The Woman Who Stayed
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Afterward there was a reception — tea and food arranged on tables along the wall, the formal event dissolving into the informal gathering that was where the real conversations often happened, where the things that could not be said in the room with a microphone found their way into the small space between two people standing slightly apart from the crowd.
Women came to her.
Not all of them — some were in their own conversations, the book having sparked things between them that were now running in the room independently, which was also what the book was supposed to do. But many came. With their copies — some already marked up, she noticed, with pencil annotations in the margins, the parti