Grace Freeman paced. She'd been pacing for close to an hour, relaying possible conversation outcomes in her head. This wasn't going to end well and no matter how hard she tried to imagine everything would turn out fine, she really couldn't. She jumped when the phone rang.

"You ok in there?" Andrea asked, her thick Italian accent, something Grace had initially found terribly difficult to understand, shining through. Grace laughed nervously as she looked into the surveillance camera above her head.

"I'm fine."

"You don't look it."

Grace gave the camera the finger and Andrea laughed.

"Your father'd be so proud," Andrea continued sarcastically. "Don't look now but he's on his way."

"My father?"

"No Moron! Lorenzo!"

Grace bit her lip to stop it from trembling.

"Thanks," she muttered, hanging up the phone and lighting a cigarette.

Puffing away, she began moving towards the window. She looked down, spotted Lorenzo and then looked up and across to the window across the street where she gave Andrea a quick wave. She inhaled, exhaled then continued pacing. This is going to be like the time when I told him I graduated from Princeton in less than three years and that I was fifteen when I started she thought to herself as her stomach turned. "Or worse," she spoke out loud. The door buzzer rang and she jumped. Less than a week she kept thinking to herself as she quickly stubbed out her cigarette. Less than a week...

"Hello," she spoke into the intercom nervously.

"Grace it's me," Lorenzo replied cheerily and she buzzed him up.

"Deep breaths, Grace," she started whispering to herself. "Deep..." she stopped when she heard the knock at the door, contemplated grabbing another cigarette, but stopped shaking her head, throwing the pack back into the large mahogany box in which she stored them. "Oh god..." she ambled slowly, as if time could drag on without her, and unlocked the door.

"Hey," he said breathlessly as he immediately pulled her into a kiss. Grace was the first to pull back and despite her edginess she was smiling.

"Hi..." she whispered softly.

"You ok?" he asked making a face. He swallowed hard at the taste of nicotine on her lips then frowned, noting the tension in her voice.

"I..." Grace began but stopped, unsure of where to begin, but on a mission to plow through. "We should sit down."

Lorenzo narrowed his eyes at her but quickly followed as she took a seat on the large, expensive, brown leather couch he had spent many nights sitting on as they watched bad American movies with Italian subtitles.

"So we're going home in a little less than a week," Grace said as she began fiddling with the strings on the cashmere throw slung over the back of the couch. She fought hard, resisting the urge to storm over to the box and grab another cigarette, but she knew how Lorenzo hated it.

"I know," Lorenzo said nodding and smiling. "I can't wait, I want you to meet my mom, and I want us to be able to show each other our favorite spots in DC, and I can't wait to get settled into my new apartment, and Georgetown... everything's going to be so great."

Grace looked away.

"Yeah..." she signed. "That's what I wanted to talk about," she took a deep breath, and instead of fixing her gaze to his eyes, stared straight ahead at the mahogany box. "When we get home, things are going to be different, I mean here in Italy it's been great, nothing's been in our way," she forced herself to at least look his way. "Who would've thought I'd come here and find someone from my home and now look at us..." she paused again. "Look Lorenzo, there's some stuff I haven't been telling you."

Lorenzo's face fell.

"Grace..." he began slowly. But she stopped him.

"Hear me out."

"Is there another guy?" Lorenzo asked ignoring her.

"No!" Grace replied quickly. "There's no other guy, I mean there is, but not the way you think. Lorenzo I love you, it's not a relationship like ours it's..." she took a deep breath. "It's my family."

"Your family? Grace, I don't understand. You've said nothing but good things about your family, and how much they do for you and how much they love you, how big it is..." he scratched his head, something he did often when he was anxious. "Am I missing something?"

Grace looked away.

"It's my father."

"Your father?"

"Lorenzo I'm not who you think I am."

"Honestly Grace, what are you talking about?"

"It's like that time when you realized that I had graduated college and I was only nineteen. Like you were shocked but at the same time proud, just like my father had been because you know his genes and my mother's genes, well I mean they knew I was smart to begin with but..." she began to prattle, something she'd done every time she had reached her height of personal anxiety for as long as she cared to remember, well at least since she'd took up the past-time of smoking. "Then it was okay that I was nineteen, because age isn't anything but a number, I'm mature for my age, and I'm an adult but that's beside the point. I mean I can vote, and in America that's really all that matters anyways. Well that and a strong education platform apparently. I mean, even though I was an art history major with an American studies minor, you started talking me into going to Georgetown law school, even though I told you that my father graduated from Duke and probably wouldn't even let me utter the words Georgetown and law school in the same sentence without thinking I was downright betraying all of the loyalty he had to his alma mater just like Mr. Dawson used to with Notre Dame and..."

