Salt

In a rowhouse living room in Washington, a few miles from the Capitol where he spent his adult life, a senator lies dead, and the night before his funeral his widow has agreed to receive the one mourner she cannot allow in the church: a lawyer thirty years her junior, brilliant, drunk, unrepentant, who was her husband's lover and who is holding, in his jacket pocket, a second will. Sidney has the house, the money, the name, and a soldier son who came home in a box after a war her husband voted for; Ben has the letters, the stories, and the conviction that the man they are burying wanted, more than anything, to be found out. Over a bottle of the Senator's whiskey the two of them do what Washington does best, which is negotiate in private what can never be said in public, and the terms on the table are grief, sex, money, and who gets to write the obituary of a man who lived two lives and died of the strain of keeping them apart.