"Tomorrow," she said. Very quietly.
"Tomorrow," he said. Same quality. Not a question or an objection — an acknowledgment. Tonight this. Tomorrow whatever the tomorrow was going to be.
She kissed him. He kissed her back. The election was in eleven hours and the city was outside and both of them were exactly who they were and both of them knew what tomorrow was going to bring and none of that was not true. All of it was true simultaneously, which was, she had learned over thirty-one days, the specific condition of being in something real.
She pulled back. He looked at her. The expression on his face was the one that was entirely him — no face, no candidate, just the person who had made coffee at five-thirty AM and shared a battery pack in a powercut and gone to Ward 3 because it was the right thing to do and told her she was the most honest person in a career built on managing honesty.
"Good night," she said.
"Good night," he said.
She went to her room. She set her alarm for six AM. She thought about tomorrow with the clear eyes of someone who had held on to the correct order of things and had held the line and who could now, on the last night, acknowledge that the line had been worth holding and that what came after the election was going to be genuinely complicated in a way she was looking forward to, which was a sentence she had not expected to be true and which was nevertheless exactly, precisely true.
She slept. The alarm would come at six. The counting would start at eight. The result would come when it came.
She was ready.
