She stiffens.

She gasps.

She reaches out.

What I heard from Shirley was the opposite of all of that — the loosening of someone whose plan has just cleared its most uncertain hurdle, the quiet breath you let out when the thing you have been waiting and working for finally, at last, arrives.

I would not understand it for another day.

But I heard it, and it frightened me, and I was right to be frightened.

I turned my head just enough to catch her face in the sunlight from the window.