That detail, of all of them, was the one that finished me.

Not the debt, not the danger, not even the confrontation at the footbridge, but the image of my bruised and battered thirteen-year-old, having just gotten away from older boys and fallen down an embankment, hiding in a diner pantry and carefully stitching his own torn shirt closed with a safety pin, so that he would look neat and respectable enough to walk into an office and make his weekly payment before it closed.

The dignity of it.

The heartbreaking, dead-serious dignity of a child who understood, somehow, that he needed to present himself well, that a torn and muddy boy might be turned away or not taken seriously, and who therefore attended to his appearance even in the middle of his own private catastrophe, because the mission was too important to jeopardize over a torn shirt.