He did not care.
He was walking into a room instead of calculating how to move through it without being seen. He had forgotten that distinction was possible.
Charlotte danced with him in the middle of the floor. Not at the edge, not in a corner where it could be explained as coincidence. In the middle, where everyone could see, where the lights were brightest. She introduced him to people she knew, and when he drifted toward the edges of conversations the way he had learned to drift, she pulled him back in with a hand on his arm and
a natural redirect that never called attention to what she was doing.
She made it feel ordinary.
That was the specific miracle of it.
During a slower song, when they were swaying in the way of two people who are not yet sure of the other’s movements, he said: “Why me? You could have gone with anybody.”
