Cadence was naked, mussed, and gorgeous. He’d kissed her. He’d made love to her. Even by the standards of today, that was wild enough without adding…whatever she was talking about.

But she wasn’t paying any attention to him; she was too busy separating their tangled clothes. “It’s probably, what, a two-hour drive to Georgetown? There shouldn’t be any traffic. Did you walk here?”

“Um, yes.”

“We can take my car, then. It’ll be a mini road trip. Ooh, we should stop for snacks, and I need to fill up anyhow. Do you want to drive the first shift? Wait, how much have you had to drink?”

He couldn’t follow her words at all. They’d been cuddling and then kidding about the end of the world—which was normal for new lovers, surely. At least tonight. She hadn’t been joking?

She was still watching him, so he answered her final question. “A few beers with dinner.” He’d been trying to calm his nerves. It hadn’t worked.

“I’ll drive then.”

“What are you talking about?”

She shimmied into her panties, and then she set her hands on her hips. “We’re going to stop the president.”

He could barely keep his mind around her when she was covered up; there was no way when she wasn’t. “My brain is fuzzy. Can we rewind?”

She handed him his stuff. “Clothing, Graham. Put it on. We’re already going to be arrested for trespassing and fomenting a coup. There’s no need to add indecent exposure.”

“Right. Well, that should be easy. And then we’ll fix Social Security.”

“Priorities. End the threat of war today, address the social safety net tomorrow.”

That was illogical, he was almost certain, but he flopped down and waited for The Cadence Show to be over. He’d spent a year picturing her naked, it would be a shame to miss a single instant of it.

Sadly, she wasn’t thinking about entertaining him. He could tell her mind was far away. She put on her pants and then dug through a drawer and added a lacy bra the color of a robin’s egg to her ensemble. Only when she was clothed and fixing her hair did he get up.

But when he did, she stopped and watched. She seemed as intent on him as he had been on her. Their mirrored desire made his head balloon-light.

“We aren’t really doing this.” He was ninety percent certain they weren’t.

“Of course we are. I’m always serious.”

But she wasn’t. She was always teasing him, making some witty remark, and thinking circles around everyone else. This had to be another joke. She knew he was tense; she was trying to help. He could think of some ways they could stay naked and occupied, but she was grabbing her phone and digging a sweater out of her closet.

His incredulity must have shown on his face, because she said, “What? It might get cold.”

But he hadn’t been thinking about the weather.

They went downstairs—he was going to have good memories of that stairwell, at least if there was a future—and she located her purse, led him outside, and locked the front door.

“I’ve heard that pub has good burgers.” He pointed to a place down a few blocks. “Should we try it?” He’d only picked at the Thai food he’d ordered earlier.

“No, I’ve got something else in mind.” She unlocked the passenger door of her Honda, and then she walked around and climbed in.

“Okay, I appreciate what you’re trying to do, but you’re taking this pretty far. I bet the crowd is thinning out at Vagabond—”

She twisted something on the steering column and washer fluid foamed over the windshield. Rivers of yellow pollen poured down and were whisked away by her wipers. “When will the tree jizz scourge be over?”

He laughed. “Pardon?”

She pulled out of her spot and drove not toward a restaurant or bar, but north, toward 95. “The tree jizz. That oak tree on the corner must have dumped forty gallons of it last year. I can’t remember when the deluge ended.”

“I’ve never heard allergy season described so…colorfully.”

“It’s because you spend too much time with delicate southern belles.”

“Most of them can swear a blue streak.”

“Is that so?” Her words were sticky sweet and incredulous as heck. She didn’t believe him—and she was jealous.

“Cadence.” He brushed her shoulder. “You have to know I was serious when I said I care about you.” That hadn’t actually been what he’d said, but this moment was different and he felt foolish repeating the L-word. But she needed to know he hadn’t looked at another woman since before he’d met her. She’d completely dominated his thoughts and interest.

She gave him a sideways look, sporting a cat’s grin. “I’m still waiting for a ruling on that.”

“From?”

“The board.”

He should explain, cajole, convince her that he’d meant it—because he did. But her questions inside about why he’d waited so long…well, she hadn’t seemed satisfied with his answers. He’d had good reasons for not saying anything sooner and for turning her down, and she hadn’t been able to deny that she didn’t intend to stay in Richmond. Even now, if the world didn’t end, this was temporary. He’d have to live off the memory that it had happened at all.

Knowing that their conversation would twist back around to the same place, he enjoyed all the delicate movements of her wrists as she drove and waited for her to call this off. He was more than a little curious how far she was going to go with it.

