The people who have been through something enormous are often smothered, afterward, by everyone’s careful, constant attention to the enormous thing, until they begin to feel they are nothing but the enormous thing, defined entirely by the worst hours of their life.

And one of the kindest things you can do for such a person, once the crisis has passed, is to let them be ordinary again — to talk about small things, to laugh about nothing, to treat them, at last, not as a survivor or a victim but simply as themselves, a whole person with a life that is about to contain a great many things besides the one that happened to them.

That dinner gave Vivienne back her ordinariness.

And her ordinariness, it turned out, was exactly what she had been starving for.