Outside the New Yorker Hotel in midtown Manhattan, Hillary Clinton's supporters - some tearful - gathered to hear her concession. Among them was Nalini Saxena, 36, who had an extraordinary story to tell about her.
In the late 1990s, when Nalini was a college student, Clinton was in the White House weathering the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Nalini's mother, Mala, felt for the First Lady and wrote her a letter of support.
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Hillary Clinton: 'Sorry we did not win'
Clinton delivers what is expected to be her final remarks of the US presidential election after a devastating loss to Donald Trump.
A couple of years later, perhaps in 1999, Nalini was working as a waiter at a breakfast for the New York Women's Agenda, a networking group that Clinton was to address. As was the First Lady's custom, she greeted and thanked the staff individually.
As she shook Nalini's hand, Clinton noticed her name tag. "I know that name," she said. "Someone with that name wrote me a letter once." She quoted part of Mala's letter.
Nalini has been a fan ever since.
"She was amazing," said Nalini, who has seen Clinton speak at functions time and again since.
"She is authentic. She speaks with such authority. She is thoughtful, she is encouraging, she is unbelievably wise. She is committed to public service."
So how could she have lost?
Nalini believes the result is the product of deep-seated misogyny, one that many carried within but do not even recognise.
Could it be that people do not trust her, I ask, mentioning Clinton's well-earned reputation for secrecy and the damage done to her campaign by the use of a private email server.
"We would not [as a society] feel that mistrust if we did not already feel discomfort at her presence for being a woman," said Nalini, pointing out that Donald Trump's endless deceits were now very well known.
Nalini's sadness at the loss of her feminist hero is matched only by her outright fear of the darker forces she worries might have been vindicated and may be unleashed by Trump's victory.
"I am brown," she says bluntly "I am scared for peace. I am scared for what it means for the definition of America." As cosmopolitan as New York is, Nalini says she no longer understand many other parts of the country.
She says her Facebook page already carries accounts of people who say they were abused on their way to work after Trump's victory, people who have been told to go home, a story of a girl harangued by her own school bus driver.
The queue Nalini was in trailed along Eighth Avenue and down West 35 Street. Some in it had tear-stained faces as they waited in drizzle, some comforted one another.
Right at the front, though, one woman, keeping to herself, looked quite bright.
Loretta Ray, 70, came from Atlanta, Georgia, and just happened to be staying at the New Yorker Hotel when she discovered Clinton was going to speak there.
Asked how she felt about Trump's victory, she said, "I can sum it up in just a few words. The heart of America has spoken. America is tired of all the corruption. We need a new beginning."
Trump, she said, is just that.