"Processing," he said. He said it honestly. "A loss is a loss. I knew it was possible. Knowing it's possible and receiving it are different experiences." He paused. "I'm fine. I'll be fine. The party will want a debrief. I'll need to think about the next step." He looked at his cup. "I was going to Parliament for a first time. I'll have to find another way in. Or wait."
"You won't wait long," she said. "You know that. You're—" She paused. "You're too good at this to be out of it for long."
"Is that your assessment?" he said. The slight dryness — she had learned that he had his own version of it, the dry quality that emerged when he was being honest rather than polished. "As my opponent of thirty-two days?"
"As the person who watched you most closely for thirty-two days," she said. "You made a genuine apology in Ward 3 when your team advised against it. You shared the budget allocation data without conditions. You installed a ramp in Ward 11 because elderly voters needed it. You told a live television audience that I was the most formidable opponent you'd encountered." She paused. "That's not a losing politician's record. That's a politician who knows what the job actually requires. You'll be back."
He looked at her across the table. The long look — not the under-look, not the quick one, but the slow one that he had been giving her less frequently over the last weeks because the slow one was harder to manage and she had noticed every time he had given it and he knew she had noticed.
"The title dispute," he said. "For the flat. My party is willing to negotiate a settlement — a reasonable market value transfer if you want to formalise the flat as constituency accommodation."
"Tell your party's legal team to expect a call from mine this week," she said. "I want it resolved properly. No loose ends."
"No loose ends," he said. He paused. "Zara."
"Yes," she said.
"Last night," he said. "I want you to know that last night was—" He stopped. He looked for the right word. He was a man who usually had the right word ready and was pausing now because the right word mattered and he was going to find it. "It was real," he said. "Not a thing that happened because of the circumstances. Real."
She looked at him. She thought about thirty-two days of the correct order and keeping the line and the election first, and she thought about last night at the window and the chai and the first name, and she thought: yes. Real. The word was exactly right.
