He is in the lobby when I arrive.
Not upstairs. Not in the project room or at his desk or in any of the professional spaces where I am used to finding him. He is in the lobby, standing near the elevator bank, and he looks at me the moment I come through the glass doors.
He says: “Good morning.”
Not Ms. Sinclair. Not the careful professional version with the distance embedded in the syllables. Just good morning, the way you say it to someone whose presence in your morning is something you are glad of, something you were waiting for.
I say: “Good morning.”
We go up together in the elevator and neither of us speaks and the silence is the comfortable kind, the kind that does not need filling, the kind that only exists between people who have stopped performing ease and are simply at ease.
