25. Ami
Chapter twenty-five
Ami
Election day, better called Re-Election Day, feels like the whole town is breathing in and forgetting how to exhale.
I believe him. I also don’t. I’m made entirely of hope and static.
At the campaign office, people are already buzzing.
Coffee cups clatter, printers spit, tape guns whir.
Volunteers cluster around folding tables, and there are only two or three of the cinnamon rolls Mrs. Connelly dropped off, They are glazed, still slightly warm, and, according to the note, “powered by butter and belief.”
Ethan’s by the whiteboard, his smile soft around the edges the moment he spots me. He crosses the room like there’s no one else in it and kisses my cheek, brief and steadying.
“Hi,” he says, and somehow, it’s a whole paragraph.
“Hi,” I echo. My hand finds his without thinking.
We fan out across Seabrook with our volunteers.
By nine a.m., I’ve climbed more porch steps than I care to count.
A golden retriever insists on bringing me a damp tennis ball like I’m the morning entertainment.
A woman in a floral robe leans out to whisper that she voted early and is making clam chowder “for after you win, honey.” A teenager with blue hair tells me she started a ‘zine because of the reenactment show and asks if the academy will have screen-printing. I say it will. I want it to.
At a tidy little farmhouse on Maple Street, a man in suspenders points to the road and launches into a full-throated complaint about potholes. I promise we’ve heard him. Two blocks later, a woman with dirt under her nails complains about stray cats treating her vegetable beds like a spa.
Ethan bumps my shoulder with his. “Potholes and feral felines. The backbone of democracy.”
I try to smother a laugh and fail. The sound sticks with me when we pause outside the hardware store and share a paper cup of too-hot coffee. It’s bitter and perfect. He blows on the surface and then presses it into my hands like a pledge.
“This is going to be okay,” he says, not loudly but with the same conviction that steadied me onstage. “No matter what happens, we did what we said we’d do. We told the truth and built something.”
I nod. I want to tell him I’ve never seen anyone earn trust the way he has, that his kind of leadership is quiet and stubborn and exactly what this place needs. But the words pile up behind my ribs, and all that comes out is, “You’re good. You know that?”
The corner of his mouth lifts. “Only because you keep telling me.”
By late morning, the booths at the community center are open and humming.
The gym smells like pencil shavings and floor polish.
Volunteers guide people to the right tables, comparing names to lists and pointing to privacy screens.
There are kids in hand embellished tee shirts, older folks in their good clothes, and teenagers trying to look nonchalant about doing something helpful.
I spend hours doing the small things: handing out pens, fetching a new roll of tape, unjamming a printer like my life depends on it. Occasionally, I catch Ethan’s voice across the room—patient, even, never showy—answering questions, thanking people for coming.
He finds me near the bleachers when the noon rush thins. “Stolen minute?” he asks. I nod and follow him down a side corridor where the noise softens. It’s just a short hallway with a dusty trophy case and a soda machine humming, but the quiet feels like a secret.
He leans against the wall, tilts his head. “Hi again.”
I grin. “You look devastatingly normal.”
“Tragic,” he says solemnly. “Think anyone would notice if I ducked out and got a haircut?”
“There’s a foam-finger kid in the lobby. He would absolutely notice.”
He groans. “Of course there’s a foam-finger kid.”
I step closer without meaning to. The fluorescent lights overhead are unflattering, but it doesn’t matter. He looks like everything steady. My fingers curl on the edge of his jacket. His hand finds my waist the way it has every day in my head lately, like it belongs there.
“What if we lose?” I whisper, because it’s safer to say it here than to let it skitter around my skull.
He studies my face like it’s part of the map he’s trying to carry in his head.
“Then we do what we said we’d do anyway.
We build the academy. We keep pushing the council.
We make the town better because that’s the work, not the title.
” His thumb skims the hem of my sweater, a tiny reassurance. “And we stay us.”
My throat tightens. I nod, and then I kiss him. Not dramatic. Not cinematic. Just the kind of kiss you can tuck into your pocket and take back out when you need to remember what you’re doing this for.
A door bangs somewhere down the hall. We step apart, breathless and grinning like teenagers who got away with something.
“Back to it,” he says, and the moment’s already settling somewhere warm inside my chest.
Afternoon slides into early evening like someone’s dimming a light. The lines are slow. People hover in the entryway, talking in clusters and checking their phones. The air has that odd combination of celebration and dread, like the minute before the roller coaster drops.
Aunt Maggie arrives around five. I see her first in the reflection of the lobby’s glass doors: jacket buttoned to her throat, hair neat, mouth set in that line I know too well.
She looks over the room like she’s measuring it.
When our eyes meet, she doesn’t look away.
She crosses to me through the crowd and takes my hand without a word.
The last time she held my hand I was twelve and afraid of a thunderstorm. I stand very still.
“Long day,” she says quietly.
I swallow. “It’s almost over.”
“Mm.” She squeezes once, a little pulse of contact, then releases me. “Let’s get to the hall.”
