The man coming toward me now was none of those things.

He was pale.

He looked genuinely shaken, stripped of all his usual composure, and there was something in his face I had never seen there before and could not immediately name, something that on anyone else I would have called fear, or maybe a kind of dawning shame.

I remember thinking, in the middle of my confusion, that I had never seen my manager look uncertain before, that uncertainty simply was not part of the face he showed the world, and that whatever was in that binder had reached past all of his practiced authority and touched something underneath it.

He did not say good morning.