LENA

The band had been playing since nine o'clock, background music, the specific ambient warmth of live sound in a room that had been designed to hold it. I had approved the set list in October: nothing that competed with conversation, nothing that arrived too soon, the kind of music that said you are somewhere that has taken care of you without requiring anyone to notice it was doing so.

I had been noticing it for the last forty minutes without meaning to.

The final speaker finished at ten-eighteen. The applause was real. The room exhaled and re-gathered into the social hour, the post-program movement of people who had been...