A tale of three halves is set in both the USA and UK. It is fairly contemporary in that it starts in 2022 and I hope reflects at least partially the Political Scene in the USA then and sadly now.

The first part of the story is about the grift and corruption in US Politics today and is told from the POV of those left behind at home when someone is elected to Congress.

[April 2022 – At a home in a small town on the edge of the Ozarks]
The lady of the house, Melissa, was getting ready to leave when her phone rang.

“Hello, Darling. I was just going to leave for the airport. What’s wrong?”

"No, you don't have to explain. I understand. You have to make sure that the bill you proposed is passed. Those pesky lobbyists would love to kill it. I saw one of them on Fox Business, sounding off about how bad it would be to the country if it passed. If getting it passed means a lot more glad-handing and sucking up, then do it. I know how much it means to you."

"Ok, next weekend it is then. That means we can both go to the Krueger's Silver Wedding party. I don't look forward to going alone as you know very well that they are your biggest donor in the district, so you can do a bit of groveling for a few bucks."

“Ok, I will RSVP them tonight. Bye.”

Melissa put the phone down and sighed. Her plans… their plans for the weekend just went out of the window. The result of his phone call was that she would have to revert to 'Plan B'.

[one day earlier]
Melissa read the email that had arrived overnight for at least the 50th time. It didn't say much, but the attached photos said more than a million words could ever do. Her formerly safe and entirely predictable world had just come crashing down from a great height. She hadn't a clue who had sent the email. She had tried to reply, but it was returned as ‘undeliverable’.

That didn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. What she did know was that she had to do something about it, and the sooner, the better.

Melissa had never suspected her husband of this… While the odd fling is pretty common in the 'Swamp' that is DC, but this… he had gone way too far even for what is generally accepted as the norm for elected representatives in Washington.

In her current emotional state, she could not face anyone at the moment, especially a very chatty hairdresser and manicurist. Those people were experts at getting to the bottom of their client's problems through a combination of mind reading and seemingly idle chat. That would often result in gossip spreading like wildfire in their small town. After sitting at her desk with her eyes closed for nearly twenty minutes, struggling to control her crazy emotions, she phoned the salon. That was the hard one. She made her excuses and didn't reschedule. Melissa hoped that her excuse of, 'I have a bit of a cold,' spoken with her fingers squeezing her nostrils, would be enough.

Once she’d cancelled the salon, she was able to relax a bit and try to plan her next move. Her husband was due to come back to the district the following weekend. This weekend was supposed to be for them to start to plan the local part of his re-election campaign. He had a lot of schmoozing to do with a gathering of his largest donors planned for the following Saturday night. That would give her some time to lay it all out for him in all its gory detail.

If he bailed out on the weekend, she would have to go to DC, but she needed a plan for when she was there. She had to confront her cheating rat of a husband. She’d heard of and read about several wives of politicians who had cheated big time and how their comfortable world had disappeared in a flash. Their ranting had got them nowhere other than their five nanoseconds in the limelight. All the stories had seemed to end badly for the wife who had done nothing wrong. Melissa looked at the photos once more and decided that enough was enough. She had to ensure that she came out the other end with at least a roof over her head.

The more she thought about it and after an hour of searching on the internet, the more she began to accept that Congressmen cheated with their interns almost every day. From the reports, it was nearly always another representative or someone else's intern. To her everlasting embarrassment, she'd ignored the signs of his affairs. They were there for her to see if only… Like a lot of things in her life, she did not see what was in front of her until someone pointed it out to her, in this case, in an email. Her safe and decidedly cozy life as a stay-at-home wife had ended in the time it had taken her to read the text and look at the attached images.

Then there was his squeaky, clean and upright reputation back in the district. He was a deacon in their church. When it got out as it invariably would, his many sermons on marital fidelity would condemn him to temporary condemnation by the members of the church. Melissa would suffer the same fate as it would be assumed that she was less than devoted to her husband and their marriage than she should have been and that she was the real reason for his affair, or was that affairs plural?

Forgiveness is not part of the 'Fundamental Christian' mantra in her part of the USA. In some of the churches in their part of the world, the ideas put forward in 'A Handmaid's Tale' were not that far-fetched. Women were supposed to get married, have children, stay at home, and keep their mouths and vaginas firmly shut to anyone but their husbands. They are there to look after their children and their husbands in that order. If he strayed, then it was her fault, and she would be banished from the church. That was the fate that lay ahead of her. If the husband strayed… then he would be forgiven, and the spouse blamed for not being the perfect wife. His only punishment would be to be removed as a deacon for a period while he served penance for his crimes. Her banishment would be permanent. That, in turn, would make living in the district next to impossible.

Melissa remembered the incident where, not long after her husband had been elected, the GOP Representative in the adjacent district had had a drunken fling with another man in DC. The wife was always blamed for not being attentive enough and hounded out of the state with nothing but her car and the clothes on her back. The fling was never mentioned again. The children were subsequently raised by his parents. Their mother had been erased from family history. It was she who was made out to be the one who had strayed in the marriage. That was a taste of what she could expect if she exposed his adultery to the press.

