Then someone in the gallery started clapping.
Melissa didn’t see who it was—somewhere in the back, a single pair of hands breaking the stillness. But it spread, rippling through the room like a wave, until half the gallery was applauding and Morrison was banging his gavel for order.
“That’s enough,” Morrison said, but he was almost smiling. “We’ll take a fifteen-minute recess before the committee vote.”
Melissa’s legs were shaking. She gripped the edge of the table, steadying herself, as people began to move and murmur around her.
She looked up at the gallery.
Rachel was beaming.
And next to Rachel… June. Standing very still, one hand pressed to her mouth, her eyes locked on Melissa’s.
Their gazes held across the crowded room. Melissa couldn’t read June’s face, but it was open at least. Meeting her eyes.
Melissa nodded, just slightly. A promise. A beginning.
Then David was at her elbow, reporters were shouting questions, and the machinery of politics churned back to life around her.
The committee vote was called twenty minutes later.
Melissa sat at the witness table while Morrison read the roll call, her hands flat against her thighs, her heartbeat loud and strange in her ears. She’d been in rooms like this dozens of times. She knew how votes felt—the careful tally, the professional detachment, the way you learned to read outcomes in the pauses between names.
This was different. Her chest was open in a way it hadn’t been this morning, and everything was getting in.
“Senator Reynaud.”
“Aye.”
One.
“Senator Dalton.”
“Nay.”
“Senator Foster.”
“Aye.”
She counted quietly, privately, the way she’d counted seconds between lightning and thunder in the dark with Lila between them and June’s hand warm in hers. The way you counted when the outcome mattered enough that you needed to know before anyone told you.
“Senator Morrison.”
“Aye.”
The final count came in at seven in favor, four opposed.
The bill would go to the floor.
Applause erupted in the gallery. David was grinning, pumping his fist. Colleagues were reaching across the aisle to shake Melissa’s hand, some genuinely, some for the cameras.
She accepted the congratulations on autopilot, said the right things, smiled the right smiles. But her eyes kept drifting to the back of the room, searching for June through the movement and noise.
The gallery was emptying. Rachel stood near the door, waiting.
June was gone.
Melissa stilled.
