In Chino Hills, preschool director Susan Harris was tending to a student who had stepped on a bee when the ground began to tremble. As they huddled together under a counter, the little girl could only stare into her eyes.
"It's OK," Harris told her, though that was not clear at all. "It's OK."
Across town, Kimberly Kessel was putting away a vacuum cleaner when her house started shaking. She bolted into the backyard without her shoes, her blue-eyed, 18-month-old son cradled in her arms.
"Oh, God," she said to herself. "Here it is."
A few miles to the east, Vanessa Rojas was at work at Blondie's Clip Shop, a salon. She and 10 customers sprinted into the parking lot.
"I thought it was the big one," Rojas said.
But it was not. Again.
It will happen eventually. And days like Tuesday, when a 5.4-magnitude earthquake struck Southern California, serve as a reminder that when it does happen, it is bound to be awful.
But across the region any immediate sense of terror was supplanted quickly by deep relief and minor repairs.
They picked up the ceiling tiles that fell at a middle school in Chatsworth; they swept up the glass from shattered windows at Pomona's City Hall; they mopped up the minor flood from a water heater that blew in Terminal 7 at Los Angeles International Airport.
"There's a whole lot of nothing," Chino Valley Independent Fire District Capt. Jeremy Ault said. "We expected the worst, but we received the best."
There is a routine that kicks in, from the first moments of a quake.
First, of course, comes a sharp jolt of fear.
"Then," Chino Hills State Park Supt. John Rowe said, "You remember: I live in California."
At UC Irvine, a student attending a summer program in critical thinking and literature began to cry as her classroom building pitched and rocked for about 30 seconds.
At Ayala High School in Chino Hills, Irene Gomez was watching her 6-year-old daughter take a swimming lesson when the bleachers in the nearby football stadium began to rumble thunderously.
"I jumped up and the water in the pool started sloshing against the sides," Gomez said. "I was standing there thinking: 'My daughter! My daughter!' "
When the quaking subsides, in creeps the sense that we've cheated the odds.
At the M&I government surplus and general merchandise store in Pomona, 20 people froze for 30 seconds after the quake. Once it became clear that the shelves holding propane lanterns and first-aid kits were staying put too, everyone walked outside -- "laughing," said salesman Jose Solis, 23.
