Though I was no longer officially employed by Miles, there were some loose ends to tie up before I walked away for good. A few days after my birthday, I commuted to the Hill one last time to turn in my credentials and pick up my last box of pictures and trinkets. Though L.K. wanted to throw me a goodbye party, I’d politely refused, done for now with parties, but I delivered cards to those who I was closest with, gave hugs to all the rest, and my newest contact information to everyone. Beginning next week, they could find me at The Daylight Project in Arlington.

“I’m going to be keeping you and Miles accountable,” I said to Bo, before he and Miles dashed off to a full day of events in Maryland. As expected, Bo became chief of staff as easily as one stepping off an escalator. This was his floor. He strode confidently, knowing exactly in which direction to head.

When I was at the front desk, exchanging final bits of gossip with Sara at lunchtime, a few high school interns tentatively approached. Would I mind, they wondered, giving them a tour of the Capitol? These interns, all young women, had seen my name in the press. Of course, I said. With the Senate now adjourned for recess, they wouldn’t be missed around the office. And it would be a farewell, of sorts, to a place that I knew well and loved—and a good distraction from Atlas.

The truth was I’d thought about him almost constantly since the news of his engagement Friday. Now that he was getting married, I was not only bidding goodbye to the last, loitering hope we might be something more, but also to our friendship as it had been. Marriage can reconfigure a life; I might as well predict that Atlas’s priorities would necessarily change once he had a wife.

A wife.

The day following the party, Wallis and Cricket had checked on me only to discover me lying atop my covers, bent like a bug in death. Wallis had knelt before me, just as I’d done for her all those months ago, the space between us crumpled, and then I was crying on her shoulder, unable to hold it in anymore, hating the sounds I was making, but forgiving myself for my tears. There, she had said to me, so quiet I barely heard. Better.

After a while—I don’t know how long—Cricket took a book from my shelf and placed herself in the small chair reserved for clothes not quite dirty enough for laundry, and began to read aloud about Matthew and Marilla and Anne. Wallis curled around me on the bed.