I had come prepared for an answer that would punish me or absolve me.

She gave me neither.

Later that evening, I stood at the back of a classroom and watched Marianne help a student revise a graph.

She didn’t take the pencil from the boy’s hand.

She asked questions until he found his mistake himself.

I recognized the patience with which she had once tried to explain our future to me.

I had been too impatient to listen.

The room was full of students learning to test assumptions against evidence.