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Inside the house, a floorboard creaked—Shelby checking on Owen, probably. The sound of a mother moving through her home at night, quiet and sure.

Chad closed his eyes.

He didn’t think about Manassas. He didn’t think about the phone call that hadn’t come in two years, the silence that had its own specific weight.

He didn’t think about it at all.

CHAPTER 19

The Forsyth County Community Center smelled like coffee and panic.

Not panic, exactly. Controlled anxiety. The hum of forty people trying to project calm while refreshing their phones every eleven seconds. Hank recognized the energy because he’d spent six years in rooms that ran on it—committee hearings, floor votes, the slow-motion emergencies that constituted daily life in the Senate. But those rooms had procedure to hide behind. Robert’s Rules. Points of order. The comforting fiction that everything was under control because someone had written down the sequence in which it would happen.

Here there was no sequence. Just fluorescent lights, folding tables, red-white-and-blue bunting that had been hung with more enthusiasm than precision, and a bank of television screens along the far wall showing county maps in various stages of completion. A local caterer had set up stations along the back—pulled pork, cornbread, sweet tea—the geometry of a Southern campaign event. A podium stood at the front of the room with a microphone and a cluster of cameras that Hank was trying very hard not to look at.

He was, he realized, holding a bourbon he had not sipped in twenty minutes.

Chad stood beside him near the windows. Close enough that their shoulders touched—that single, steady point of contact the only thing preventing Hank from doing something undignified, like pacing, or vomiting, or delivering an unprompted monologue about turnout models to the caterer.

“You’re refreshing again,” Chad said.

Hank looked down at his phone. He was, in fact, refreshing again. “I’m checking the⁠—”

“You’re refreshing.”

“Fine. I’m refreshing.” He put the phone in his pocket. Took it out again. Put it back. “The early precincts don’t mean anything. Rural counties report first. They always skew⁠—”

“Hank.”

“What?”

“Drink the bourbon.”

Hank looked at the glass. Took a sip. It burned going down, which was something. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” Chad’s eyes moved across the room—the bartender’s scan, reading the space, cataloging. “Patricia’s been on her phone for nine straight minutes. Is that good or bad?”

“With Patricia, it’s impossible to tell. She has the same expression for ‘we’re winning by ten’ and ‘the building is on fire.’”

“Comforting.”

“She’s been doing this for twenty years. If there were something to worry about, she’d—” Hank stopped. “She’d look exactly like she looks right now. Which is not helpful.”

On the nearest screen, a county in south Georgia turned red. A small cheer went up from a cluster of volunteers near the buffet. Hank’s stomach clenched, released, clenched again. He knew these counties. Had driven through them, knocked on doors, eaten in their diners, shaken hands at their churches. Chattooga. Catoosa. Murray. The names ran through his political brain like a rosary—each one carrying a number, a margin, a story about who showed up and why.

Shelby appeared, weaving through the crowd with two plates and the look of a woman who was not taking no for an answer. Lowell followed with Owen on his hip, the toddler glassy-eyed and fighting sleep with the ferocity only a two-year-old could muster.

“Eat,” Shelby said, thrusting a plate at each of them. Pulled pork sliders, coleslaw, cornbread.

“I’m not⁠—”

“Eat.”

Hank ate. The pork was tender, the sauce good, and he was hungrier than he’d realized. Chad was already halfway through a slider because Chad had the survival instincts of someone who’d learned to eat when food appeared.

Owen reached for Hank, making the grabby-hands gesture that preceded all negotiations. “Fuzzy.”

“Hey, buddy.” Hank transferred his plate to Chad and took Owen from Lowell, settling the warm weight against his chest. Owen immediately grabbed a fistful of beard and held on like a man securing an anchor in a storm.