evidence: On a swampy afternoon this past spring, I met Mitt Romney in his soon-to-be-vacated Senate office. It was strange to see him in person again. For two years, we’d talked almost every week as I worked on a biography that would cement his reputation as a Republican apostate. Since the book’s publication last year, we’d kept in sporadic touch—mostly through texts, the senator’s preferred medium for venting about politics—but we hadn’t spoken in much depth. [...] As our conversation in the spring wound down, I decided to ask Romney a question I’d somehow neglected to bring up in our dozens of interviews before: What—if anything—gave him hope about the future? [...] When Romney announced his retirement last year, he framed the decision as a move to make room for "a new generation of leaders." At the time, I didn’t pay much attention to this notion. It seemed like a savvy bit of rhetoric aimed as much at dinging the two geriatric presidential contenders at the time as it was at explaining his own thinking.