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The nurse -- square-jawed and deeply tanned but with warm brown eyes -- advised Susan to leave her purse with her friend, and in that moment of turning back to hand over the strap of her bag, Annie saw that Susan was trembling, trembling slightly, almost imperceptibly, but also thoroughly, from her fingertips to her shoulders to the smooth flesh of her pretty face, lips, scalp, even the ends of her pale hair.
In that moment she saw, too, how Susan had fixed her eyes -- brown not hazel -- on some distant point, some point out of the room, out of this particular ten thirty on a Tuesday morning in late August, out of this strange office building in Manhattan, and onto a place after which this would be done, gotten through, gotten over.
Annie took her friend's bag but did not aim, again, to smile at her or to offer any encouragement. Later, wading through the war stuff, she wondered if what Susan had shown her in that moment -- trembling, looking ahead -- could be called courage. And wondered why it was assumed that courage was always put to some noble end.
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