And I, of course, was the first one who looked at this small market of dressed up needs and said:

good, I can house this.

After the night of networking as intimacy, the room had stopped humming like a community. It was humming like backstage. Small groups. Whispers. Calculations. Certain looks that no longer had any interest in pretending they had met by accident. Everyone knew by then. It just had not yet been said plainly.