"I don't know yet," he said. "It might have helped with two or three committee members. That's not enough to change the ward significantly. But—" He stopped. He looked at his hands. "It was the right thing to do regardless of whether it helps."
She looked at him. She thought: you did the thing because it was right, not because I told you to. She had told him to do it, but the reason he had done it was not her. The reason he had done it was himself — the part of him that separated the ethical from the political and acted on the ethical even when it was less convenient. She had seen this in him before. She had been filing it as data for nineteen days.
"You should eat something," she said. "There's dal from this afternoon."
He looked at her. The under-look — faster, less managed. Then: "Are you offering to heat it up?"
"I'm informing you of its existence," she said. "The heating is your own responsibility."
He almost smiled. She went back to her press review. She heard him go to the kitchen and heard the familiar sounds of a man heating food at nine PM, and she thought about the committee members who had not expected it and about the forty minutes of questions he had stayed for and about the fact that in twelve more days this was going to be over in the specific way that elections ended things — decisively, irrevocably, one of them winning and one of them not, the ground on which they had been coexisting swept away by the result.
She did not know how to feel about this. She noticed that she did not know how to feel about this, which was itself new information, because before Day One she had known exactly how to feel about it: she was going to win, he was going to lose, the election would be over and she would get to work. The simplicity of that feeling was gone and she could not get it back and she was not sure she wanted it back, which was the most complicated thing she had felt in a very long time.
He came back with two bowls. He set one at her end of the table.
She looked at the bowl. She looked at him.
