Sarah says she said it quietly and that it still carried, because of how silent it was.

There were four people at that party who knew Brandon Lawson personally.

Sarah says that all four of them did the same thing at the same moment, which was to look at the ground.

And then somebody — she has never been able to establish who, and I have always suspected it was one of the board members, because of what he already knew was in his inbox — said, into the silence, in a completely ordinary conversational voice:

“Christ, Chris.”