"Of course you do," he said. Not mockingly. With the specific quality that she had learned over seventeen days was his version of appreciation — the observation that recognised a thing without performing a response to it.
She sat on the sofa. He sat in the chair. Both of them had their phones — she had seventeen percent battery, which was the specific horror of the late-night worker who had been planning to charge before bed. He appeared to have more — he had a spare battery pack that he carried and had apparently already attached it, which was the prepared-ness of someone who had been in enough campaign situations to know that having no phone was worse than any specific problem on the phone.
"Your generator," she said. "The one your team brought on Day Three."
"In the third bedroom," he said. "It requires twenty minutes to set up and it's loud enough to wake the floor."
"The battery pack?" she said.
"I'll share it," he said. "Charge your phone."
She looked at him. He held out the pack. She took it and plugged in her phone and set it on the table between them and they both looked at it for a moment — her phone, charging from his battery pack, on the shared table in the candlelit living room, which was a domestic scene of a kind that neither of them had planned for and that the court order had, once again, engineered without asking their permission.
"Day Seventeen," he said.
"Fourteen to go," she said.
"Are you scared?" he said. He asked it the way he asked things in the late-night kitchen — directly, without the political register, in the voice that was the voice of a person rather than a candidate.
She thought about whether to answer honestly. She answered honestly, because at eleven-forty-five PM in a powercut in a candlelit room with seventeen days to an election, honest was the register that her system had defaulted to over the past week and she was done fighting it. "Yes," she said. "Not of losing. I've lost cases in court. Losing is survivable. I'm scared that I win and I'm in Parliament and I spend the next five years learning the difference between what I thought it was and what it actually is, and the difference is large enough to matter."
"It is large," he said. "The difference. It's very large." He was looking at the candle. "You adapt. You find the space within the system where your specific skills and intentions can work. It's smaller than you expected. You work in it."
"Is that what you've been doing?"
"I haven't been in Parliament yet," he said. "But I've been watching my father for thirty years." He paused. "And I've been in party structures. Committees. The space is real. It's just not the whole thing."
"That's honest," she said.
"You asked an honest question," he said.
