He reached the door, paused, looked back with a smile that encompassed the room and excluded every person in it.
"UCL will be great again. This is the first step."
He left.
The silence that followed his departure was different from what had preceded it—less suspended, more exhausted, the particular silence of people who had survived a storm and were now assessing damage they had not yet been permitted to fully comprehend. People moved slowly, spoke softly, avoided eye contact with those who might have been named in documentation they had not seen, whose fates remained uncertain despite Kellerman's departure.
