I have tried to describe to myself what happened in those eight bars, because it was the hinge the whole rest of it turned on, and the best I can do is this: for eight bars, we forgot to be strangers.

The body remembers what the mind has given up on.

My feet knew where his were going before I did; his hand found the small of my back and pressed, the old signal, and forty years and all the cold between them fell away and I turned because my body still trusted his to catch me, and it did, without either of us deciding anything.

That is the thing about a thing you once did ten thousand times together — it lives somewhere deeper than the estrangement, in the hands and the hips and the muscle, waiting, and it does not care how long it has been, and it does not care that you have become polite strangers, it just wakes when the music is right and moves you the old way before your wary careful minds can stop it.