The announcement is set for seven in the same gym where people voted all day.
By six forty-five the bleachers are packed, and the floor is crowded with people standing around the perimeter.
The American flag at the back wall hangs straighter than usual.
Along a side wall, someone laid out trays of cookies and a punch bowl that looks like it belongs at a church basement social.
It shouldn’t fit the gravity of the night, but somehow it does.
Ethan and I take our places near the front with the other candidates.
Aunt Maggie drifts to the left but then circles back, claiming my other side like gravity I don’t fight.
When the mayor asks us to step forward to offer brief remarks, Ethan looks at me first. There’s a question there: Are you okay?
I nod. He exhales like that was the last piece he needed.
He speaks without notes. He thanks the poll workers, the volunteers, and the others who stayed from dawn to dusk.
He talks about potholes and stray cats and big plans and small kindnesses.
He says Seabrook is not an idea—it’s the people in this room, and the ones who couldn’t make it here tonight, and the kids who will read about this day in a history book we haven’t written yet.
He says no matter what the outcome, he’s in. He’s staying. He’s working.
I don’t know how to breathe and listen at the same time, so I do a terrible job of both.
Then the mayor turns to Aunt Maggie. She steps up to the mic with the poise of someone who’s been doing this longer than most of us have been voting. Her voice carries, steady and sure, and for a few sentences I brace for what I expect she may say.
Instead, she builds a bridge.
“I care,” she says, “about what we were. I also care about what we could be. I’ve watched Ethan move through this town for months now, and he has convinced people not by shouting, but by listening.
Preserving our past does not mean refusing our future.
” She pauses just long enough to let people catch up to the words.
“Tonight, in the spirit of what’s best for Seabrook—not for me, not for my pride—I am endorsing Ethan. ”
The sound that lifts in the gym is not a cheer so much as a wave.
It surges and crashes and leaves behind silence in its wake.
I’m crying before I register that I am. Aunt Maggie doesn’t look at me.
She looks at Ethan. They nod, formal as a treaty.
Then she reaches for my hand again and takes it, firm and impossible to misread.
“Don’t let it go to your head,” she murmurs, so quietly I might be inventing it.
“Oh, never,” I whisper back, and want to laugh at how utterly unconvincing that sounds.
The mayor clears his throat and brings us back to earth. “Thank you,” he says, and his voice is a shade rougher than usual. “We’ll begin the tally now. Please be patient.”
Please be patient. Right. Sure.
The next twenty minutes stretch like an hour and snap like a second.
It’s ridiculous how time behaves when it knows you’re watching.
People wander to the cookie table and back with half-eaten sugar stars.
The foam-finger kid reappears and pokes his little sister in the arm until she yells, and then their father confiscates the offending foam and wears it sheepishly.
A teenage volunteer tries to balance five empty paper cups on the rim of the trash can, fails, and does a mortified bow when people clap for the performance.
Laughter flickers here and there, bright and nervous.
Ethan works the room in that gentle way of his, shaking hands, listening, thanking, listening again. When he reaches me, the crowd thins for a beat, like the tide letting us stand on a sandbar.
“You okay?” he asks.
“No,” I say truthfully, because my heart has learned a new percussion and my palms are an ecosystem. “But I’m with you.”
He tucks a lock of hair behind my ear. The light is terrible; he is beautiful anyway. “I am wildly in love with you,” he says, as if we’re discussing the weather.
I stare at him. It’s ridiculous and exactly right. I laugh one startled sound that breaks into something close to a sob. “You can’t just say that in a gym.”
“Apparently I can,” he says, crooked grin flickering. “I can also say it outside, on the boardwalk, or in the produce aisle if you prefer.”
“Don’t you dare make it the produce aisle.”
“Okay.” He sobers, the grin tugged into something softer. “Okay,” he repeats, and lets the words be a promise instead of a plan.
Before I can answer, the mayor returns with a small stack of papers and an envelope.
The room stills the way a forest stills when the wind pauses.
I feel Aunt Maggie’s hand reappear. Ethan’s arm brushes mine and stays there, a quiet touch.
I realize we are standing exactly as we were earlier in the day: me between them, held on both sides.
I don’t know what this means in the long term.
I know what it means right now. It means I am not alone in a room that is about to decide too much.
“Thank you for your patience,” the mayor says.
His tone is careful, neutral, warmed by something almost like pride.
“First, I want to say again how grateful I am to everyone for the turnout, for the civility, for the care you’ve shown one another.
Whatever happens next, Seabrook is stronger tonight than it was this morning. ”
He slips a finger under the envelope flap. The paper sighs.
Someone inhales behind me and doesn’t let the breath go.
Ethan’s knuckles nudge mine and stay.
Aunt Maggie’s fingers flex, a tiny anchor.
The mayor looks down at the numbers and then up at the room that feels like it’s leaning in as one body.
“The votes are in,” he says.
The clock on the far wall clicks over to seven-thirty.
I grip both hands tighter and brace for the word that will change everything.