"Grace!" Lorenzo shouted cutting her off. "What in the HELL are you talking about?"

"My last name isn't Freeman," she mumbled quietly, looking down, hoping he wouldn't hear.

"What?"

"My last name isn't Freeman," she said looking up. "It's Baxter. I'm Graceland Elizabeth Baxter. My mother, Rose Freeman, well now Baxter, gave birth to me on air force one, with the help of Ben Dawson, flying over Graceland, which is where I got my name. She had actually hitched a ride with her father's boss who was going to join my father who was at the time in Louisiana for a Democratic Fundraiser in Baton Rouge. My father is William Baxter," Grace finished quietly. Lorenzo nodded and took a long moment before responding.

"As in President of the United States William Baxter?" he asked momentarily uncertain of everything including the air around him. Grace nodded.

"Yes."

"And you're just telling me this NOW?" he shouted standing up. Grace closed her eyes and inhaled sharply.

"Yes," she squeaked meekly.

"WHY?"

She took a moment thinking through her answer.

"It's hard for me," was the first thing she could allow out of her mouth. "It's hard for me to go up to someone and say hi my name's Grace and my father's the President of the United States. Which is why I came here, and why I wasn't all over the television when he was elected, and why I left for Europe just five days after inauguration and why I'm really scared of going back to the states and why, most of all, I didn't come here looking to fall in love with someone let alone someone from home, who's going to school only BLOCKS FROM WHERE I LIVE!" Grace took a deep breath. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to yell."

Lorenzo opened his mouth to speak but closed it when there was a knock at the door.

"Shit," Grace said standing up.

"What?"

"Secret Service," she began walking towards the door when she heard the all too familiar male voice calling out her name. "His name is Mike," she began explaining to Lorenzo. "He lives across the hall, one of my father's guys, luckily with me being in Europe I only need two agents close by on duty as protection. Mike lives across the hall, Andrea, the other, across the street. She watches from a surveillance camera but Mike only comes out if Andrea calls him."

She opened up the door.

"You alright?" Mike enquired immediately.

"I'm fine. I just told Lorenzo..." Grace replied quietly.

"Oh..."

"Yeah."

"Well," Mike began backing away. "You just let me know if you need anything."

Grace smiled.

"Will do," she closed the door, glanced at the mahogany box, said to hell with it, picked up a cigarette, lit it, and shuffled back over to Lorenzo, her head hung low.

"I'm sorry," she looked back up at him, her eyes welling with tears. "I just... I didn't know how to mention it and... I'm sorry, it just never seemed right," she took a long steady drag. "I didn't want it to get in the way."

"Get in the way? Grace you actually think something like that would have gotten in the way? I love you, things just don't get in the way. This IS huge, but... this is just a hurdle," Lorenzo tried to be calm, rational, as he imagined himself he would be in court defending an important case, something that was sure to be looming in his future. "We'll get over it, we, I mean, I, I just..."

"Are you mad?"

"A little."

"You have to understand..."

"I do understand I just," she cut him off.

"I can tell you more."

"I'm not too sure that now's the time."

"So now what?"

"I think I need to go for a walk."

"Will you come back?"

Lorenzo nodded.

"I will."

"You promise?"

"Yeah I just need to... work some things out."

"You promise?"

"Yeah," he finished moving towards the door. "I promise."

Grace nodded. He kissed her softly and then left.

Fifteen minutes must have passed before Grace moved from her spot after having locked the door. She was on her second cigarette in twenty minutes, completely surpassing her daily limit, which, on the most stressful of days, had usually been two. When she finally realized what she was doing she quickly moved back to the couch and grabbed the phone, she picked up a place card from underneath the receiver and dialed the number at the bottom.

"Kim Walsh," the voice on the other end answered after three rings.

"Kimmy, it's Grace," Kim let out a quick shriek, forgetting where she was for a moment, much to the dismay of the people around her. She sat down on a bench in the middle of central park and loosened the strap of her right Jimmy Choo. "Where are you?" Grace asked smiling at the sound of her best friend's voice.

"The park, I had a break and I needed some inspiration, I am SO glad this shit is over soon, I'm going out of my mind Grace, this one "design expert" on this committee I'm working on, Nazi I tell you he... oh my god," Kim paused to take a deep breath and finally realized that Grace calling her wasn't exactly a commonplace event now a days. "I thought we said we weren't going to talk, barring emergency, until we were both back in DC 'cause then it'd be like we never left each other and your phone bills were getting out of hand."

Grace laughed nervously then was silent for a long moment.

"Grace?" Kim asked confused.

"Yeah?" Grace replied distantly.

"You alright?"

Grace let out a deep, overly tragic, sigh.

"I just told Lorenzo..."