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“You’ll see me at breakfast. Seven sharp. I’m making biscuits.” She squeezed his arm. Looked at him. Whatever she saw seemed to satisfy something, because she nodded once and then she was gone, the community center door swinging shut behind her.

The steps outside were concrete and cracked. The night air hit Hank’s face like cold water—sharp, clean, smelling of pine and the distant edge of frost. November in Georgia. The stars were out, the same absurd profusion he’d grown up under and that seemed brand new every time he came home.

Chad sat down on the top step. Hank sat beside him.

For a while, neither of them spoke. The muffled sounds of cleanup drifted through the door behind them—chairs being folded, tables dragged, someone laughing. A car started in the lot, headlights sweeping across the gravel before turning onto the road.

“You know what’s funny?” Chad said.

“What.”

“I spent the whole night terrified that I’d do something wrong. Step on someone’s foot. Call someone the wrong name. Use the wrong fork. And the whole time, you were the one up there—” He made a gesture toward the building, the podium, the space where Hank had stood and said the truest thing he’d ever said. “Going completely off-script in front of the entire state.”

“I did not go completely off-script.”

“You forgot your own speech.”

“I didn’t forget it. I finished it. And then I—improvised.”

“You froze, stared at the crowd for about forty-five seconds, and then said, I’m a senator like it was breaking news.”

Hank opened his mouth to argue, then didn’t, because that was, in fact, exactly what had happened.

“It worked,” he said finally.

“Yeah.” Chad’s voice softened. “It worked.”

A pickup truck rumbled past on the road, its taillights shrinking into the dark. Somewhere in the trees, crickets or frogs or both were making the persistent, rhythmic sound that Georgia nights were made of.

“Shit,” Hank said quietly.

Chad looked at him.

“I won.”

“You won.”

“I said all that. On television. In front of—” He calculated. Stopped. “Doesn’t matter. I won.”

“You did.”

Hank sat with it. The weight and the lightness of it, simultaneously pressing down and lifting up, and he didn’t have a word for what that felt like because he’d never felt it before. Not happiness, exactly. Not relief. Something that contained both and also the exhaustion and the terror and the strange, startled recognition that the man who’d walked into this building six hours ago no longer existed.

“We should go,” Chad said. “Before Shelby sends a search party.”

“One more minute.”

“Take as many as you need.”

Hank looked at the sky. The stars were doing what they always did—burning steadily, saying nothing, meaning everything or nothing depending on who was looking.

He was looking.

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s go.”

He stood. Offered Chad his hand—a reflex, the Southern-manners muscle memory that would outlast everything else about him. Chad took it, pulled himself up, and didn’t let go.

They walked to the car like that, hand in hand, across a gravel parking lot in Forsyth County, Georgia, at one in the morning on the first Wednesday in November. The lot was nearly empty. The bunting would come down tomorrow. The folding tables would go back to wherever folding tables lived between events.