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I heard the door to the carport slam and went to the top of the stairs to see Frannie Reese, my closest friend on the island, sprinting upstairs toward me, a bundle of energy in her shorts and bathing suit. She had two cups from Starbucks and handed me one. When we first moved to Sullivan's Island back in 1998, Frannie's husband, Tim, was away almost as much as Mark had been during his years serving in Congress. She and I started out as carpool pals, but within months we were picking up each other's kids after school, taking them to appointments and to practices and eating dinner frequently at each other's homes, herding our kids around like one big mob. Recently, when my sister Kathy moved to Charleston and had a baby of her own, she fell seamlessly into Frannie's generosity. Frannie came to see how I was doing that morning. She said she'd be back before Mark's press conference. I retreated to shower and freshen up.

As I finished getting dressed, I heard Kathy's boisterous voice filling the main room as she came through the front door. She's an artist with a wicked sense of humor who, like our mom, knows how to make an entrance. "He wasn't hiking the Appalachian Trail," she announced. "He was getting Argentine tail!" I laughed. How good it felt to laugh!

Unbidden, my local sisterhood had assembled itself at my house, and my sister Gier was on the plane here from Chicago. So, too, was my dad, who would be arriving within an hour or two. I thought of Blake and Landon, ages ten and fifteen, four miles off the coast deep-sea fishing with Lalla Lee's sons and a friend, and Marshall, our oldest, in the Caribbean, for a two-week summer job. I paused next to the bed that Mark and I shared, to appreciate how truly I loved and was loved and how nothing that happened that day could take any of that from me.

Excerpted from Staying True by Jenny Sanford Copyright © 2010 by Jenny Sanford. Excerpted by permission of Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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