It wasn't as if he hadn't been warned. Since his elevation from a lowly county representative to a seat in the US House of Representatives and now onto two very prestigious committees, he'd had a couple of not-very serious flings that hadn't lasted very long. This latest one was by the image shown in the photo, in a very different league. It looked like this was a case of 'third time unlucky for her'. If he was re-elected, then he’d become the GOP ranking member on at least one of those committees. He would become an almost permanent fixture on channels like Fox News and Newsmax, as well as the local TV stations.

Their nineteen years of marriage had gone out the window in the time it took to take a photo. The image of her great-grandmother's engagement ring on ‘her’ finger would stick with Melissa forever.

The remaining photos were of a collection of documents. Those documents were bank statements. All of them had the name of her husband on them. A few had, much to her surprise, her name as the account holder. This was all news to Melissa, especially the ones that were from banks in Panama, Abu Dhabi and the Cayman Islands. The sums of money were astronomical. She had to count the number of zeros twice. As she had run the finances for his district office and later his congressional election campaigns, Melissa knew in great detail the sums of money involved in those operations. While they were large, they were dwarfed by the amounts on deposit in these accounts.

It had always irked Melissa that her husband was always complaining that she spent far too much money on clothes for the countless times when she had stood in for him on official duties. A woman has to dress the part, but a man could wear almost any suit as long as it wasn't tan-colored. Jeans and polos were allowed for the men at BBQs, but she would have to be a perfect image of womanhood and would have to wear a new outfit that no one had seen before. That cost a lot of money, and her husband was a skinflint when it came to spending money on her. Thankfully, Melisa had learned the art of ‘mix and match and accessorize’ from her mother.

Almost everyone laughed at Obama when he wore that tan suit. Fox News spent weeks tearing the POTUS apart. They still bring it up when he makes a public appearance. Then, there was her husband’s refusal to buy a new car. Their one car was almost a decade old. When he flew to and from DC- he would always take the cheapest flight, even if it meant a five-hour stopover in Atlanta or Chicago. He'd say that it was all part of his carefully cultivated image of being a man of the people. The truth was very different. Her husband came from money from before the Civil War. His ancestors had seen what was coming and sent all their money in gold to London and Paris for safekeeping. Melissa was from a humbler background.

She knew that it was all an act from day one. She had gone along with it just to please him and keep her cozy life intact. It was starting to dawn on Melissa just how much of his life was an act, or like his 'dear leader' just a downright lie? She didn't know. The images that were now ingrained in her brain seemed to say that his DC life was one big grift.

Thanks to that grift and the anonymous email, she had discovered that her skinflint husband was sitting on tens of millions of dollars. Her level of anger was rising with almost every minute. Melissa was determined not to keep quiet, let him divorce her in favor of a younger model, and be left with nothing.

She knew how much money was in his Super PAC, and it was nowhere near enough for him to get re-elected in November. At the moment, there were no challengers from his party that would be strong enough to force a primary election in a few months. Therefore, he'd likely face a pretty weak opponent in November as the district was very red-leaning and had been since the 1960 election. Even a one-sided campaign would need at least three million dollars. He simply didn't have that sort of money in his PACs at the moment. His donors would have to cough up most of that. Small money donors in the district were thin on the ground. If there was a fight for the seat, then they'd dust off their wallets and purses and stump up otherwise, the good folk of the district kept them firmly shut.

Moving any of this other money could start people in the wrong places asking questions, especially the FEC and, eventually, the FBI/DOJ. The party would not worry despite almost constant claims of 'draining the swamp'… the DC swamp. Neither the former President nor the Party had done a thing about it when they controlled the House and the Senate as well as the White House. If anything, they had only added to it, and her dear husband was right up there filling the swamp with his urine. Then, she had to consider his reluctance to publicly commit to standing for re-election despite his filing the papers as required by law more than a year ago.

All sorts of horrible thoughts started going through her mind. Was he going to head on down to somewhere that did not have an extradition treaty with the USA with all that money with ‘her’ and start a new life? She just didn’t know what he’d do when confronted with the facts, but being left carrying the can while he lived on some tropical beach and enjoyed life was not an option for her.

It seemed pretty clear that with the rumors about other interns and now ‘her’, he was a serial adulterer. That Melissa could handle, but the money was a different matter. That could lead to jail time for both of them. Two of the offshore accounts were in joint names. Melissa would swear on a stack of Bibles that she had nothing to do with them. The only time she’d been out of the country was when the whole family had gone to Cancun for a holiday after his first election to the state legislature. Moreover, she wasn’t even sure if her passport was still valid.

Melissa had been such a dutiful wife… there was that horrible word ‘dutiful’ again. She was annoyed that she'd let herself be played by the one person in her life whom she thought she had cared about. She was such a fool, and even thinking about that hurt right to her core.

Her life, as she currently knew it, was over if the unknown sender of the email made good on their promise to go public in ten days unless certain things happened. One of those was Melissa divorcing Jeff. The sight of a pregnant intern wearing a family heirloom made that decision very easy.

Her next problem was how she was going to recover that heirloom and move on with her life.

