But she had stopped listening to him. She was looking at me.
She looked at me the way no one had looked at me since the morning on the bank: all the way, as if there were something there to see. Her eyes went to my face, and my hair, which is light brown and going gray and which I wear pulled back, and then to my coat — I wasn't wearing it, it was downstairs on its hook, but she looked at my cardigan, at the color of it — and then, slowly, to my hands.
I have kept my hands folded, palms in, for the better part of two years. I unfolded them. I held them out over the counter, over the cake, palms up, so she could see.
Her hand went to her eyebrow. To the scar. And she said, so quietly that I'm not sure anyone but me and Derek heard it, "Say it."
I knew what she meant. My throat had closed up and I had to wait for it. Then I said, "Look at me. I've got your head. I've got you, sweetheart."
She made a sound I won't describe. She put both her hands over her mouth, and the report slid out from under her arm and scattered on the floor, and Bethany from implementation got to her first, and then two or three others, and someone said, "Okay, okay, let's give her some air," and someone else said, "What the hell just happened?" and someone said, quite loudly, from the sales pod — I think it was Kaylee — "Seriously? At his engagement party? What is wrong with you?"
I don't remember leaving. I know I went down the stairs, not the elevator, and that I held the rail the whole way, and that when I got to the third floor Winona was standing at her desk with her phone in her hand, because somebody had already texted her, and her mouth was open. She looked at me. She looked at my hands, which I had forgotten to fold. And then she came around the desk and put her arms around me, which in eleven years she had never done, and I stood there in the middle of accounts payable and let her, and everyone in the room looked at us, and I let them.