I’d first met Atlas in Virginia coal country, where Gregory Richardson thought I, his college-aged daughter, could help reinforce his threadbare support. I spent many nights counting the bumps on the popcorn ceilings of motel rooms, dreading another morning of runny eggs and talking points, of being a prop for my father. (Only later would I fully recognize the good he was doing, bringing dentists and doctors to underserved communities, repaving crumbling roads, introducing broadband internet. It would be several years more before I realized I wanted to get into politics to do the same.) I would’ve despised the assignment entirely if it hadn’t been for Atlas. He wasn’t necessarily supposed to befriend the daughter of the guy he was writing about, but the campaign trail is narrow, and the loneliness makes it claustrophobic.

My Atlas—because I was already thinking of him as my friend, my person—and I stole moments to talk everywhere: in elementary school gymnasiums, buses that smelled of hand sanitizer and french fries, dim veterans’ halls, back roads bars filled with journalists with moderate alcohol issues and campaign staff with major ones. Atlas had spent his childhood off Marylebone High Street, in a dusty flat that implied inherited wealth, mostly gone, walls coated with lacquered paint and rooms filled with furniture not meant for children. His mother: American, a struggling actress. His father: Welsh, a mediocre barrister and part-time writer of mystery novels. They never married, and she left when Atlas was fourteen. When he told me this, he admitted that other people often found him reserved. He wondered if I thought his description of his childhood, as an example, was terse. No, I’d insisted. The way he recounted these details suggested a writer’s mind, always capturing the pertinent details and finding a concise way to convey them. It suggested someone who thought before he spoke. Sometimes Atlas sounded English; other times his accent was barely detectable. His face was slightly asymmetrical, his nose had a bump from when he fell off his bike freshman year at Stanford, but I often caught myself staring. I was nineteen and in love for the first time—with his deadpan manner, his way of sitting that made his rickety chair look comfortable, his big tips to tired waitresses.

My Atlas. In fifteen years he never made one move.

While he’d been overseas, I could forget, partially, how badly I wanted him to. Now I feared this desire would be plastered over my face.