A few minutes later, she pulled into a Wawa near the highway. “Okay, I’ll take care of the gas. You should get something to munch on. You know I love Pringles, but I don’t think we’ve talked about how I feel about Cinnamon Bears.”

“Cinnamon Bears?”

“They are my favorite candy. Like of all time. And since we’ve got a drive ahead of us, a Cherry Coke too. Please.”

“Right.” He’d give it to her: she was committed. Maybe she was trying to teach him some sort of lesson—though about what, he had no idea—but he could play along. “I’ll be right back.”

He bought food and returned, fully expecting her to turn around and take them back to her place or his. But instead, she kissed him on the cheek and got on 95 toward Washington. Well, he knew she didn’t do things halfway.

“You should pick some music.” She changed lanes and settled into her seat again. “I was trying to decide what the ultimate road trip album is.”

That at least he could answer: “Bookends.”

“Simon and Garfunkel? ‘A Hazy Shade of Winter,’ ‘Mrs. Robinson,’ ‘America’?”

“Yeah,” he admitted. “My parents were hippies. Or maybe they were too young to be hippies, but they were definitely into 70s counter-culture. I grew up listening to all that late folk.”

“It’s amazing you made it out so normal.”

“Eh, I’m a policy nerd who’s convinced the world is about to end. That’s not the epitome of well-adjusted.”

“And I just talked you into sleeping with me. Well-adjusted is overrated.”

He gave her ponytail a tug and left his hand on her nape. It felt natural, like that was where he should rest it for the rest of his life. It was a silly thought—but he let himself hold onto it and her. A few minutes wouldn’t hurt, at least any more than this already would.

Cadence clicked her tongue. “Bookends is a solid choice. I think I have a playlist with some Allman Brothers, Neil Young, that sort of thing. I have to warn you, though, there is some twenty-first century stuff mixed in, in case that takes away from the purity for you.” She unlocked her phone and handed it to him. “There’s a cord to plug it in somewhere in the glove box.”

Her wallpaper was a blurry photo of the Constitution. “This seems really intimate.”

“You were inside me, but handing you my phone gets your attention?”

“I specifically meant looking at your playlists, but yes.” He opened her iTunes app. She had. . .a lot of music, and it was organized obsessively. There were playlists for different moods, different weather patterns, and different months. “You have a few songs here.”

“And your point is?”

“What’s a ‘Thursday playlist’?”

“That way you feel on Thursday in the winter when it’s gray and you’re sort of melancholy. Like if El Greco were music.” She gave him a quick glance, and her face was a bit flushed. “Tell me you know what I mean.”

“Moody, self-conscious, anxious, stretched—yeah, I might know something about that.”

That was where he’d spent almost every day since the election. Frankly, his spleen was probably going to be tense forever. His underlying anxiety level was high; add in the past few months, and he felt like a fire alarm whose batteries were running out.

But the look Cadence gave him was pure recognition. She saw what he felt, she understood it, and she wanted him in spite of it.

That just couldn’t be right, and what she did next was what he never seemed to manage: she smiled and gave a half shake of her head. “Well, then you know that’s too sad for this. Try the ‘getting shit done’ one.”

She really had a playlist called that? He scrolled up. Yes, she did. “No, I want ‘Ironic Fourth of July.’”

“The irony is there’s no irony. It’s pure patriotic schmaltz. I can’t handle that right now.”

He selected “getting shit done,” plugged it into her car, and, once Jack and Meg White were appropriately pounding, opened the bag of Cinnamon Bears and handed one to her.

“Thank you.” She made a noise of pure pleasure that had him wanting to ask her to pull over, but they were still in the outskirts of Richmond. When he had her again, it was going to be in someplace with absolute privacy and hopefully more space than her backseat.

“You know we have to talk about the elephant in the room,” she said.

“Whether you’re going to come to your senses before we reach the Stonewall Jackson Shrine?”

“Oh, we should put that on our to-do list: destroy Confederate monuments. We should have bought some spray paint. We could have defaced some on the way home.”

He could slurp her optimism down, even if it felt misplaced given what a shit-show the country obviously was at the moment. “The way home from saving the world?”

“Yes, but that’s not what I meant. I was thinking more, will we be leading a coup? And if so, how do we feel about that?”

Oh, well, he supposed if they were really on their way to convince a cabinet secretary to invoke the Twenty-fifth Amendment, that would be a coup, at least in the strict legal sense. “Like are we seditionists?”

“Yes, and I’m only half-joking. I think I can probably be disbarred for this.” She sounded considering but not opposed.

“There’s never been a Twenty-fifth Amendment situation, right?”

