Denise Kiernan - We Gather Together: A Nation Divided, a President in Turmoil, and a Historic Campaign to Embrace Gratitude and Grace

The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II

The Last Castle: The Epic Story of Love, Loss, and American Royalty in the Nations Largest Home

Waiting at the depot, the team of horses began approaching its iron counterpart. After the engineers had uncoupled the four passenger cars from the steam engine, the beasts went to work hauling them off one set of tracks and onto another, and adding one more car to the short train for the remainder of the journey. Once off in their new direction, the five cars would follow the tracks stretching out before them to their final destination and the thousands who anxiously awaited them there.

The trains journey had begun that morning in Washington, DC, its passengers bound farther north. One passenger descended there at the Calvert Street Station in Baltimore, waiting for the equine railroad workers to move his car onto the freight line of the Northern Central Railroad. He was headed to western Pennsylvania, where the cheering crowds that awaited him would stand in stark contrast to the somber occasion that was the reason for his trip. But these were somber times. These were the days when the most enthusiastic of voices were carried on the same winds that just months earlier were rife with the smell of gunpowder, teeming with cries of anguish, not joy, rising above the blood-soaked land. These were times that mingled suffering with satisfaction, gains with gut-wrenching setbacks. The passenger waited for the next leg of the journey, coffins stacked on the platform around him. This was war.

Some 130 miles to the east of his Keystone State destination stood the city where this young country had begun not yet ninety years earlier. In that city a galvanizing idea, one of independence from tyranny, had united citizens of different walks and varying ideals. Representatives had argued, yes, differed but ultimately had come together. United.

That city was now a bustling hub of commerce, and there an editor waited, an editor whose father had fought in that revolution decades earlier, an editor who now watched what her father had fought for slipping away. That editor had come to wield more influence than she could ever have imagined, unearthing voices previously unheard, battling for that which she valued. Yet that influence was still not enough to achieve the goal she had been striving toward for much of her adult life. She needed someone of greater importance, someone with a more powerful reach and voice. Someone on a train headed to her state to use that very voice.

She had been waiting for more than thirty years to see her idea, her heartfelt desire, come to fruition. Like so many people published before and during her time, she had had ideas ignored and cast aside, views discounted, opportunities limited. She was a woman who had risen to the top of a profession she had never expected to have, one that she had crafted more out of need than of want. But she had always risen to the occasion.

He was a man of contentious proclamations. He was not their first choice to speak that day. He knew that. He, too, would rise to the occasion.

A woman and a man. A media mogul and the most powerful politician in the land. Both hailed from much humbler beginnings; she on a farm, he in a fabled log cabin, countrysides far from the East Coast hubs that they each now called home.

He now wielded power in the halls of the nations capital; she now wielded a pen in the offices of the countrys publishing mecca.

She was far from perfect, as was he. But they were somehow perfectly suited to this occasion, seeking unity in different ways, ways neither had thought might align. Not under these circumstances, not in these divisive times.

Their paths had never crossed, yet in one week, their fates would intertwine. Her intention would meet his execution, her will finding his willingness.

A country torn apart might one dayor for just one dayseek to come together.

The table was set.

The train pulled away from the station.

Origin stories are at once enticingly satisfying and perilously fraught with missteps and minefields.

Take the mythic origin story of the city of Rome, Italy, for example. To put it ever so briefly: The god Mars impregnates a Vestal Virgin named Rhea Silvia, whose fathers reign over the kingdom of Alba Longa has been usurped by his own brother. Rhea gives birth to twin boys, and her power-hungry unclethe one who snatched the throne from Rheas fatherorders the babies drowned in the Tiber River in order to prevent them from ever making any claim to the throne of Alba Longa, considered by legend to be the oldest city in Latium. After the would-be assassins set the infants adrift on the river, rather than succumbing to those swirling, ancient Italian waters, the twins alight safely ashore, plopped beneath a fig tree. There, they are suckled by a she-wolf and fed by a woodpecker. The two boys, Romulus and Remus, grow up, rally their forces, and take back Alba Longa from their scheming, murderous great-uncle.