And then it did, all at once, in a wave I could feel more than see — two hundred people turning the two facts over and fitting them together, the new owner’s name and the wife’s face, the wife’s face and the chief strategy officer beside her, and arriving together at the same impossible, delicious conclusion.

I have been in rooms when a shared understanding moves through a crowd, and it is a physical thing, closer to weather than to thought.

It began at the front, near the stage, where the people who could see my face clearly got there first, and it rolled backward through the ballroom table by table, a turning of heads, a leaning-together, a hand rising to a mouth, until two hundred people had arrived at the same place at very nearly the same instant, and the place they had arrived at was my husband.

Somewhere behind me, a woman gasped.