"I know," he said. Same quality.
"So," she said. She picked up her chai cup. She took a sip. She looked at him over the rim of it. "Tomorrow. Whatever happens."
"Whatever happens," he said. He picked up his own cup. He held her gaze — the steady, direct gaze of someone who was not managing anything in this moment, who had put down the face entirely and was just himself in the last room of the last night before everything became different. "Zara."
He had used her first name. He had been using her last name for thirty days. The first name had the specific quality of something that had been held back and was now not held back, and she stood at the window and felt it land and did not pretend it had not.
"Aditya," she said.
They stood at the window. The city outside was the city. The election was tomorrow. The chai was in their hands and the window glass between them and Lucknow was cool and the night had the specific quality of a night before something enormous — held breath, the sense of a door about to open onto something that would not look like this again.
"Get some sleep," he said. His voice was the low one, the unmanaged one. "You have a constituency to win tomorrow."
"So do you," she said.
"Yes," he said. "But I'd rather you won it properly than me winning it by default." He paused. The pause contained several things she was not going to examine in detail. "I meant what I said."
"I know," she said. "I meant what I said too."
She went to her room. She set the alarm. She lay on the bed. Outside, the city that was about to vote was doing whatever a city did the night before, and inside, in the flat that had been two campaigns and one court order and thirty days of the most complicated professional proximity she had ever occupied, it was very quiet.
She slept. Not immediately. But she slept.
Through the wall, she was almost certain she heard him do the same.