“No, not in real life. Congress passed it after Kennedy died. It’s never been used,” Cadence said, sounding like she was repeating notes from con law.

“Well, if it had been around during World War I, we might have a test case. Everyone was suspicious of Edith Galt.”

“As they probably should have been, though maybe it would have been better to be concerned a white supremacist was the president.”

“It turns out depressingly few people find that concerning, then or now.” But that didn’t make her plan any more workable. “Even if somehow you could get the majority of the cabinet on board, you’d never get the vice president.”

“You don’t think it would appeal to his self-interest?” she asked.

“I’m not convinced he’d be any better.”

“So we should just do nothing?”

He had done something—he’d come to her—but she meant something for the country, for the world. “I don’t know.”

She held out her hand and he set another Cinnamon Bear on her palm. “I know what you’re saying, and it’s not that I don’t agree, but I can’t just sit around. We have to try something. So why not this?”

“Sure,” he finally said. But he didn’t believe it. Not doing anything was, if not his normal mode, then something he was comfortable with.

“My main concern is if we normalize the Twenty-fifth Amendment process,” she asked, “what’s stopping a cabinet from doing it just because a president is unpopular? Isn’t it a bad precedent?”

“In the same way the normal political process has been weaponized? Hearings on the White House Christmas card list and all that?”

“Yeah.”

He sighed and sank down in his seat. They’d finally left the city now and the fields stretching out on either side of the highway were wide and dark. It felt like they were in a little bubble of light together. “I’ve lived in Virginia forever. The evidence of the Civil War, not to mention slavery, is everywhere. It’s pretty dumb for me to say, ‘things have never been this bad,’ but it feels like things have never been this bad. Like if we do this—”

“Oh, we’re doing this.”

“—it’ll never work. The Twenty-fifth Amendment? Even impeachment? It seems like fiction.”

“Democracy is a process, and these are built-in safeguards.”

He didn’t want to argue with her, and he didn’t want to let her see how pessimistic he was. She’d dump him. So instead, he said, “Okay, so if it works, how does the country get past this? How do we stand at a ballgame together and sing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’? The damage to our institutions is bad enough, but how do we make the truth matter again? How do we forgive each other?”

It was an impossible question, but probably not a necessary one. The country wasn’t going to be around long enough for it to matter.

“How did we ever? This has always been a divided country, and one built on exclusion. We’ve always overlooked a lot of shit to sit at that Thanksgiving table and talk about national unity. I would guess if we can survive this, there’ll be a lot of repression.”

“Well, cheers to that.” He raised his soda and toasted the air. “Repression is how I get through life.”

She reached out and stroked the back of his hand. “How can you not know how great you are?”

“What?”

“I don’t think anyone at the statehouse understands what goes on there, all of it and how it’s connected and what it means for the future, the way you do.”

He folded his arms across his stomach, which felt suddenly tense. “You’re crazy. There are lots of people who—”

“No. Please listen to me and accept this compliment. You are extremely good at what you do. The best. And lots of people depend on you. Not just Delegate Pendleton, it’s every Democratic staffer and most of the reporters. It’s fucking thankless to toil for a minority party in a statehouse, and maybe you feel like you should have done more, but you’re awesome, Graham Wilcox. And if you think I would have spent a year yearning for the loser you just described, I’ve got to say that’s damn insulting.”

“Cadence, you’re smart and beautiful and ambitious and you’re going to be the one who saves the world someday.” He had no doubt about that. Okay, he had some doubts, but not about her, only about the world.

“With you?”

She tossed the question off, but he could feel the weight under it like a prow of a ship.

“Well, I can’t let you go now.” He linked his fingers with hers. “I showed up at your house thinking, ‘no regrets,’ but about the time you kissed me, it had changed. That was…pretty intense. It—I wouldn’t have taken you to bed if it hadn’t meant a lot to me, and if I didn’t think it did to you too.”

“Good.” She squeezed his hand hard. “Because it did. In fact, I think you used the word love.”

She wasn’t going to let that go, was she? “This isn’t really the place for that discussion, but as soon as you’re not driving, I’ll make you a proper declaration. We could turn around, go back to your place or mine, and I could do it right now.”

“Silly Graham. We haven’t accomplished our mission yet.”

Her self-satisfied smile was back, so he let himself get carried along with it. She told him about a restaurant she liked in Fredericksburg, and he told her about a military history class he’d taken in college, and they ate crap and listened to music, and it was both precisely like the time they’d spent together before and absolutely new. Everything that had been buzzing around them was acknowledged, accepted. Somehow, she was his, and he was hers, at least for the moment.

