Heidi Nelson Cruz stepped to the lectern in a black gown, waiting for the applause to settle. She was beaming.

Speaking to college graduates in Tennessee, Cruz — then 31, with an MBA from Harvard and a dream job at the White House — peppered her commencement address with a cache of worldly wisdom: No job is beneath you. Don’t be afraid to fail. And, perhaps most important, choose the right partner.

“Marry someone who complements you, literally and figuratively,” she said. “Few, if any, decisions will have a greater impact on your happiness.”

Left unspoken: Cruz and her husband, Sen. Ted Cruz, were living 1,500 miles apart and trying to find a happy balance in their own lives.

Soon after, Heidi Cruz quit her high-powered post in Washington, took a job in finance and moved to Texas, an unfamiliar place, to be closer to Ted Cruz, then the state’s solicitor general. The transition unsettled her.

In August 2005, a police officer in Austin, answering a call about a woman sitting beside an expressway on-ramp, found Heidi Cruz with her head in her hands. He transported her to an unnamed facility, according to his report, which said, “I believed that she was a danger to herself.”

Heidi Cruz rebounded, and a decade later, she is a successful executive and a force in Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign. She has kept a far more active public campaign schedule than any other spouse in the Republican field, traveling the country, often without her husband, to deliver speeches with the easy charm of a candidate. (“We talk at the end of the night,” Ted Cruz told an Iowa crowd recently, “and typically we say, ‘OK, where are you today?’”)

In recent weeks, Heidi Cruz, 43, has joined her husband for appearances in Iowa and across the South, often introducing him with their two daughters, 5 and 7, fussing at her sides.

After about a decade as a financial adviser to the wealthy clients of Goldman Sachs, she has become a fundraising power, specializing in soliciting maximum contributions from well-heeled donors.

Inside the campaign, Heidi Cruz has built a model that seems lifted from Wall Street, with donors labeled “investors” who are privy to “quarterly investor meetings” to discuss the “product.”

She also helped recruit an important fundraiser, Lila Ontiveros, after Ontiveros left Goldman Sachs.

At times, the dual role of Goldman executive and political spouse has attracted attention, tugging the firm’s name into contentious political debates. For example, when Ted Cruz helped cause a government shutdown over President Barack Obama’s health care law, Ted Cruz was pressed into acknowledging that he was covered by his wife’s Goldman plan, valued at more than $20,000 a year.

And this month, Ted Cruz said his 2012 Senate campaign had failed to properly disclose large loans from Goldman and Citibank, muddying the couple’s tale of having poured their life savings into the race.

Last spring, Heidi Cruz took an unpaid leave of absence from Goldman, immediately focusing on fundraising for the campaign. By the fall, she had begun appearing often at her own public events and, on occasion, taking their daughters to accompany Ted Cruz at his.

“It was deemed helpful by the campaign just to begin to show our family a little bit,” she said, “and to speak to voters on why I, as probably the person closest to Ted, see him as the person who should be leading our country.”

A Tough Transition

Heidi Cruz’s business savvy showed early in life. As a 6-year-old in San Luis Obispo, California, she began operating a bustling bread stand, baking for four hours each day with her brother after school.

Born into a family of Seventh-day Adventist missionaries who were steeped in medicine — her father a dentist, her mother a hygienist, and her brother an orthopedic surgeon — Heidi Cruz traveled on missions to faraway places like Nigeria.

She graduated from Claremont McKenna College in Southern California, took an investment banking job, earned a master of European business degree from the Université Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium and enrolled at Harvard Business School.

“She stood out for knowing where she wanted to go,” said Edward Haley, an international relations professor at Claremont McKenna and a longtime mentor. “The only question was how to find those opportunities.”

In 2000, she secured a spot on George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign as an economic policy aide in Austin, where she met Ted Cruz, another Bush policy adviser. Their first date was a dinner that lasted nearly four hours. In a 2001 New York Times Magazine article about couples who met while working on the Bush campaign, Ted Cruz said he had driven her to the airport so she could fly back to finish her Harvard MBA and asked, “What do you want to do now?”

