Joelle at the meeting: choosing to believe
He’s got your autodidactic orator’s way with emotional dramatic pauses that don’t seem affected. Joelle makes another line down the Styrofoam coffee cup with her fingernail and chooses consciously to believe it isn’t affected, the story’s emotive drama.
Context
Sincerity as a decision, made against one's own irony. Joelle's critical faculties are fully online — she clocks the speaker as "your autodidactic orator," registers that the dramatic pauses could be affected — and then she overrides the whole apparatus by choice: "chooses consciously to believe it isn't affected." The radical move is that sincerity here isn't a property she detects in him; it's a stance she elects toward him, an act of will exercised against the reflexive suspicion that would keep her safe and unmoved. Belief becomes something you do, deliberately, in the teeth of your own sophistication — and that election is itself the recovery-move. This is the scene's answer to 138's Attitude-of-Platitude: the platitudes work because someone decides to let them.