It was because I could not forget the room.

Six floors below the balcony where I now sat in cashmere, there were women, my friends, my neighbors of two years ago, women whose names I knew, still eating the grey soup, still sharing the drafty rooms, still feeling, every single day, the particular cold of being old and poor and forgotten.

I knew exactly what that cold felt like, in my body, in my bones, because I had felt it a week ago and for decades before.

And knowing it, I found I could not simply buy my own way out and leave them there.