When the doors closed behind him, the room exhaled.

The quartet, after an uncertain pause, began to play again.

People returned, slowly, to their tables, and a strange, giddy warmth began to move through the ballroom — the warmth of eight hundred people realizing, table by table, that they still had their jobs, that the thing they had been afraid of had just walked out the door in handcuffs, and that the quiet woman in the blue dress had been the one holding the roof up the whole time.

It is a strange gift, to watch people revise their entire understanding of you in the space of ten minutes.