I have thought about that expression more than almost anything else from that day.

There is a specific despair that settles into a face when a person has held on and held on, waiting to be found, and has slowly run out of reasons to expect it.

Teresa had spent I do not know how long tied to that column, alone with someone cruel, and somewhere in those minutes or hours she had begun the terrible arithmetic of concluding that help was not on its way.

That I happened to walk in when I did was luck, nothing more, a rescheduled flight and a romantic impulse.