Dana moved.
She stepped aside.
Jennifer ran the card.
We went in.
The ballroom was full.
Maybe a hundred and fifty people.
The specific energy of a gathering of people who knew each other twenty years ago and are performing the reunion of it, the assessments and the updates and the specific way people talk when they are constructing who they are for an
audience.
I walked in.
The room noticed.
Not all of it.
But the room has a temperature, as I said, and I felt the temperature change slightly as we crossed the threshold.
Not negative.
Different.
The temperature of a room in which an expectation has been violated.
They had expected, if they had thought about me at all, the Claire from the hallway.
The Claire who managed the distance.
The Claire who calculated the safest path.
I was a different Claire.
I was the Claire who owned a business.