The one more thing other than a divorce that she was sure about was that he would never share her bed again.

More out of frustration than anything, Melissa went for a swim. When her dear husband told her that their new home was going to have an indoor pool, she was overjoyed, and like many things, she never questioned the cost.

The pool was her place to exercise and to think. He had his gym in a room next to his office. He never swam, and she never worked out. While they were married, they lived very separate lives. Now that she thought about it, they had been emotionally separated for years. Now, it was time for that separation to be both physical and legal.

Her swim lasted for just two lengths. Melissa’s emotions finally caught up with her, and she had a good cry at the edge of the pool. She hated crying. It was just not her, but the events of that day were more than enough to tip her over the edge.

When she'd recovered from both the swim and the crying, one thing was very clear to her. Melissa was going to divorce him, and she needed to go and see Henry Gibbs, the attorney who had handled the estate of her late mother. If he couldn't handle a divorce, he'd know of one who would be able to handle it with the necessary confidentiality that her position in the community demanded.

Her final task of the day was to start making two lists. One for ‘Plan A’ when she’d face up to Jeff that weekend. The other was for ‘Plan B’, where she’d go to DC at the end of the following week and sort it all out there.
She fell asleep hoping that he was true to recent form and would cry off from visiting his district that weekend.

---

[Back to the day when Melissa’s husband cried off from the weekend]

The phone call with her husband, Jeff, had made her wish that ‘Plan B’ was the way to go a reality. The one thing her free weekend had given her was breathing space. Space to prepare to face her husband with all her ducks in a row.
At the top of her list was lining up a divorce lawyer.

As she thought, Henry Gibbs was unable to help with the divorce, but he was able to recommend another attorney, Dana Thomas. Dana was a divorce lawyer. Melissa kicked herself for not thinking of Dana because she was the person that her hopefully soon-to-be ex-husband had run against for his seat in Congress almost two years ago.

The downside was that Dana could not see her until the following Monday. It looked like she'd have to do her best to hide her emotions from him over the weekend, especially if he was coming home as planned.

There were a couple of community events on the calendar that he'd be expected to attend if he was in town.

Melissa wasted no time in calling the organizers of the event that she or Jeff would have attended that weekend and cancelling their attendance. Her excuse of getting over a cold was accepted without much question. She had an almost perfect record for attending events on behalf of her husband ever since he was first elected. She did hate having to lie to people that she’d known for years, but if her plans worked out, she would not have to face them ever again.

With nothing better to do, she went for her daily swim. This would be one thing that she’d miss from leaving the house for good.

The feelings of anger and frustration this whole thing had given her didn’t go away even after a one-mile swim. No matter what she tried, all she could see was her going to DC and confronting him. Deep down, Melissa knew that it would not matter that much if she was just mad at him. The email contained a list of six names. She knew, or rather, she had met them all at least once. The five-term representative that Melissa had the misfortune to be married to had at least one intern on his staff every year. All the names were of the women interns that he’d employed. The bitter taste in her mouth seemed to get more intense with every passing minute.

Their big house seemed even emptier than ever as she contemplated her next move. It was all very well arranging an appointment to see Dana about a divorce, but what else? She had to think about their kids, Zeke and Brittany. They were away at a private school. That was his idea, and it was presented to her as a done deal. Another piece of the jigsaw that was his life of grift in DC fell into place.

The sheer amount of money in their joint account was nowhere near enough to pay the fees for their education. He’d simply said that it was ‘all taken care of’ and the fool that she was believed him. She believed him because she was trying to play the role of the ‘Good Wife’ aka ‘the dumb blonde’ and not question anything about his life in DC.

If the money wasn’t coming from one of the accounts shown in the photo, then who was paying the bills, and what was expected of her husband in return?

With every step, his double life became murkier and murkier, and she had been blind to it all. Melissa felt so mad at herself for not seeing his duplicity for herself and had stuck her head in the sand until the email arrived.

Melissa had played her part as the dutiful wife of a congressman all these years. She had attended countless functions in his absence. She had never gotten used to being introduced as 'The lovely wife of our congressman Jeff Michaels’. They never used her name. She was always the wife of… It frustrated the hell out of her, but she let it slide. He was our representative in Congress and there to serve us… Only that he was serving himself and not just to huge amounts of money.

Melissa felt so guilty for not suspecting that he was a nasty, crooked SOB years ago. All those engagements that she'd attended in his place, always looking as good as she could. Her bulging closets were filled with outfits that she'd worn just once or twice. At his insistence, a slip of paper was attached to each one showing what function it had been worn to. Again, at his insistence, her hair was now blonde, and she’d get a good telling off if she let her brown roots show at an event.

Even with him being hundreds of miles away in DC, he ruled her very existence. The email was going to change that. Of that, she was sure, but… how? She didn’t have a clue other than they were done. The philandering might have been forgiven, but the money and his pregnant intern wearing her great-grandmother's ring was unforgivable.

Despite all this being on her mind, she did manage to get some sleep thanks to a little white pill. Something else she pledged to give up when she made her break from this god-awful life.
[to be continued]