“Nervous.”
“Why?”
“I’m not—” I almost said ‘qualified’ but I wasn’t going to reveal that to him. He already knew too much. “It’s just been a while since I’ve worked.”
“Did you always want to work with charities?”
“No.” I laughed. “I wanted to teach fifth grade.”
“A teacher!”
“Does it seem so ridiculous?”
“Not at all. Why fifth?”
“Because Mrs. Jordal was my fifth-grade teacher, and she was the best teacher ever. And I like the age. Not little kids, but not yet teenagers.”
“So? Why aren’t you a teacher?”
I thought back to the conversation I’d had with the senator.
“I need you to be my wife. To travel with me. To manage functions and throw parties. You can’t teach school and be the wife of a senator.”
“That’s not true,” I said. “There are plenty of senator’s wives who keep—”
“You can run the foundation, if you feel like being my wife isn’t enough for you.”
“Jim,” I said, putting my hand on the desk between us. “That’s not what I mean—”
So fast, like a snake, Jim lifted the hard-backed book in front of him and smashed it down on my hand.
“Poppy?”
I blinked. Flexed the fingers of the hand he’d hurt. There’d been no broken bones, but I hadn’t been able to hold anything in that hand for a week. And the bruise had been purple and green for even longer.
“Sorry,” I said. “I got married.” I shrugged like that explained everything. Like a shrug could encapsulate the slow shrinking of my world.
“And you stopped wanting to teach?”
I set down my fork, feeling heckled by his questions. “What about you? Did you always want to be a... whatever you are for rich people?”
He smiled and then laughed. “No. I wanted to be a priest.” My mouth hung open. “When I was little and where I was from the priests had a lot of power. And if it was get hurt or hurt someone, I reckoned I’d rather not be hurt.”
“It’s hard to imagine you as a priest.”
He took a bite of rice and shrugged. I ate yet another piece of cheese.
“How did you end up working for Caroline?”
I was watching so I saw it, the tiny freeze. The way he set down his fork and instead of feeding himself he wiped his mouth with a napkin. “She was in the UK, and I did some work for her there.”
“Doing what?”
“Solving some problems with oil companies.”
“Are you a lawyer?”
That made him laugh. “A negotiator.”