It’ll be four soon. He can still make it home tonight, to be there with Seema when the election is called. He looks around the office: it won’t be the same here. He feels foolish. He hands over the list to a staff member, hurrying through his instructions. “Go, we’ve got this, go,” he’s told.

He pumps the accelerator as he noses it through Reno, swearing at the late-afternoon traffic like he’s never done before, only the election coverage on the radio providing relief as voting closes in the eastern states. The first states are called, Kentucky for McCain and Vermont for Obama, and exit polls are trickling in.

He’s just gotten through the ragged mountain slopes of the Sierras when—Oh. My. God!—Pennsylvania is called for Obama, not thirty minutes after the polls closed there. They’d been expecting the swing state to be hard fought, called only after a long, nail-biting night. Obama must be doing much better than even they’d expected. Bill rolls down the glass and screams out the window, the screams whisked away by the wind, so he can barely hear himself. Still he continues to scream, to the air, to the countryside, to the road, to Seema: “Seema, we won Pennsylvania!”

Her empty seat beside him is a reproach. He recalls the tone of her voice—Bill, I love you—so different from their frequent casual affirmations, apprehensively solemn like their earliest declarations. How could he have doubted her?

He hunts around for news on Prop 8 but can’t find any radio coverage. He assumes she’s probably volunteering somewhere with Fiaz and gives him a call.

She isn’t. Fiaz doesn’t even know she’s back from Reno. He and Pierre have been knocking on doors in neighboring Alameda all day. He is despondent: turning out every “no” vote in the Bay Area has now become necessary, to counter their opponents’ lead in the rural parts of the state. There’s some fear that if an Obama win becomes inevitable too soon, many voters in San Francisco may not even bother to vote.

A sense of anxiety, of urgency, grips Bill. As if he needs to reach Seema now before polls close in California, to show her he is standing with her. She’d asked him: How is she to believe in all this “hopey-changey stuff”—as Palin calls it—when even Obama is still unwilling or unable—or both—to stand with everybody standing with him? He increases his speed, first seventy-five, then eighty, approaching even ninety in spots. Ordinarily he’d be worried about being stopped by cops, even when he’s driving just five over the limit, which is his max.

Ohio is called for Obama when Bill’s still an hour away from San Francisco. And with that, McCain effectively has no path to an electoral college majority, and the race is over even while California is still voting.