He came at eight PM.
She had been there since six — the post-result press had kept her occupied until five-thirty, and then she had come back to the flat that was no longer a campaign flat and was now simply a flat, the campaign materials cleared, the whiteboards blank, the specific lived-in quality of a space that had had thirty-two people in it every day for a month and now had one. It felt very large.
She had made chai. She had sat at the kitchen table. She had looked at the whiteboards and the blank space where the ward maps had been and the window where they had stood the previous night and she had thought, with the thorough attention she brought to all things, about the thirty-two days and what they had been and what they were going to become.
He knocked. She opened the door. He had two suitcases and a laptop bag — the same things he had arrived with, thirty-two days ago, when she had opened the door and he had stood in the corridor and said her last name and she had said his and both of them had been looking at each other with the professional assessment of two opponents taking inventory.
She stepped back. He came in. He looked at the flat — the empty walls, the blank whiteboards, the very specific quality of a place that had been intensely occupied and had just released its occupation.
"It looks different," he said.
"Yes," she said. "Come in. I made chai."
He set down the suitcases. He came to the kitchen. He sat at his end of the table — the right end, which was still his end by the thirty-two-day habit that was not going to be in effect tomorrow but was in effect tonight. She sat at her end. The chai was on the table. Both of them with their cups, at their ends, one more time.
"How are you?" she said.