Heidi Cruz responded, “If you really want to keep in touch, I want to talk to you every day.”

By May 2001, the Cruzes were married. Over the next several years, their union was tested.

As Heidi Cruz climbed the ranks of the Bush administration, eventually working at the National Security Council under Condoleezza Rice, Ted Cruz’s Washington track stalled, prompting him to return to Texas, where in 2003 he was appointed solicitor general, an influential post.

The pair had reached a crossroads: Heidi Cruz had made it in Washington. Ted Cruz had made it in Texas.

After the couple spent more than a year commuting to see each other, Heidi Cruz diverted her career path to join her husband in Texas — taking on the challenge of returning to the financial services industry after years away. She initially joined Merrill Lynch in Houston, about 160 miles from Ted Cruz’s job in Austin.

“I was living in a city by myself again,” she said in an interview, “and that is sort of a strange circumstance to move to be with your spouse but then, like, not be with your spouse.”

But Heidi Cruz has seldom discussed the full toll of that transition and, in particular, the night of Aug. 22, 2005, when the Austin police fielded a call about a woman in a pink shirt with her head in her hands, sitting near an expressway.

When an officer approached, Heidi Cruz explained that she had walked out after dinner. As she sat 10 feet from traffic, the officer determined that she was a danger to herself, according to a heavily redacted police report first obtained by BuzzFeed News. Additional details from another version of the report obtained by The Times showed that the officer transported her to the unnamed facility. In the interview last week, Heidi Cruz declined to elaborate on what happened that night and said there had been no similar incidents since. She refrained from using the word “depression,” although in his book, “A Time for Truth,” Ted Cruz wrote that her move to Texas had “led to her facing a period of depression.”

“I don’t have years and years of major suffering from this,” she said, “and I want to use it to strengthen people around me and to recognize that we all have rough patches.”

Heidi Cruz described seeking comfort in her faith and the company of those close to her, particularly a sister-in-law.

Asked how Ted Cruz had supported her, Heidi Cruz called him “patient” with what seemed like a “weird decision, to say, ‘Let’s stay together and move home, but not move to the same city.’”

“He would just listen and give me a hug and say, ‘I want to do whatever you want to do,’” she recalled. “‘And if you want to live in Houston to be at an investment bank, it’ll be harder for me to not have you in Austin. But if that’s what you want, let’s do that.’”

Rebounding in Texas

It did not take long for Heidi Cruz to find her footing. She soon joined Goldman Sachs, where she was early to arrive each day and among the last to leave, impressing her boss at the time, Peter Coneway, who helped recruit her to the firm in 2005 and later recommended her to lead the office.

Coneway recalled Heidi Cruz’s thriving in a region where the money management industry was largely a men’s club.

As she built a network of clients, she found politics to be an icebreaker and her husband a willing partner at dinners with prospective investors. She would call on him to “help make the ask,” she said on a panel at Claremont McKenna in 2011. (Heidi Cruz told The Times, though, that she believed in a “separation of church and state” between business and politics and did not ask her clients to donate to the campaigns.)

Amid their hectic schedules, the Cruzes started a family. When their daughters were born, some assumed that it would signal a professional change for Heidi Cruz, but with the help of nannies, it did not.

“Just the fact that I came back from maternity leave was shocking to everyone in Houston,” Heidi Cruz said. She said having live-in help had allowed the Cruzes to take on more than some families could imagine.

About a week after Texans elected Ted Cruz to the Senate in 2012, Goldman announced Heidi Cruz’s elevation to its ranks of managing directors — a well-deserved promotion, colleagues said.

Between public appearances, Heidi Cruz cajoles officials for coveted endorsements and travels, with or without Ted Cruz, to meet potential donors.

In recent weeks, Heidi Cruz headlined a luncheon at a home in Los Angeles and a fundraiser in Dallas. She was the guest of honor at an intimate reception in downtown Seattle. Between events, she phoned scores of donors, focusing on the ones most likely to give the maximum $10,800.

“My role is very simple,” Heidi Cruz said. “Doing whatever I can do to help Ted win.”

© 2016 The New York Times Company