There were four journalists. Two photographers. One man with a video rig who was already rolling.
They materialized from the space beside the Ara entrance with the practiced efficiency of people who had been waiting and had learned, through repetition, how to make a waiting look like an arrival.
They reached her car door before she had opened it. She sat for one breath.
One single breath in the quiet interior of the car, the last available quiet, she understood, before the day became what it was going to be.
She used it to find the thing she needed, which was the expression of a woman who was heartbroken without being broken, who was private without being defensive, who was almost-but-not-quite-holding-it-together in the specific way that was simultaneously sympathetic and unimpeachable.
She found it. She opened the door.
