You could hear the whole eighteen months in that applause if you knew to listen for it — the frozen raises and the suppliers asking for cash and the meetings that ended with someone crying quietly in a stairwell.

These were people who had been carrying a fear they were not permitted to name, and Malcolm, by naming it from the stage, had given them the first permission they had been offered in a year and a half, a genuine and visible unclenching that moved through the tables,: permission to admit how frightened they had been, now that the thing was finally over.

Fear kept secret is heavier than fear spoken, and this was a roomful of people who had been keeping it secret from each other for a long time, each one privately certain the others were coping better than they were.

The applause let them find out, all at once, that they had all been afraid together, and there is a strange relief in that discovery that is almost like joy.