glad that she’d worn her highest heels. “Yes, that is what I said. A shithole country. You have no idea what you are doing and you have surrounded yourself with people who are giving you shitty advice. When you even choose to listen to them. You will become one of those one-term presidents that people pity. Yes. They will pity you. They will call you a weak loser and they will pity you.”

He stepped closer, his mouth tightening, his arms hugging themselves across his body. “I don’t like what you’re saying. What you’re saying sounds like a person who doesn’t have any faith in me. It sounds like you think I’m some kind of low IQ, low quality person.”

“If the cheap suit fits.” And then she decided. But maybe she had already decided, and it took a few blows to her ego for it all to sink in. “Yes, I think I will go to Manhattan with Ugo. And I will stay there with him. At least he is nice to me. He does not treat me like some kind of stage prop, to be trotted out whenever he wants the media to think he has a heart.”

Then she turned with a flick of her hair and slammed the door shut, damn what his idiotic advisers would think. She might tell the National Enquirer herself. Maybe even write a book. But first, she had a call to make. She was certain Mr. Mueller might be interested in what she had to say.