By the end of John Edwards’s trial, we’d all heard more than we ever wanted to about the sad characters in this sordid melodrama: the politician himself, whose ego trumps Trump’s; his onetime aide, who mistook “Single White Female” for an instruction manual; the New Age mistress, who complained when a love nest lacked the proper feng shui. Regrettably, she has a memoir due out soon. Proper feng shui dictates its placement in the remainder bin.

But there’s a figure from the trial I can’t stop thinking about, someone on the fringes of the melodrama but in the center of Edwards’s courtroom retinue, the kind of steadfast supporting player every political sex scandal seems to demand, the archetype with the least accessible but most fascinating tangle of emotions.

What was Cate Edwards thinking? What went through her mind and heart as she walked with her father into court every morning, took a place in the row behind his, listened to fresh accounts of his treacheries and her mother’s torment, nervously twisted her long hair, and then walked with him back out of court, day after queasy-making day?

Was she propelled by selflessness, forgiveness and an extraordinary strength that enabled her to look hard at the grievous hurt John Edwards caused and yet look past it? Or was she just repressing it in order to do what she herself needed to do: cling to, and believe in, the only parent she had left?
With her mother gone, Cate, a 30-year-old lawyer, was the woman confronted with the choice to stand (or not) by her man, and in her there were echoes of Hillary Clinton, Silda Spitzer, Huma Abedin: of all the enigmas who have weighed the wrong done to them and the options available to them and arrived at accommodations that no one on the outside of a given marriage or family can ever fully understand.

Cate’s situation was different — and sadder. Although she wasn’t directly betrayed, her whole family was devastated, all the more so because both of her parents ended up being publicly savaged, her mother’s tirades becoming legend. Elizabeth Edwards spent the years before her death in late 2010 not only battling cancer and but also raging against her husband’s infidelity, lies and squandered promise, even though there was no benefit in that for Cate and her two younger siblings, now 12 and 14. Cate’s as close to a mother as those children have left.

She’s practiced at heartache. An older brother, Wade, died in a car accident in 1996, when he was 16 and she only 14; for two years afterward, she slept in her parents’ bedroom, on two chairs pushed together.

Like Dad and Mom both, she became a lawyer, heading to Harvard for her law degree after undergraduate work at Princeton. At the Democratic National Convention in 2004, where her father was the party’s vice presidential nominee and her mother spoke, Cate took the stage briefly to introduce her.

“I am the proud child,” she said, “of two people who have made our home a place of hope.” How much of that sentiment was true up until then, and genuinely felt? How much could she hold on to, or recover, over the torturous years to come?

During the trial she fielded many requests for interviews, but didn’t grant any substantive ones. In an era when so many people thrill to and preen for the spotlight, no matter why it’s there, she showed up for court in unfashionable tops and skirts, ballet flats and chipped nail polish. She wasn’t there to perform. If she intends to join the lengthening list of political daughters who have converted their surnames into television exposure, she hasn’t shown it.

And yet. She had her wedding last fall photographed for — and written up in — People magazine. In a less flashy vein, she wrote a moving Mother’s Day essay for Southern Living last month.
Could these have been public relations moves made with her father in mind, and timed to coincide with his trial? She often seemed to leap past mere support for him to active help, scribbling charts and notations during the jury-selection phase.

Elizabeth Edwards, in the weeks before she died, seemingly made a sort of peace with John and no doubt wanted the family to stay strong. That would have been a whole lot tougher to pull off if he’d gone to prison or if he’d stood by himself in that courtroom, lonely proof of a family unstitched.

So maybe Cate marched alongside him not out of any particular mercy or meekness but just because she, more than anyone else in the family, held the needle and thread, and because what she said on a stage eight years ago still rings at least slightly true. In the Edwards home, despite everything that’s happened, there’s hope.