She exited onto 395. After they cut across the Northern Virginia suburbs, she took a few more turns and they were actually in Georgetown. He knew better than to try and question her plan at this point, so he just leaned back and watched their progress. They flew up the almost empty Wisconsin Avenue.

“It’s right on the border with Burleith, I think. I’m going to turn maybe at the next light, and we’ll start trolling. It’s a yellow brick house with green shutters.”

“Forest green?” He said it like Barbara Streisand in Hello, Dolly!

Cadence gasped. “A man who knows his musicals. How did I not fuck you a year ago?”

“It’s one of life’s great mysteries.”

She took a left, and they slowly crawled down a side street filled with quaint, hyper-expensive houses. They rounded the block and did the same thing. Three streets. Four.

“Maybe it’s on the other side of Wisconsin?”

“A few more, then we’ll try that.”

But they didn’t find it. No yellow brick. No forest green shutters.

“One more block,” she said, stubbornly.

He’d thought this was for fun, but she was over-invested. Why did they need to find the house? What were they going to do when they got there? Hadn’t they proved whatever this was about? “Cadence. This has been probably the best night of my life, but this plan was never going to—”

She slammed on the brakes, and the car shuddered. “Holy shit, there it is.” It was the exact house she’d described, and several rooms were lit.

This being Georgetown, there weren’t any parking spots available, but she drove to the corner and pulled in front of a hydrant. She turned off her car, and they both twisted to watch the secretary’s house through the back window.

“That’s where the labor secretary lives, huh? It’s a bit of a fixer-upper.”

“It’s pre-Civil War, and the kitchen’s all white marble and glass. That’s all I remember.”

“So impractical. What would you do when the top came off the blender and tomato sauce went everywhere?”

“Clean. A lot.” She leaned against the headrest. “Well, here we are. What are we going to do about it?”

Nothing, because there’s nothing to be done. But she’d hate that answer.

He pressed a finger to the tip of her nose. It was still miraculous he could touch her whenever he wanted. “Why did you want to come here? And don’t say to save the world.”

There was only just enough light to make out her expression: pensive and a little bit sad. “I have loved you for a long time,” she finally said.

She hadn’t said that word to him yet, that love word. It might have some sort of performative power, because it filled some crack in his chest with warmth.

She loved him.

“After I made that offer and you said no, I kept trying to get over it,” she said, “because it seemed like you didn’t reciprocate. Which was…fine. Painful, but fine. But I couldn’t get past it because you kept being you. I’d board my heart up again, and then you’d rip the nails out. And we just tonight let each other in. I’m vulnerable here. Maybe I couldn’t be in my bed with you anymore because it’s scary, trusting you, when I told myself for months you didn’t want me.”

“I have always—”

“Sure, but you said no and then you told me how you really felt because of the president’s tweets?”

He should have kept that part to himself. “I’m an ass.”

“With a ridiculously low opinion of himself.”

“I’ll work on that.”

“No. It’s not a test or a flaw. It’s a thing about you that’s bringing the rest into focus. I’m sorry I didn’t know before. Coming here was about running, but with you not from you, and being silly and finding hope.”

“Where is the hope?”

She gestured between them. “It’s here.”

“Ah.” Maybe he didn’t have to believe in the entire world, he could limit himself to believing in her. He pressed his mouth to hers. “Yup, I’m feeling better.” He unbuckled his seat belt, leaned forward so he could wrap his arms around her waist and kiss her properly.

She did seem to want him, and she was bright and optimistic, and it was like a candle in the dark. He’d take it for as long as she’d offer it.

He trailed his lips down her neck. “I promise, I’m going to earn—”

She squeezed his shoulders. “Graham, look, someone is coming out.”

The front door of the labor secretary’s house had opened. First through the door was what had to be a Secret Service agent given the conservative black suit, but behind him was the secretary herself, dressed in workout clothes and holding the leash of a gray standard poodle.

They set off down the street toward Graham and Cadence.

This was dumb. It was crazy. They would probably be arrested if they tried to talk to the secretary; even if they did risk it, she was never going to stop the president. That wasn’t how things worked, not in government and not in Graham’s life. But he’d wanted power and no regrets and to save the world, and Cadence had put him here, had given him this.

He looked down at the woman leaning against him. Cadence was giggling. She’d wanted to give him hope, and, strangely, he had it. Holy crap.

Which was why he gently untangled himself from her, opened the car door, and stepped out into the street. He folded his arms on top of Cadence’s car, wanting to look as non-threatening as possible since he was about to do something pretty gosh darn dumb.

“Madam Secretary,” he called. “Do you believe in love?”