The ones who had built the specific temperature of the hallway and maintained it.
They were watching me.
The watching had a quality.
Not hostile, exactly.
More like the watching of people who are recalibrating.
Who have built a story about something and who are encountering information that does not fit the
story.
I walked over.
Not aggressively.
Not with the energy of someone who has a score to settle.
With the energy of someone who is simply present and choosing to be present everywhere in the room equally.
Dana said: Claire.
I said: Dana.
She looked at me more closely than she had at the door.
She said: you look different.
I said: I am different.
She said: what have you been doing?
I said: I opened a fitness studio in Portland.
She said: a fitness studio.
She said it with the specific quality of someone hearing irony that they are not sure is intentional.
