He doesn't think he has truly smiled since he got back from the island. Until he meets her.
He had smiled at his mother and Thea and Tommy but the smiles had been tainted. Tainted with memories of a previous life, one he would never get back, one he wasn't sure he even wanted anymore.
He would look at his mother and remember the day he left on the Queens Gambit with his father. He saw her waving on the dock until she was nothing but a speck on the backdrop of Starling City. He would look at Thea and see five years that he had missed of his baby sister's life, five years that he had been without her, five years that had not only scarred himself but her as well. He would see Tommy, see his best friend's attempts at helping him readjust and be reminded of his shameful past.
Then he meets her, bright and babbling, and she makes him smile. There is no pain or forced cheerfulness behind his smile, just a new kind of joy.
She has an aura about her, one that comes with the curls and the bright lipstick, an aura that can't stop him from smiling.
He leaves her office with a foreign lightness, an inexplicable force that pulls at the corners of his mouth.