It was not theatrical. Just names, voices, hands, procedure. But Ryan looked at each vote as though it were personal violence, which in a way it was. Not because they hated him. Because he had relied on being liked more than being fit, and for the first time the distinction had been called in publicly. By the time the last director said aye, the room no longer belonged to him in any sense he could recognize.
Security escorted him out.
He did not shout. That would have been easier, somehow. Shouting would have let him remain the man from the gala, all force and contempt and certainty that volume could bend narrative. Instead he went pale and quiet and walked toward the door like someone moving through the afterimage of an explosion. Right before he crossed the threshold, he turned once and looked at me.
Not with remorse.
With disbelief. The purest form of it. As if the most impossible thing in the world was not that he had behaved monstrously, but that the tired woman with milk stains on her dress and twins in a stroller had possessed the authority to erase him from his own myth.
Then he was gone.
The room stayed silent a full ten seconds after the door shut.