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And Hank—who had given speeches his entire adult life, who had built a career on knowing exactly what to say and when to say it—couldn’t think of a single word.

He didn’t need one.

Chad’s hand was warm in his. The car was thirty feet away. The night was cool and clear.

And his.

CHAPTER 20

The flight attendant called Hank “Senator” before they’d cleared the gate, and that was how Wednesday started.

Not a big moment. Just a woman with a beverage cart and a professional smile recognizing the face that had been on every screen in the country twelve hours ago. “Can I get you anything, Senator? Congratulations, by the way.” Hank thanked her, ordered coffee, and went back to his phone, thumbs working through what looked like an endless scroll of messages.

Chad ordered a ginger ale and watched Georgia disappear through the window.

Tuesday night was already becoming something else—not a memory exactly, more like a photograph someone else had taken. The community center. The fluorescent lights. The podium. This is Chad. He makes me brave. He could replay it in sequence, could see Hank’s hands shaking with the index cards, could feel the exact moment Hank’s fingers had closed around his and pulled him forward. But it was flattening. Becoming a story. The kind of thing that would get retold until the retelling replaced the thing itself.

At the gate in Atlanta, a man in a Braves cap had stared at them for a full thirty seconds before looking away. Chad couldn’t tell if he’d been recognized or if the guy was just working through his feelings about two men holding boarding passes in close proximity.

Welcome to the rest of your life, buddy. Better get used to the staring.

Hank was deep in his phone now. The posture had changed somewhere over the Carolinas—shoulders squaring, jaw setting, the accent pulling back from its Georgia sprawl into something more clipped and careful—the senator reassembling himself in real time, component by component.

“Frannie wants dinner tomorrow,” Hank said without looking up. “She says, and I quote, ‘Tell the boyfriend I’m vetting him properly this time and he should prepare accordingly.’”

“Should I be scared?”

“Frannie’s harmless.”

“You hesitated.”

“I did not hesitate.” Hank hesitated. “She’s mostly harmless.”

Chad smiled and turned back to the window. Virginia now, the suburban sprawl south of DC beginning to assert itself—highways and housing developments and the beige of mid-Atlantic architecture. Somewhere down there was Manassas.

He didn’t look for it.

The pilot announced their descent into Reagan National, and Hank put his phone away long enough to take Chad’s hand. A slight gesture—automatic, easy, the way you’d reach for something you expected to be there. Three weeks ago, that hand would have stayed in his lap on an airplane. Three weeks ago, a lot of things would have stayed where they were.

“You okay?” Hank asked.

“Just tired.”

“We’ll be home soon.”

Home. Hank said it like it was settled. Like the word had an address they both knew.

Chad squeezed his hand and didn’t say anything.

The apartment was the same, and it wasn’t.

Same hardwood floors. Same den with the couch and the bookshelves and the desk where Hank left his laptop open like a man who trusted the world not to touch his things. Same kitchen where Hank had made him eggs the morning after, low and slow, the careful choreography of a man performing domesticity for an audience of one.

But First Kiss hung on the wall across from the couch—acrylic on canvas, a painting Chad had made in his studio seven weeks ago and offered on a first date. It looked good there. Like the wall had been waiting for it.

And Chad’s stuff was here. Not all of it—the bulk of his life was still technically at the Foggy Bottom apartment with Ricky, clothes in the closet, canvases against the wall, the accumulated debris of twenty-three years of not owning very much. But enough had migrated. His toothbrush in the bathroom. A hoodie over the desk chair. Two tubes of cadmium yellow on the kitchen counter because he’d been working on something the week before the election and had set them down and never picked them up.

Neither of them had discussed this. The conversation from three weeks ago—Hank’s blurted move-in request, Chad’s I need to think, the alarm bells that had clanged and then quieted—had never actually concluded. There’d been no official resolution, no lease discussion, no moment where Chad had said yes, I’m moving in. He’d just started being here more than he was anywhere else, and Hank had started saying home like it included both of them, and the thing had happened the way most real things happened. Not with a declaration. With gravity.