The Chosen One Read Online Free PDF Page A

the sorrow – in the world and the determination to do something about it. These days, her ideals seemed to have slipped so far into the distance, it was a struggle to glimpse them. But Stephen Baker had just reminded her that they were still there. She turned back to him and nodded.
    ‘And that’s how I am, too. I never forgot what I saw out there. And about eighteen months from now, I’m going to have a chance to do something about it. Something big.’ He shifted the car down a gear. ‘Will you be with me, Maggie Costello?’
    Now, nearly two years later, the President was reaching for a red plastic lunch box with one hand and opening the fridge with the other. ‘So what’s it to be, junior? Apple or pear?’
    ‘Can’t I have candy?’
    ‘No, young man, you cannot. Apple or pear?’
    ‘Apple.’
    Stephen Baker wheeled around, an expression of deep seriousness on his face. ‘That’s not so you can use it to play baseball, is it?’
    The boy smiled. ‘No, Dad.’
    ‘Josh.’
    ‘I promise.’
    The President put the fruit into the box, clipped the top shut then placed it in his boy’s hand. Then he bent to kiss his son on the top of his head. Maggie noticed that he shut his eyes as he did it, as if in a moment of grateful prayer. Or just to savour the smell of Josh’s hair.
    ‘OK, young man, scram.’
    Just then, Kimberley Baker came in, clutching a bag bulgingwith gym gear. Blonde and pretty as a peach in her college days, she was now usually described as ‘rounded’ or, by the less kind, ‘plump’. Magazines had obsessed about her weight when her husband first announced, the celebrity press zooming in on cellulite patches or a close-up of her rear-end in an ill-advised trouser-suit. She had gone on daytime TV, told how she had gained weight when Katie was born and how she had tried multiple diets – ‘including all the nutty ones!’ – to take the pounds off, but failed each time. Now, she said, she was comfortable with who she was and had decided to devote her energies to something more worthwhile than her waist size. The women in the audience had stood and cheered their approval, the host had hugged her and, within a day or two, she was declared a role model for female empowerment.
    No less important, the political cognoscenti had decided that Kimberley Baker was an enormous asset to her husband. Female voters, in particular, had long been sceptical of Barbie doll, Stepford political wives; they liked what it said about
    Stephen Baker that his wife was a real, rather than arti ficially flawless, woman. That she was from Georgia, thereby connecting him with the vote-rich South, was an added bonus.
    The Bakers could not say they were used to life in the White House, even if Tara MacDonald had already briefed People magazine that they were loving it. But Kimberley was certainly making an effort, chiefly for the children’s sake. She had been worried about it from the start, anxious about an eight-year-old boy and a thirteen-year-old girl entering the most vulnerable time in their young lives in front of the gaze of the entire world. She remembered her own adolescence as one long stretch of blushing embarrassment: the notion of enduring that with a battery of cameras permanently in your face, scrutinizing your clothes and your hairand relaying those images around the globe, seemed truly unbearable. During the campaign, Stephen Baker always got a laugh when he joked that the only two people who truly wanted him to lose the election were his opponent and his wife.
    Now Kimberley was fussing over both Josh and her shy, gauche, pretty teenage daughter, bundling them out of the door and into the hands of a casually-dressed, twenty-something woman who looked like an au pair. In fact, she was Zoe Galfano, one of a Secret Service detail whose sole duty was the protection of the Baker children.
    ‘Maggie, something to drink? Coffee, hot tea, juice?’
    ‘No thanks, Mr President. I’m fine.’ The phrase