My Husband Ran for Governor on a Family-Values Platform. I Ran on His Search History

He fired me as his wife and his strategist in the same week. He forgot that I'm the one who built him — and that I know where every body is buried, because I'm the one who buried them.

I've made twenty-six candidates. Every word my husband has ever been praised for saying, I wrote. Every scandal he doesn't have, I buried. So when Harry stands up at his campaign launch, puts his hand on the small of my protégée's back, and unveils a slogan I would have strangled in its crib, I don't scream. I count the room — and I notice one line in his speech that isn't in his voice, one sentence that quietly hands eleven hundred acres to a casino developer from Nevada.

He didn't cut me out because he fell in love. He cut me out because I'd have killed the deal.

So I drive to the county clerk's office, and behind a man renewing his notary license, with a pen chained to the counter, I file to run against my own husband. Not to win — to get a podium at the debate, eight feet from him, with a microphone he can't turn off. What I need is the one man standing outside his machine: Tommy Widener, the opponent I personally destroyed in two campaigns with a photograph and eight-point type. He throws me out of his office. Reasonably.

Then the machine starts defecting to me. And somewhere around week four, I look at my own numbers and realize the terrible thing — I could actually win this. That I want it. That I've wanted it for twenty years and told myself a story instead.

Six weeks. One debate. And a husband who has never once, in all the years I made him, learned to write his own concession speech.