CHAPTER 105

MARGARET BLEVINS WOKE UP to her husband’s raspy snoring at ten minutes to five; she reached over and turned off the alarm on her cell phone before it could sound. She didn’t want to wake Phillip, who had stayed late at one of the inauguration balls and, judging by his snoring, had drunk a little too much wine.

Well, Blevins thought as she went to her walk-in closet, closed the door, and began to put on her running clothes. He rarely drinks, doesn’t fool around, and he is the best of men. Let him snore to his heart’s content.

Besides, beyond a little muscle stiffness from yesterday’s run, she felt better than she had in weeks, certainly since before Christmas.

The Supreme Court justice put on her sports bra and paused, looking at the shorts she usually wore in the basement gym and at the cold-weather leggings she wore to run outside. Usually, she alternated weight days and running days to give her security detail a break every other day, and she’d run yesterday, so she wasn’t planning on running today.

But the morning before had been so spectacular, clear and cold, and there’d been something about the dawn and the brilliance of the winter sun in the woods and the frosted birch trees near the end of her usual loop. The justice had carried that sense of wonder into the day, watching as the new president took the oath of office, forty feet from history.

The memory made Blevins’s skin tingle and she shivered as she found herself wanting to regain that sense of wonder. Besides, until yesterday morning she’d been cooped up in the hospital and at home.

It would do her good to get more fresh air, and her doctor had told her it was important to be outside early in the day, no sunglasses, especially in winter to help keep her vitamin D levels up. And there really was no need to call and wait for someone from her security team to join her. That could take forty minutes. Maybe more.

The justice was soon downstairs, dressed for the chill weather. She wore her winter trail runners, a Christmas gift from Phillip, with tiny sharp studs in the soles that prevented her from slipping. She fitted her AirPods into her ears and linked them to her phone. Blevins put on music by a woman named Deva Premal that she always found calming, stuck her phone in the pocket of her reflective vest, and pulled on a wool cap, a headlamp, and thin wool gloves.

She checked her watch. Ten past five.

The house phone began to ring, which was odd. No one used it anymore.

The justice went out the door thinking that if she timed her run right, she’d be entering that beautiful birch grove at dawn.