They were managing it.

There is a difference, and you can feel it if you’re willing to.

A person startled by information asks questions; a person managing information supplies conclusions.

Neither of them asked me a single thing about Samantha — not how she looked, not what she’d said, not why she was cleaning airport floors instead of balancing corporate accounts.

They both went straight to the instruction: let it go, don’t dig, drop it.

Two women who had never, as far as I knew, coordinated anything in their lives, arriving in perfect unison at the same three words.